What was your first car? Mine was a 1965 Triumph Herald 12/50 in conifer green, and to be frank, it was a bit of a dog.

The Triumph Herald is a small saloon car manufactured between about 1959 and 1971. If you are British your grandparents probably had one, though if you are not a Brit you may have never heard of it. Americans may be familiar with the Triumph Spitfire sports car, a derivative on a shortened version of the same platform. It was an odd car even by the standards of British cars of the 1950s and 1960s. Standard Triumph, the manufacturer, had a problem with their pressing plant being owned by a rival, so had to design a car that used pressings of a smaller size that they could do in-house. Thus the Herald was one of the last British mass-produced cars to have a separate chassis, at a time when all other manufacturers had produced moncoques for years.

My 12/50 was the sporty model, it had the high-lift cam from the Spitfire and a full-length Britax sunroof. It was this sunroof that was its downfall, when I had it around a quarter century of rainwater had leaked in and rotted its rear bodywork. This combined with the engine being spectacularly tired and the Solex carburetor having a penchant for flooding the engine with petrol made it more of a pretty thing to look at than a useful piece of transport. But I loved it, tended it, and when it finally died irreparably I broke it for parts. Since then I’ve had four other Heralds of various different varieties, and the current one, a 1960 Herald 948, I’ve owned since the early 1990s. A piece of advice: never buy version 0 of a car.

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