As you’re likely aware, this site has been the nation’s premiere organization for the dissemination and preservation of sidelight knowledge and culture, and I’m happy to keep that tradition going. Sidelights are, generally, some of the most under-appreciated lights in the vast automotive lighting constellation, which is why I was so excited to see this illustration in a 1959 Ford Prefect brochure. I’ve never seen sidelights shown with so much drama!
The image is up top there, and what I like about it especially is that it’s showing sidelights being used in their original, true context: in a well-lit city center at night, where the purpose of the lights is more to insure you’re being seen as opposed to casting light to see by.
I think what really sells the painting is the moody atmosphere set aglow by the strangely-bright lone Philips 44963XTXD bulb. Maybe an 1156, I can’t really tell, but you get the idea. I mean, look at this:
That’s easily the most moody portrayal of a parking/sidelight in all of Western letters, right? I love it.
This whole brochure is full of good illustrations and captions and combinations thereof, and portrays the Prefect as a very charming and useful little car. It has a very expressive face with a sort of constantly pensive expression that’s oddly endearing.
That dude looks sort of strangely small in there, doesn’t he? Also something about the tricky angles here make him look precisely in the middle and the driveshaft offset, which I know isn’t the case. Fantastic Kermit-the-Frog-green suit, though.
These Prefects had a 997cc inline four making about 39 horsepower, so while you weren’t going to haul all that much ass, whatever ass you were hauling was probably fairly content with the ass-hauling rate, given the time and place.
Sometimes the time and place looked to be in the middle of a storybook forest, at least according to this lovely illustration. Look at the impressionistic flora in the back there, it’s just stunning. And holy crap, that kid in back is positively beaming.
I also appreciate these wordy descriptions of the lighting setup, including a note about the chrome surround of those same sidelamps and the little rundown of everything in the taillights.
This description of the carburetor I find funny because, well, that’s what all carburetors do, or at least should do. It’s written here like it’s something special and unique to the Prefect, this incredibly ability to measure fuel out to the cylinders, but that’s like talking about how amazing someone is because of the way they masticate and swallow food, then process it into energy and wastes.
Oh! One thing about Ford Prefects that may be familiar to our geekier American readers: when I was a kid, first reading the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books, there was a character in there named Ford Prefect. I knew it had to be a joke of some kind, but we had no Ford Prefects here in America, so I had no idea what the joke was.
This was pre-internet, of course, so I couldn’t just google the name and find out that Ford Prefect was a common car in the UK at the time. It’d be the equivalent of a character naming themselves, something like Ford Fairlane here in America, which I suppose actually did happen a bit later, though most of us have likely blocked this from our memories:
Anyway, now I know it’s referencing the car and the joke is that Ford Prefect, an alien stranded on Earth, mistakenly thought it’d be an inconspicuous name. In fact, in the 2001 movie version of Hitchiker’s Guide, there was a nice actual Ford Prefect cameo:
It seems so obvious now! What dark ages we lived in.
Why is the Prefect’s driver facing backwards in that film cameo image?
At that time, it was legal in the UK to drive at night using only sidelights, as long as you were in an urban area
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=5556872144324867
What’s that white stuff trailing out of the front brakes in the third picture? Did they use chalk, mined from the Cliffs of Dover for brake shoes? I doubt they were using discs and pads back then.
“Carburettor” (sic) as a high tech 1959 selling feature makes me laugh too.
Today’s equivalent would be the 4K television. “But honey it’s got 4K and it’s on sale…”
Very few actually know what it does or even care but every buyer knows they gotta have it.
240, 241. Whatever it takes.
Scotch?
Jeezus Jason… stop raiding my tortured memories for content!
I too wondered about Mr. Prefect from tH(h)GttG for years… but never did anything about it, nor did I know (until today) that there even was a Prefect sold by Ford in the UK.
So, thanks I guess for the edumacation. 😉
PS: did Ian Fleming ever have a slightly frumpy femme fatale named Hillman Minx?
That is clearly the light of an 1156 bulb. The coiled single filament cast a warm glow oriented vertically for more precise illumination and visibility.
In honor of the HGTTG reference, I’d like to take this moment to wish Torch, David, Mercedes, and the rest of the (mathematically proven!) figments of my deranged imagination on this site a very Happy Holiday!
aw thanks!
