ASK Star readers between 1973 and 2009 what page they turned to first every week and it’s a pretty safe bet “Whalley’s World” would be the answer on most lips.
 

Alan Whalley kept St Helens smiling over four decades as he served up a magic menu of larger than life characters and nuggets of nostalgia every week with his sublime storytelling skill.
 

Alan passed away last October, but we’re sure he’d be tickled pink to know his award winning words were making a timely comeback to the Star’s pages to inject a little cheer in these unprecedented days. 

  • In this week’s piece from the archives Alan describes his memories of the days he was the proud owner of a Jowett car.

 

I WAS once the proud owner of an old van made by the unique Jowett car company from Yorkshire. It was the second vehicle I had ever driven (first was a 1934 baby-sized Austin 7 Ruby).

Eventually, I sold that totally-dependable Bradford van for £25. But, oh, how I wish I had hung on and put it in mothballs!

For today there appears to be much prestige in owning a vehicle which rolled off the Jowett production line in Bradford from 1906 to the shut-down in 1953.

The best-remembered Jowett model is probably the Javelin saloon of which more than 23,000 were built between 1948 and 1953. And they were sold in large numbers through their St Helens agents, Broughtons.

All this detail comes from Noel Stokoe of the Jowett Car Club which, I discover, has affiliated clubs in New Zealand, Australia and North America.

Having had such a major agent as Broughtons (now Lookers Peugeot of Knowsley Road) Noel hopes that St Helens will prove a fertile hunting ground as he tries to build up a store of records in time for the Millennium.

He explains: “When the Javelin was revealed to the public in 1947, it created, in its own way, as much excitement as later luminaries such as the Mini and the Jaguar E-type.”

With its advanced ‘flat four’ 1.5-litre engine, capable of carrying six people at 80-plus mph, this was the first all-new postwar saloon, and very advanced for its time

 I’ve had an occasional glimpse of a Javelin tootling around St Helens territory in recent times (this model has a real eye-catching look about it).

This report appeared in Whalley’s World in June 1998