HAROLD THE HERALD

Over the last 20 years, Harold the Herald has been through five distinct phases of development. Now though, with owner Dale Barker going soft and transferring his favours to a big and comfortable saloon, Harold is looking for a new home.

‘You build all those lovely cars for other people, so why don’t you build one for us?’ asked my wife one day around 25 years ago. I couldn’t think of a suitable reason why not, so the search was on.

Her requirements were simply that it should be a convertible, have enough seating to accommodate our two young children and be a nice bright colour, preferably red. That narrowed the search down fairly significantly and in 1997 I bought a partly completed (but in reality not very completed at all) restoration project from a friend for the modest sum of £250. He had owned the car since 1985 and had pretty much given up on it, so it suited us both. Strangely though, to this day he still refers to it as ‘his’ car!

The car in question is a Triumph Herald 1200 convertible and was at the time a combination of the original Royal Blue, grey primer and ferrous oxide. It also had a Herald 13/60 engine and gearbox fitted which ran, but only just and only after much coaxing. Some other repairs and modifications had been carried out, but over such a long time period that some of them needed doing again, so I set to and pretty much started over.

Phase One then was a fairly rough affair and in need of some pretty extensive repair work. The target was to get the car ready for the 1998 Club Triumph Round Britain Reliability Run, so not much pressure there, then! Work moved on apace, unfortunately that pace being something of a dawdle and in the best traditions of that great event, with little more than a few months to go the car was still in bits. Determined to make the deadline, I drafted in some help from friends and associates and real progress began to be made.