Page 32 - MM_Sep Oct 2021

WOODEN
IT BE GOOD?
John Jones brought modern yacht technology into play during the restoration of his birthday present
WORDS AND PICTURES John Carroll
‘I’ve got a ’30 Ford wagon and they call it a woodie...’ Woodie is a term undoubtedly popularised
by the musicians like Jan and Dean in the 1960s era of California surfer music, and refers to wooden-framed estate cars. On this side of the Atlantic, the Morris Minor Traveller was one of the world’s most produced ‘woodies’, with a continuous production run from 1954 to 1971.
The Traveller was very much a mass-produced car with numerous joiners assembling the wooden framework during the assembly line process but wooden Minor pick-ups are the exact opposite. Sure, in the 1980s there were lots of rusty Minor LCVs that acquired a wooden load bed when rust took its toll on the original steel, but essentially they are one-offs built by their owners. This pick-up is even more bespoke because it didn’t acquire something that looked like a small lorry’s load bed but one that closely resembled the original steel panels. What’s more, when John Jones set out to build it, he didn’t look to Minor Travellers for inspiration but to classic wooden yachts, sailing dinghies and the technology used in their construction.
In order to find out more on behalf of Minor
Matters, I was invited to a workshop in a quiet corner of Snowdonia with a view that includes the steam trains of the Snowdonia Mountain Railway in the distance as they climb the gradients of the highest mountain in Wales. The first time I had looked at a photo of the pick-up, I thought it had been painted in a woodgrain pattern to make the steel panels look like wood but there’s a whole lot more
to it than that - something that was evident as soon as
I stepped inside the workshop full of beautiful wooden boats.
As is often the case, the story starts years earlier John had owned a Minor van in his student days and later reluctantly sold it. He regretted this so years later when his 60th birthday came around his wife Nina, mother- in-law Margaret, and daughters, Rhian and Ffion bought him a 1962 Minor pick-up that had been registered in nearby Bangor. It wasn’t just any pick-up either as it had formerly starred in the BBC’s CBeebies series Mr Bloom and Friends.
John said “It was great and I drove it around for a year but then knew it needed a proper restoration job.”
ABOVE: John and Nina Jones
32 | MINOR MATTERS SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021
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