So much to unpack in that brochure…
I’ll note the callout to the “Well-balanced rear end design”…
Who doesn’t appreciate a well-balanced rear end… design?
Agreed, who wants to walk around in circles all day long?
This article should have been saved for Towel Day on May25.
That part I don’t know — what’s the reference for May 25? Is it the day the Bypass hit?
Also, two cars ago I started always having a towel in my car. It has been useful many many times.
I have always carried a towel in my car. It has great practical value.
Seems like it was set simply based on being first held two weeks after Adam’s death.
Always travel with a towel and remember Ford Prefect.
Always travel with a bit of rope and remember Samwise Gamgee.
Spell check the headline…
It’s very depective. Err deceptive.
I heard later Prefects got a horsepower bump to 42
HEY! I, uh…
Fit neatly into that category. Never mind, please carry on.
What a golden age of horsepower we live in. A 1 liter engine cranking out 39 hp isn’t much these days. For post-war England it was likely plenty.
That Ford Prefect is SOOOO froody!
It’s mostly harmless.
“What is the top speed pf a Ford Prefect?”
“42!”
“No, that won’t work.”
I wonder whether they were really focussing on the inlet manifold there – it wasn’t uncommon for cars of that era to have Siamesed (conjoined, I guess?) bores so having one branch per cylinder was a selling point.
Little Mr. Torchy, sat on his porchie — writing ’bout lights all day
Along came a Prefect, the theme nearly perfect
BUT WHAT THE F*CK IS A SIDELIGHT?
OHHHHHHHH!
wraps cigarette around head and takes drag
I kind of miss ADC and Kinison. Ran across a clip of Sam Kinison on YouTube a while back and ended up nostalgic for the era. I wonder how these guys would hold up today.
According to IMDB, Clay is still alive and working.
After watching that Ford Fairlane trailer I think I’m good for another 30 years of not thinking about him
As a very longtime comedy nerd, I don’t think they’d have really broad appeal these days, that energy doesn’t really translate to full hours of comedy — but clips might work. This might be a weird take, but people like those guys, along with Robin Williams, even George Carlin….I think their heydays were not coincidentally during the peak of cocaine usage/acceptance and that made their whole vibe more relatable.
Agree, except for Carlin. I don’t think he was doing a character, like Dice, a lot of his stuff is still relevant today. I recently saw the first episode of SNL, which he hosted, and found myself nodding along.
I suspect not well… But, that’s just me. I don’t think I ever understood Sam, and I really didn’t like ADC. But I grew up on the west coast and perhaps that was a geographical and cultural disconnect.
In 2000, I put a newsroom computer system (iNEWS) in at a new Univision station in Chicago. They had reporters and writers from all around the Spanish-speaking world, and the ones I talked to had far better English, than my, at best, 4th-grade level Spanglish. The really funny thing was they had to be very careful with their slang, because something that might have been fine to say in Colombia was abhorrent in Puerto Rico. Or Spain. Or… That station had people from all over. It was a really fun project with great people to hang out with. They were so nice. I think they appreciated that I tried to communicate in their native (although varied) native tongue.
I still do a little better in Parisian French. A couple of projects in Quebec also taught me the French there is a bit different than the French in France.
I find that the routines I laugh the most and the hardest at are by a host of Jewish female comedians. Joan Rivers broke a lot of ground and there are so many now, that are so funny.
I also like Kathleen Madigan (who grew up Catholic) and also some pretty clever guys of unknown religious providence.
The comedy channels are almost the only reason I still subscribe to Sirius/XM. First Wave (Channel 33 in my car) has musical content that makes me a bit nostalgic for when I was in my early 20s. That was ~45 years ago.
Technically, we did get some Ford Prefects in the US, they were officially sold here from 1949-1961, through separate British Ford dealer franchises, which were co-located with Lincoln-Mercury, more often than not
The slogan was “It’s imported! It’s Ford! It’s yours for $1 a day!”
The 2-door Anglia version probably sold better though.
The later MkII Cortina seems to have been a minor success also, or else its survivorship bias, since they seem to come up for sale in US spec form every so often
It looks like those sidelights are glaring through the typical fog of a London evening, but that’s just the exhaust of the preceding car with a poorly-adjusted *carburettor*.
The green car in the background is just a fraction of a second away from getting rear-ended by the red bus/truck/trolley behind it. The subtle surrealism of print ads is legendary and ubiquitous.