The Saga Begins

It all started in April 1999. Having driven Jaguars for the previous 10 years or so, I was temporarily without one. For various reasons we needn't go into here, I had spent the four months since christmas as the proud owner of a Range Rover. Now the Range Rover is a fine vehicle, but it falls far short of a Jaguar in all the areas I'm interested in, other than carrying capacity. On one of my regular Thursday evenings in the pub with my 'classic car' friends, Don informed me that a colleague of his had an S Type to sell. The story went that the car was totally in bits, but many of the bits had been restored. The price was one thousand pounds. My plan had been to sell the Range Rover and find a nice 4.2 series 1 XJ6 (I'd previously had a 2.8 which was lovely, but no matter how hard it pulled, the skin stayed on the rice pudding). It was clearly time to abandon the plan! I'd always thought that the S Type was the prettiest Jaguar saloon, so I asked Don to inform his colleague that I was interested and to arrange a viewing.

A trip to Matlock in Derbyshire to see the car soon followed. Here's a picture of the car as it had stood in it's garage for the last ten years. The bodyshell and most of the rest of car was located either in the garage or a nearby shed. The chromework, carbs, intruments and woodwork had been stored in the house