Autospectroscopy

Autospectroscopy

By Hugh Pearman

Cumulus Grey and Snowberry White. We had two little BMC cans of those colours, the kind with a tiny brush inside, projecting from the underside of the cap. Touch‐up paints, necessary for an early 1960s Austin Cambridge A60 in that livery. Cars don’t visibly rust now, but they did then. One had to be alert to stone chips, lest they bloom into bubbling patches of oxide. As well as the paints, my father had an impressive selection of anti‐rust treatments on a shelf in the architect‐designed ‘car port’ where, some springs, robins would fly in to build a nest.

The Pininfarina‐designed Cambridge, though ancient even at the time in engineering terms – Sir Alex Issigonis was shaking things up with his Mini and 1100 ‐ was just the smartest car, and they kept making them until 1970. The Cumulus Grey, warm rather than flinty, was the overall colour, while the Snowberry White accounted for the broad colour‐contrast stripe along the sides, outlined in chrome strips. The seats were of red leather, the carpets were in matching red. The dashboard was of fake woodgrain, walnut‐ish, with chromed details. There was masses of shiny chrome front and back as well, which also rusted through given half a chance. In this carefully‐tended vehicle, on our cross‐ ply tyres, we proceeded in stately fashion along the Kent and Sussex country lanes of a weekend, or charged down the N roads of France and across the Alps on holidays.

These holidays, of course, I associate with plenty of other colours. Yellow Michelin maps of course, thoroughly exotic. And all those advertisements painted on the sides of buildings, usually for drinks – San Raphael or Campari, Banania, Orangina, Perrier (red, yellow, orange, green). Plus all the colours of the rival petrol companies, especially Elf with its big red disk symbol, often to be found painted on the side walls of village‐edge houses. But especially significant for us was the lovely mid‐blue colour of Camping Gaz apparatus. Camping Gaz (founded 1949) was and is very consistent on its colour branding. They hung enamelled signs outside every quincaillerie, so we always knew where to buy replacement canisters. We needed these because naturally we stopped at intervals to brew tea, and – not least in mountainous southern parts which taxed the overloaded Cambridge considerably ‐ to let the engine cool down.

I wondered at the extraordinary amount of labour represented by all the painted kilometre marker stones – white with red caps for the N roads, yellow for the D roads. Freshly‐painted yellow ones were particularly satisfying. Later I read the French Foreign Legion adventure stories of P.C. Wren. In one story‐within‐a‐ story a man ‐ Rastignac the Mutineer ‐ deserts in Algeria and escapes detection by stealing two pots of paint, black and white, plus brushes, from a public works depot. He then walks to freedom kilometre by kilometre, touching up the

lettering on the stones as he goes, hiding and moving in plain sight, until he gets to Oran and away.

I saw that tiny white tenth‐of‐a‐kilometre stones measured out the distance between the big ones, so turning every main road into a giant tape measure. I speculated on how many of these stones there were in France, and how much paint that represented annually, and how big the four paint pots would be if you put it all together – one red, one yellow, one white, one black. I imagined these Cyclopean paint cans the size of municipal gas holders. I can’t say I’m surprised the kilometre stones are now mostly replaced with plastic replicas or dull flat road signs by the Départment des Ponts et Chaussées. And the art of physically painting permanent advertisements – for us a Victorian thing ‐ is long dead in France, finally killed off presumably as much by the arrival of the autoroutes which demoted the N‐roads, as by the decline in sign‐painting craft skills. Ghost signs are all that remain.

French cars, I noticed in those closed‐market days, were not only shaped very differently from English ones – never mind the extraordinary Citroens, check out the Simcas, rear‐engined Renaults and the Panhards – but wore very different colours as well. Simcas were pretty cars with a slightly anxious expression that often came in a pale baby blue, Panhards resembled streamlined frogs, best in a pistachio colour, while both Citroen and Renault did an industrial‐looking gunmetal finish on their utility ranges, of a kind unknown in Britain. Peugeots were duller big cars, though acceptable in a soft cream finish, maroon or black.

