AOC At The Classic Car Show

AOC At the Classic Car Show

The AOC had an excellent stand at the Lancaster Insurance Classic Car show in the ‘Hall of fame’ theme, from 8th to 11th November. The stand was very well attended by the public and AOC Members

Alvis international in Kent allowed me to pre-select some very worthy candidates and most of those owners followed through, so that made car selection a great deal easier. Our choice was eventually Miles Pinniger’s Offord/Carlton 4.3s, driven to the event by Glen Daniels the TC 21/100 DHC of Bob Moore and Eric Ody’s Vanden Plas Crested eagle DHC, also both driven to Birmingham on the Wednesday before build-up of the stand. Earley Engineering delivered two cars for us, a 1935 Speed 20 SC Charlesworth two-seater and a superb and very early TD 21 DHC, one of the factory demonstrators and publicity cars, complete with press photographs.

New member subscriptions were around 10 this year, and thanks to the presence of Peter and Rosie Milne with the laptop membership database, we were able to re-sign quite a few lapsed members as well. We did have around 90 club members either on or visiting the stand over the weekend. Quite a few of those the new members were either new owners of Alvis or were being steered towards acquiring one.

The stand build up commenced on Wednesday afternoon and was more or less completed by 6:00 pm, leaving Thursday for Silver Crest delivery and to finalise all the display material.

As last year, public interest in our stand was amazing, and it was so intriguing to see their wide-eyed amazement regarding the quality of Alvis. Our volunteers were almost flat out in engaging with visitors throughout each day. Footfall was this year probably greater than usual over the three days, circa 70,000 being the normal figure and as usual we received many, many comments that the AOC stand was one of the best.

Once again, an excellent show that was well supported by AOC volunteers for each day, and we offer our thanks to them and to those who displayed their cars this year, without whom none of this would happen.

The full article and more pictures will appear in the next Bulletin.

Steve Horne