Ah yes....Ferry road Christchurch. This was a major route out of ChCh to the suburbs and had more than its fair share of Used Car Yards. We lived at Mt Pleasant and I attended school in ChCh city so I cycled down Ferry road regularly. Always a southerly wind into town and always an easterly wind home, so had headwind both ways!! Now, do you know I cant remember a single yard of all the dozens that were along this strip that had 'interesting' cars. They were full of sensible everyday vehicles for Mr Joe Average....Vauxhalls, Standard Vanguards, Hillmans, Etc. All the interesting ones were tucked away in dusty little corners round the town, and most, if not all their owners were members of the Canterbury car Club and were regular competitors in club events. Virtually the only way to advertise cars back then was via the Press or the Star Sun newspapers, but these guys had some sort of bush telegraph amongst the club members so a lot of the cars never appeared in the paper, hence you had to check them out for yourself on a regular basis. One I used to go to a lot was Salisbury Motors in Colombo St, another haven of used car lots, and this guy always had sports cars, mostly MG's, and here I am talking cars from the 1930's and early 50's. A nice 5 year old MG TD could be yours for 725 pounds [1500 bucks in todays money] Sounds cheap but remember you could buy a pretty good house for 5000 pounds so even then the sports cars were relatively expensive. I used to spend time sitting in these objects of desire wishing I could go to the bank and withdraw the necessary cash and drive out into the sunset. I couldnt, and in fact the first car I bought was from a wrecking yard...a 1928 Singer Junior, a car with no sporting or performance qualities at all, but it did 6 years later lead to the Singer LeMans a very honest little car which challenged the MG marque for a while. The thing about these yards is that they were all so small.....8 or 10 cars at the most....dont know how the dealer paid the bills but they seemed to survive. Perhaps a dealership licence was easy to get so lots of chaps had a go being salesmen, but 10 years later they were all gone. No more CASH...TRADE...TERMS...
we were entering the era of the professional car dealer...read SHARK.