When Stewart Marsh agreed to chat about life with his beloved Ford Zodiac, he had some reservations.
“It’s rough – I’m sorry it’s rough,” he smiles, showing us round the big Ford that wears every one of its 54 years on its amber gold bodywork.
But while the car wouldn’t win any awards for presentation, Stewart reckons it’s carried him and his family on about 40 holidays all over the UK since he bought it in 1982.
It’s been a reliable workhorse, towing caravans all the way from their Norfolk home to Scotland, Yorkshire, and neighbouring Suffolk, in the process working its way into his affections.
And despite the 1969 Ford’s somewhat tatty appearance, the 3-litre V6 starts up on the button and purrs away sweetly as Stewart heads to the famous Happisburgh lighthouse for our photoshoot.
“I know it’s not the tidiest looking car, but mechanically it’s fine,” says Stewart. “I would like to get the bodywork tidy and spray it up. It will one day be in better condition than it is at the moment – not concours or showroom, but I just want it to look a bit more respectable when I use it.
“Not that I’m fussy; I don’t mind using it like it is. I love driving it, I love the sound of the engine. As soon as I get going down the road, I think ‘oh this is blinking beautiful’.”
Delving back into Stewart’s motoring history, he recounts a succession of cars before he bought the Zodiac at the age of 32.
The first was a Vauxhall Viva HA, bought for about £360 when he was a 19-year-old tractor driver.
“It was expensive, because it turned out the engine was knackered,” he says, trading it in for a Mini pick-up. “I thought it was cool and I could use it for work, but the cab always stank because I was carrying diesel around in the pick up bed.”
That gave way for a high-mileage Mk2 Ford Cortina 1600 that got off to the worst possible start on the way to an early date with his now wife Linda.
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“I knew I’d need to do it up because the engine was breathing heavily,” he remembers, “but I was on my way to see Linda when the piston rings came through the cylinders, so I had to turn back. She thought I’d stood her up.”
Local engine specialists Whitmore & Co had the car back on the road in 48 hours, with rebored cylinders and new pistons, all for the princely sum of £26 10s.
Stewart sold the Mk2 to a friend and bought a Mk3 Cortina, which was only nine months old but had already clocked up 49,000 miles.
“My mate wore the Mk2’s engine out again, so I bought it back for my dad and did the whole works on the engine again,” says Stewart, the car ending up with his brother, where it remains, these days as a non-runner with 250,000 miles on the clock.
By now, Stewart had swapped work as an agricultural contractor in north Norfolk for a job as a maintenance engineer at Rugby Cement in the Midlands.
After the Mk3 Cortina came a Reliant Scimitar and Linda’s first car, a 1967 Mini, and then a “rattly old 2-litre Capri”.
“I bought an oxy-acetylene welding kit and I was really keen to do a car up,” he says. “So I bought the Mini, but also this Capri and I spent weeks welding stuff into it.
“We’d been camping with it, towing a Lynton Scimitar caravan, but Linda couldn’t cope with it anymore, and that’s when we bought the Mk4 Zodiac.”
The car was owned by a friend in the agricultural industry in Norfolk, who had bought it in an attempt to cannibalise its power steering for a Scimitar he also owned.
When that plan was abandoned, so was the car…
“I rang him up and said ‘what about that car, do you want to sell it?’” says Stewart, now 72. “He said ‘yeah, I’m not doing anything with it’.”
A price of £50 was agreed, and Stewart headed from the Midlands to Briston, north Norfolk, where he found a sorry looking Zodiac in the middle of a field.
“It had even been ploughed around,” he smiles. “I went there with a can of petrol, got it going, and drove it home.
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“I thought it was marvellous, and the engine sounded good.”
The Ford needed only minimal immediate work, and it was quickly pressed into service for camping trips.
The Zodiac was the upmarket version of Ford’s Zephyr saloon, fitted with the larger, 140bhp V6, and other improvements including twin headlights, an alternator instead of a dynamo, adjustable steering column, heater and Aeroflow ventilation, two-speed wipers, rev counter, and reversing lights.
Stewart’s is an Executive version, which offered power steering and overdrive on the four-speed manual gearbox, which remains one unfixed problem on this car.
“This funny little switch on top of the gearbox is missing, and it stops the overdrive kicking in on first, second and reverse gears,” he says. “I’d love to find one of those switches…
“So you have to be careful about knocking it in when you’re in the low gears because it’s not good for it, and if you’re in reverse it’s very bad.”
