Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

AshDawson wrote:

Fertii wrote:
A close friend rolling his mini whilst drunk up near Shelley's Wood one saturday evening whilst a grecian..

Mmmm i to remember the mini incident , if i remember rightly he had only had his licence a few days !!!!

It certainly hadn't been a long time as I recall...and would I be right in thinking the Mini was yellow...?

Was indeed a yellow Mini. Used to belong to James MacLean...

Tommy wrote:Was indeed a yellow Mini. Used to belong to James MacLean...

You have this Mini mixed with another one......it wasn't the one which belonged to James.

Tommy wrote:Aah Wurzel he must have embellished the story a bit

I remember an Old Blue (I think it might have been Nick Angel) brought a beautiful looking modified yellow Mini back for OBD and drove it fairly quickly from the Front Ave between Barnes and Maine to the Back Ave. Unfortunately he misjudged the dip where the path between the houses' front doors is. One loud bang later and he'd ripped a hole in the gearbox... Ouch...

I remember when a dustcart went through the tube roof (well a skylight) there - i think they beefed up the roof after which is why there was such a hump

Fertii wrote:

Tommy wrote:Was indeed a yellow Mini. Used to belong to James MacLean...

You have this Mini mixed with another one......it wasn't the one which belonged to James.

Aah. Got that snippet from someone who'd heard it from someone at the time so probably not the same one then Both cars were yellow and about the same age I think. Seem to remember he'd made quite a mess of it anyway.

Remember McCall had a blue Metro that looked so knackered it couldn't possibly have an MOT and Miss Muir's very rusty Citroen GS. I also remember in about 1984/85 Mr Branfield (CDT teacher) had a Triumph Herald which looked in a terminal state. And Mr Stindt had a Escort XR3i; my guess is he'd taken driving lessons from Shippen given the way he drove it.

JDS had a succession of increasingly fast cars whilst I was at the school - I think he started off with a BMW 325I, worked up to a 5 series and then moved onto Jaguars. I remember going up to the Lakes at some speed in the Jag whilst he was testing out both the cruise control and the bass of the speakers which made Classic FM rather loud... Just after I left, he switched cars compeltely and bought a Ford Ka before retiring to the Lakes and buying a Land Rover Defender!

Great Plum wrote:JDS had a succession of increasingly fast cars whilst I was at the school - I think he started off with a BMW 325I, worked up to a 5 series and then moved onto Jaguars. I remember going up to the Lakes at some speed in the Jag whilst he was testing out both the cruise control and the bass of the speakers which made Classic FM rather loud... Just after I left, he switched cars compeltely and bought a Ford Ka before retiring to the Lakes and buying a Land Rover Defender!

I think that he had a Morris 1000 in the '70s!

JDS had a silver Renault 5 Gordini when I first appeared at CH. I have never seen anyone drive with such recklessness and utter speed. I think he would have stood a good chance if he'd entered the RAC Rally... He replaced this rusty old wreck of a Renault with a green Mk1 Golf GTi. Which of course was faster... He always drove like a man possessed by red mist.

You could hear every gear change of that Renault 5 as he drove to the Bax from Lamb, I dread to think what speed he used to hit past the end of wapplegate track.

I also remember it had one of the early on board info displays because he would tell us how much it depressed him sitting in jams and watching the average speed tumble

Of course, these days, the road out of Wapplegate has been allowed to grow over and is nothing more than a bridleway now so the Renault 5 would never go that far...

He only used the actual wapplegate track coming back from the bax. On the way it was front Ave all the way to main gate - double back right and from the sounds of it right foot flat down until he had to brake for the S bend before the bax - I was referring to the speed he had attained along 2 mile ash by the time he came level with the wapplegate track