My beautiful Marinas
Think of a head-turning car and it isn't the first motor that springs to mind. But when Shropshire motorist Andy Morris zips by in his, he gets the lion's share of craned necks and second takes."I went to Peterborough and people were looking at you," he says. More disbelieving glances were cast in his direction that day than for all the flash Ferraris and BMWs put together.
His car? A Morris Marina. In its day pretty common, today it's more rare than a Dodo's doo-doo.
More than a million British-made Marinas rolled off the production line during the vehicle's tenure as one of the nation's favourite family cars of the 1970s. But so many have been scrapped that a study by Auto Express magazine now ranks it the rarest mass-produced motor on the road with just 745 of them left.
There are all the obvious reasons for why the numbers have dwindled - the end of production more than 20 years ago, the folding of the British Leyland Motor Company for which the Marina was their first car - not taking into consideration the fact that Andy appears to have the world's total supply of them stashed on the drive of his family home in Dawley, all 15 of them.
"I've been told to get rid of some of them but I can't bear to part with them," he says. In fact Andy did just this once - only to find himself buying it back again from a chap on the Isle of Wight.
His love affair with the Marina began when his dad drove one as a company car back in 1979. He liked it so much he later bought it off the company.
For Andy, the bond with this particular vehicle was about to get stronger: this was the car that he learned to drive in, and after he passed his test in 1983 it also became his first car.
"It was quite an exciting drive - just don't throw it round the corners," he warns.
"It was an easy car to work on. A lot of companies had them as fleet cars because they could be worked on. It wasn't anything special but it fitted the bill."
He continues: "I remember going round the country in them - north, south, east, west. We went all over the place - wherever the need went.
"The car has got a little bit of character - not in bucketfuls - but because it was such a diverse range I made a decision to get rarer parts of the range."
Indeed, many Marinas in Andy's own personal "fleet" are extremely rare; they include an ice cream van version, a couple of coupes and several Marina camper vans.
His regular run-around is a pristine yellow 1973 Marina Jubilee TC and although it's 33 years old it'll still give most modern cars a run for their money.
"It's the same engine as an MGB and it's just a bit quicker than the MGB because the Marina has a lighter body," says Andy.
"I like the noise it makes. It goes and sounds really well - sort of throaty sound."
Andy, a warranty manager for Inchcape Volkwagen in Shrewsbury, also drives a modern car but says he's always glad to get back inside his trusty old Morris.
"It's always nice to go back," he says. "Perhaps people come back to them because of an association with family and they've moved on and got something modern but they want something else as a project."
This is certainly the case for Andy. In saving his Marinas from extinction he does most of the restoration work himself - the mechanics, the interiors, the bodywork and welding. Everything but the paint job in fact.
In their heyday, the Marina was a car prone to paint jobs and customisation. One reason for this perhaps being that it was a car that didn't know what it wanted to be.
Launched by British Leyland in glamorous Cannes in April 1971 as a replacement for the Morris Minor, the box-ey looking Marina started life as a rival to the Ford Escort but also tried to be the new Ford Cortina.
Of course, what it really wanted to be was neither of these. What it really wanted to be was a TV cop car.
And to owners with vivid imaginations the Marina was very much the British answer to the Starskey and Hutch car.
The look was achieved by daubing typically dour 1970 car colours such as browns and beiges with a coat of red paint and embellishing it with that familiar white flash which began at the headlights, streaked back towards the boot before arc-ing over the roof.
By all acccounts, however, no-one has ever been spotted attempting to gain entry to a customised Marina, Hutch-style - by leaping from a first-storey window on to the top of one.
One of Andy Morris' Marina re-stylings was not quite quite a Starskey and Hutch car, but it did have echoes of a vehicle made famous in another American TV cop show - The Dukes of Hazzard. Remember the big orange car called the "General Lee".
Andy recalls of his souped-up Marina version: "It was already that orange colour and it the stars and stripes and number 01 on the side and all the alloy wheels.
"We didn't call it the "General Lee" though. We called it the 'Generally'.
In hindsight, it was an apt name for the once extremely common Marina.
By Ben Bentley
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