.jpg?v=caea2062-4ee4-456b-8337-ecdf9b186e97)
In June we said goodbye to Chris Davis, a good friend and a gifted artist, at a touching and off-beat celebration in Worcester.
Chris was one of the first people I encountered when I started in business in the mid 1980s. Back then the Autojumble scene was exploding. Events were running every weekend, all year round, in the ground of stately homes, on school playing fields, in sports halls and at race circuits. Sometimes stand-alone ‘jumbles’ , sometimes as one part of a larger classic car show or a steam rally, sometimes in the back of a paddock at somewhere like Oulton Park while vintage racing was in process.
It was a thriving motoring sub-culture in the days before TV took any interest, with the likes of JUNK AND DISORDERLY, an era before the relaxing of Sunday trading laws meant the big crowds drifted off to B&Q or TESCO. In this roustabout world some of the promotors made big money and others lost their shirts, but for those of us starting out in any related business it was a perfect platform, and to coin a phrase “we never had it so good!” We just didn't realize at the time…
I was a mere teenager who travelled to a different event almost every weekend with my family and we soon found a whole troupe of regulars who we saw week-in-week-out.
One of these regulars was not selling books or car parts, polish or T shirts, he had a table full of amazing bronze motoring sculptures. And he'd created them all from scratch. The lines, the proportions, the details… they were all spot on. Over the years they became larger and more dramatic, and more costly. In recent times if you wanted one of the bigger pieces, weighing maybe 90lbs and over 2 feet long they would have set you back almost £8,000. As such they were serious pieces of art and graced the motor houses of numerous wealthy car collectors . Donington Park owner Tom Wheatcroft was one such customer.
Over the years Chris' s work has been exhibited at Pebble Beach, The National Motor Museum, The Patrick Collection, Goodwood, the Geneva Motor Show and the Wingfield Sporting Gallery in London.
Chris was always amiable with a ready smile and an off-beat sense of humour that had a touch of the Goon Show about it. He had worked for a number of years in California at various studios and companies including a stint making models and figurines at the famous FRANKLIN MINT . He was a trained sculptor, using a time consuming but high quality ‘lost wax’ process to turn his clay originals into bronze castings that then needed many hours of careful finishing to achieve the desired result. Each was a limited edition and once the edition (sometimes as few as 5) was sold out, the original piece and the moulds were destroyed. There would be no second editions.
He produced numerous commission works for the owner of the subject car. There was a Maserati 250F, a Ferrari 375 F1 and one of the last was the famous Aton Martin “62 EMU” that finished 2nd at the 1955 Le Mans 24 hours .
This he admitted was a very tricky car to capture as it has an edge along the top of the swooping wheel arches which has to be perfectly aligned and completely even or it looks terrible. He nailed this feature perfectly . I have ‘fond’ memories of this piece in particular as in recent years I helped lift one or other of the edition out of his estate car and up onto it's display plinth. My poor back…
Then at the end of the day the process was reversed. In between times I was always royally rewarded with regular cups of freshly made tea. Chris was keen on tea and always had a gas stove and kettle to hand.
As the 80s melted down into the 90s and first the property market and then the overheated classic car market crashed, the kind of events that we had grown used to were starting to flag. I found more of my business was through mail order and I needed more room, so moved into the first of three different shops . As a result I drifted away from the weekly routine of pitching a marquee and dragging boxes of books out of the van to fill it up. Soon the shop was taking up too much time, I was competing in rallying and then circuit racing so other events went onto the back burner. I lost touch with many of the regulars. Chris was among them and it was probably a decade before I got back out ‘on the road’ and found he was still going strong , often sharing a stand with painter Sheridan Davies and his good lady Rosie.
On occasions, when they were not at an event, he often shared my stand . His help was greatly appreciated as the work of setting up and breaking down the marquee is not that of a moment . In the time between, the kettle was always boiling.
Covid got in the way over recent years ; so many events cancelled, so much lost in those strange times. I only got back to doing events in the middle of 2022 and the last time Chris and I met was at the Prescott VSCC event last August, on Sheridan's stand, where we sat and mulled over the way of the world while, drinking the inevitable cups of tea!
News of Chris's sudden and expected passing came from Rosie and so it was that I found myself in Worcester Crematorium a few weeks with his grieving friends and family. There were no hymns, but there was a reflective piano piece played by his younger daughter Amelia, who I've met numerous times at events , a bagpipe lament ( God almighty…not a dry eye…how evocative are the pipes?) and at the end we made our way out to the strains of Norman Greenbaum's SPIRIT IN THE SKY ! It was ‘very Chris’.
In a few weeks time it will be Prescott VSCC again. But it won't be quite the same. We miss you, mate.