The endless N‐roads provided endless opportunity for a child to contemplate such wonders. The French had their equivalents of Dinky and Corgi toys, too, including a precision‐moulded all‐plastic range. The ones that interested me were the models of branded delivery vans, and especially those for Amora Moutarde de Dijon – which deployed 2CV vans which were, of course, bright mustard yellow. I bought a model Amora van for two francs and 50 centimes, probably.

Ever since, I have enjoyed the colours of cars, more obtusely the fashions in car colours. There is usually a default colour, the one you see most often, and this changes gradually but periodically. In Britain in the 1980s, red was the default colour. In the 1990s, this changed to metallic silver. Plain black and white –which at one point, in a reverse of the Henry Ford dictum, not so long ago used to be special‐order items ‐ are now very popular, especially for powerful German cars with their angry sharkish look. But for me the car brand with the loveliest colours, whether subtle or strident, is at present Fiat. Other brands such as Mini have tried to emulate it, but Fiat’s solid reds are redder, its blended colours

richer. As with their retro designs, there is something of a 1950s feel to some of them.

Simca Aronde 1951-64

When I went to the current Ove Arup exhibition at the V&A, “Engineering the World” and saw the Ferranti Pegasus Mark One computer of 1957 of the type on which they ran the early calculations for the Sydney Opera House, I thought “Fiat, now”. It was the computer’s spray‐painted metal coachwork, in dusky pink and – how to describe the green? An aloe vera/mint cross? Clearly the people who designed these casings were thinking “office furniture” but I think they also got out the paint cards of motor manufacturers. As for the green, that’s a shade you also find inside postwar buses and railway carriages. Perhaps some expert at the Design Council came up with it. It is distinct from the engineering colours you used to find on the crankcases and cam covers of car engines, which were the same green and the red you find on static steam engines from the 18th and 19th centuries.

I’m not so interested in cars as things to drive but the styling and the colour is important for the simple reason that these are the most ubiquitous designed objects of all, apart from clothes. You cannot NOT see them, even subconsciously. They sit somewhere between clothes and buildings – enclosures of space, yes, but also things people put on in order to go out. Every street,

everywhere, is lined with these coloured objects, which is rather like everyone putting their wardrobes outside. Looking out of my window today on my North London, I see – what?

2013 Fiat 500 in banana yellowi

It’s a disappointingly tasteful arrangement of blues, blacks, whites and silvers. A few reds, but not many. One bronze muscle car. I see that there’s an unexpected niche revival of rich mahogany brown happening. It’s a bit classier than the brown Austin Allegro hue of 1970s memory, but not much. There are no green, yellow or orange cars on my street today, nor have these colours been common for years. Purple, though it does occur, is even more rare (Marc Bolan’s 1977 death crash was in a sporty purple Mini).

You will be told by marketeers who study these things that green cars are harder to sell than any other colour. But this has not always been the case. Aside from British Racing Green, especially associated with proper Bentleys and MGs, green was quite a popular colour in the 1970s, for instance. My own first car at the end of that decade was an Alfasud the colour of a Granny Smith apple. In the same decade mustard yellow was quite a thing, too, along with that inexplicable Life on Mars fad for black vinyl roofs (the applique black plastic look has now revived a little on cars with a roughie‐toughie aesthetic such as the Citroen Cactus with

its curious rusticated‐plastic side panels and hurrah, outré colours). The wonderful Bond Bug three‐wheeler came only in orange. Today, it’s pretty much only Citroen and McLaren supercars that do acid oranges and greens, and that’s precisely because they want uncommon colours.

2015 Citroen C4 Cactus in Lime greenii

It has, I think, always been the case that you find the jauntiest colours on the smallest and/or sportiest cars. 1960s Minis had a lot to do with this – they’re just so cheeky – but in fact this tradition goes back a lot further. You find some pretty eye‐searing inter‐war baby cars. And although Henry Ford did go through an all‐black phase with his Model T, that was because at the time he was pioneering mass production, a black shellac happened for a while to be the fastest‐drying paint available to him. You get lots of Model Ts in fire‐engine red also, with a minority going for blue.

Meanwhile a large car has a certain dignity that doesn’t lend itself to bright colours, perhaps, it could be to do with surface area, all that bright colour is just too much. Or is it that if we associate bright colours with smallness, that also equates to cheapness, and nobody shelling out huge sums of money for a set of wheels wants it to look cheap? Or maybe it’s just that the likeliest customers for small cars are young, while oldsters with more disposable income and conservative tastes go for the bigger ones.

