The oddest man I ever met was a man called Eric Ducksbury. He could not possibly be alive today but he has left an indelible imprint on my life and it is thus that I offer this story.

I met him in 1961. We were both farmers at that time. Tall and lanky, he walked with a slight stoop. He was born in Duxbury to a highly placed family. He was taken to church dressed in bola hat, by a chauffer who drove a Bentley. Eric however rebelled against the aristocratic life style and went to live as a recluse at a location I do not know about. Then the war came. He was unfit to serve in the military and so he was sent to a pow camp in Chapeltown near Sheffield where he guarded German prisoners. After the war, he bought forty nine acres of land and farmed what he could of it. You see half of it was marshland.

I passed his house twice before I concluded that the building he lived in was a house.  Eric became a little of everything. he bought scrap, bargained among gypsies, sold sad looking vegetables to the poor in Sheffield and milked his cows at midnight. This was where he planned the next days operations.

He had the ability to visit auctions with no money and leave with eighty pounds. I did not believe some of his stories including this one but he proved it to me when i attended such an auction with him. Stunning! He bought me a pig trailer for one pound when every other trailer went of twenty two pounds.???????

He was a kind man, religious and extremely knowledgable. He gave me a Standard-Fordson tractor. His logic was sometimes incomparable. There had been a huge thunderstorm and when we and his family discussed it over a dinner we made for them, his son Paul, related to that previous evening when rainwater soaked part of his bed. "Looks like a roof job Eric" I remarked.

"No no no no" he replied.
"What?" I guffawed.
It's quite simple" he replied  "Paul just moves the bed."

But how does this relate to antique cars?  Good question. This is what happens.He ventures off  on his Friday night sales run, his truck filled with vegetables and he espies this old chap approach him to come and buy some cabbage and carrots. He has left his garage open. Inside it is a Bentley. Eric Says  "Nice car sir. Do you use it?"

"Haven't done for fifteen years" came the reply.
"Do you want to sell it?"
"Sure" the old man replied.
"How much?"
"Make me an offer"
"How about three hundred?"
"Done" said the old man and a handshake agreement was completed. (The Masonic way, no doubt)

 Eric took us to the coast in it a few weeks later. What a car. A year later he took it to a rally. Now I am not exactly sure of the year after all this time but i believe it was a 1933 model when only six models had been made. Eric was remarkable. No matter what happened he came out on top. He even sold the marshy side of his farm for an enormous nineteen thousand pounds and then guess what? he bought a new farm at Duxbury, the epitome of country gentry countryside lands-but- yes there was worse to come; he trundled along with about fifteen old and antique tractors, and twenty steam rollers. The country side seethed with anger but his actions were legal. I gave up farming a few years later but he would have nothing to do with me or us after that because he believed we should all live on and with the land.

 My story is almost finished except to remark that I used to be the owner of a   1939 BSA Scout. The gear shift was the worst part about it but the reason I have offered this story is because as a lover of this great Lady motor car, I would like to know if there is a person in Britain who would sell me either a 1938 or 1939 Scout in a fashion that Eric acquired his Bentley. Stranger than fiction? Yes. Audacious? Yes. A dreamer? Yes but you know, when legends die and dreams end, when there are no more dreams, there is no more happiness.

John E. Myles.

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