The overdrive switch itself is also not in its usual place.
“Our son Luke, who was about two at the time, so it must have been in about 1988, was sitting on the seat and broke the overdrive switch, so it’s now on the foglight switch,” he adds.
Stewart and Linda moved back to Norfolk soon after they bought the Zodiac, which was mostly kept as a summer car for highdays and holidays.
“Money was tight and we couldn’t afford to keep two cars taxed all year round, so we mostly used Linda’s Mini,” he says. “We had a little bit of savings and every year we’d take a little out for a holiday in the Zodiac.
“I was working on the farm as a tractor driver, we’d got a mortgage and we were struggling to pay the bills, even more so after Luke was born in 1985. I once even took the engine oil out for a service and put the same oil back in again.”
On the plus side, Stewart has never paid a garage bill since he’s owned the Zodiac.
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“Working for an agricultural contractor, I’ve done no end of fitting jobs on some of the biggest tractors, putting in gearboxes and diffs etc, and repairing stuff for farms,” he says. “That was where I started learning. I’m very much a person who will have a go at anything and see what happens. So I’ve had a lot of experience.
“Most years I had to do work on the car for the MoT, some welding but not an awful lot. I did all the work myself. These days, now it doesn’t need an MoT, I check it all over myself.”
Repairs have included a new clutch, new main bearings, and consumables like brakes and tyres.
“The back brakes have to be serviced regularly, because they’ve got this horrible self adjusting mechanism, a load of rubbish really,” says Stewart, who adds that the car has only let him down once, and never on one of the family’s long holiday trips.
“The condenser packed up when I was coming back from my brother’s in Reepham, but he towed me back home with an HB Viva.
“We’ve used it for no end of caravanning holidays, including numerous trips to Yorkshire, and three or four to Scotland. It will just eat up the miles doing 60mph, though 70 or 80mph probably isn’t very wise these days.”
It was in Scotland, at a car show and autojumble near Fife, that a pristine Mk4 Zodiac pulled up and parked next to Stewart’s less-than-perfect car.
“I’d gone walking round the show, but Linda was in the car and was hoping they’d go away,” he laughs. And did they? “No.”
When Stewart retired from his last working role as a farm manager in 2018, the big car had been laid up in the garage it shares with a work-in-progress 1939 Sunbeam Talbot for three or four years.
“You come up against all sorts of problems when you leave a car for a while,” he says, noticing a small aluminium ‘take off’ for the heater system had completely rotted away.
“I got some metal and made one up, and got it back on the road.”
Since then, it has only been on one major journey, a holiday to Thirsk in North Yorkshire, mostly because Linda now struggles with the seating position, much preferring the modern comforts of the couple’s Ford C-Max.
“She keeps saying she’ll go out for a picnic in it, but I don’t think she will,” he says.
But while the car’s long-distance travels may be behind it, Stewart still takes it over to his brother’s on a Sunday afternoon, when it attracts plenty of attention.
“People see it and they have a good look, because there aren’t many on the road,” he adds. “One old boy said ‘proper car, that, proper car, that’s when they made them properly’. I’m not sure he’s right about that!
“Modern cars don’t rust as much and they’re more reliable, simple as that.”
Stewart also takes the Ford over to the north Norfolk town of Stalham, where he is treasurer of the Baptist church.
“There’s a guy over there, the septic tank man, and every time he sees me he gives me a good old toot, he loves it,” he says, some of his time taken up by getting the church ministers’ cars through their MoTs.
As for the future, Stewart has vowed to keep driving the Zodiac for as long as he can, adding to its 113,400 miles.
“Luke has fond memories of it, and I’ve dreamed about him taking over the Zodiac and the Talbot when I’m gone, but I’m not sure he will,” he says. “He’s got a really high pressure job, and he may not have the time.”
For now, the car that’s more reliable than it looks will continue to be driven around the B-roads of Norfolk, a testament to Stewart’s mechanical skills in keeping the last of the big Fords on the road.
“I doubt you’ll see another on the road that someone’s using practically, as opposed to show cars that go on a lorry,” he says.
“It reminds me of the old days, my family growing up and going on holiday. I have so many lovely memories of Linda sitting next to me and our son in the back in a car seat, having lovely holidays together.
“I just love it.”