And then there’s gold. Meaning metallic, shiny gold. The colour of those supercars that appear for illegal races around Knightsbridge in the summer.

Enough said, really. Maybe you can get away with that on a Lamborghini. Though I’d like to see someone try on a little Fiat 500. It could be beautiful.

2016 Lamborghini Aventador SV in gold

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Three things which don’t quite work on cars are: those ‘Flip’ paints which change colour depending on the angle of vision; matt‐finish paints – it seems cars really want to be shiny; and the parti‐coloured look in which every panel is a different hue. Astonishingly, Volkswagen tried this once. The result looked like a car assembled from spare bits found in a breaker’s yard. Patterning generally doesn’t come off, though we all love to see a leopard‐print or op‐art car from time to time. But – remembering the Cumulus Grey and the Snowberry White – two colours on one car is fine, so long as the styling allows it and the layering is horizontal. A car where the front half is a different colour to the back half would just be so wrong. As for the actual fully colour‐changing cars promised a while back in a Tomorrow’s World style moment, I’m still waiting.

And finally: G.K. Chesterton, Edwardian novelist. His prophetic novel of 1904, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (set in 1984 as it happens), is nothing whatever to do with cars, rather individualism and regionalism. But it does touch on the importance of colour. The novel starts in a world in which colour has drained out of everyday life, where all is drab and homogenised. Suddenly, in London, an eccentrically splendid‐looking elderly man dressed in bright green appears. He

is looking for two particular colours – red and yellow. He sees a bright yellow Colman’s Mustard advertisement, tears a corner off it, and pins it to his lapel.

Then he cuts his hand with a penknife, soaks his handkerchief with his own blood, and tears a corner off that to pin next to the yellow.

1995 VW Polo Mk 3 Harlequiniv

Asked why he did this, he turns out to be Juan del Fuego, the deposed President of Nicaragua, a nation conquered by globalisation and duly turned drab. These colours are the colours of his lost homeland. He says: “Señor, you asked me why, in my desire to see the colours of my country, I snatched at paper and blood.

Can you not understand the ancient sanctity of colours? The Church has her symbolic colours. And think of what colours mean to us—think of the position of one like myself, who can see nothing but those two colours, nothing but the red and the yellow. To me all shapes are equal, all common and noble things are in a democracy of combination. Wherever there is a field of marigolds and the red cloak of an old woman, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a field of poppies and a yellow patch of sand, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a lemon and a red sunset, there is my country. Wherever I see a red pillar‐box and a yellow sunset, there my heart beats. Blood and a splash of mustard can be my heraldry. If there be yellow mud and red mud in the same ditch, it is better to me than white stars."

Having said this, he disappears, to die quietly a few days later, his novelistic purpose served. The novel duly unfolds in a riot of colours of warring factions,

each with gorgeous costumes and heraldic symbols. Well now, a man looking out of a window at a streetful of cars, and wishing that more of them were in outrageous colours, cannot compete with Chesterton’s tragi‐comic vision of warring city‐states and driven individuals. But the notion of the ‘ancient sanctity of colours’ prevails. We are familiar with Imperial Purple, of London or Chinese red, of soothing pale greens. Political spinners and other astute marketeers study colours closely. So a streetful of cars tells you something about the people that own them beyond income level. If the colours of the vehicles start to change, it may well merely be fashion. But it may reflect something else as well: a deeper kind of change. If you pay more than passing attention to cars, look out for the yellow, the orange, the purple and the green.

i

https://waynesworldautobloguk.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/waynesworldautobloguk‐fiat‐500‐colour‐ therapy‐21.jpg ii http://www.motorverso.com/citroen‐going‐beach‐c4‐cactus‐convertible/ iii http://metro.co.uk/2016/03/29/supercar‐silly‐season‐is‐here‐people‐with‐more‐money‐than‐you‐are‐ driving‐round‐london‐5782479/

iv

http://www.driving.co.uk/car‐clinic/car‐buying‐guide‐39‐years‐of‐the‐vw‐polo‐and‐how‐to‐buy‐a‐used‐one/