Feeling My Age

Shot on phone placed on a cafe table opposite the Royal Festival Hall in London…

This immaculate late 1950s Morris Commercial J-type with its custom ice cream van body still regularly plies for trade outside the Royal Festival Hall at the South Bank Centre in London.

The GPO used a version of this van both for Royal Mail deliveries and for their engineers with Post Office Telephones. Yes, kids – there was once a time when Royal Mail, Parcel Force, Post Offices and British Telecom were all part of the same nationally owned company – which was run as a public service rather than as a way of extorting money from the public for the benefit of its shareholders.

According to Wikipedia the only difference between the Morris J Type van launched in 1949 and the equivalent Austin 101 born in 1957 was the badge above the radiator grille. This one says “Morris COMMERCIAL” – both models rolled off the same assembly line at the Nuffield factory in Oxford and were eventually discontinued in 1961 after nearly 50,000 had been made.

By comparison, Ford introduced the Transit van in 1953 and haven’t stopped making them to this day. As of last year they’d built six million of the things – I even briefly owned one myself. But that’s another story altogether.