Touring

I have been excited about this for some time…
…and on what is possibly the hottest day of the year so far, I have spent hours and hours on buses, walked along baking roads and detoured through fields and ditches…to see this car.

Not just any old car, but a 1913 Sunbeam Tourer, bought for the young Frederick Lawrie Johnstone just nine months before the outbreak of WW1. Frederick enlisted right away and he died of wounds in France at the age of 21, being posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

His father drove the car and after he was nearly killed in an accident, Mrs Lawrie Johnstone ordered her servants to burn the Sunneam and bury it in a pit in the orchard, never to be driven again (or so she thought).

Fast forward to the 1970s when a market gardener’s plough kept getting caught on some buried metal. Hauled out by a tractor, the car’s chassis was destined for the scrapyard, but a former neighbour and classic car enthusiast heard about it and bought it for £15.

To cut a very long story short, the car was restored to its former glory and driven around Scotland. It is now being cared for in the Myreton Motor Museum near Aberlady.

The reason I was so keen to visit was that it was from our very own garden that the Sunbeam was dug up :-)