The Flying Ford Anglia That Was Too Famous To Hide
Sometime overnight on a Wednesday in late October 2005, somebody stole a very famous car.
The location was South West Film Studios in St Agnes, Cornwall, a facility the media had taken to calling Aggiewood. The studio had gone into administration the previous year. The vehicle had been left sitting outside under a simple tarpaulin.
The thieves pulled back the tarp, secured the vehicle, and vanished. They had stolen a car from a bankrupt lot. They had not checked whether it had an engine.
The Shape
Before it was a piece of stolen property, it was a 1962 Ford Anglia 105E. It wore blue paint and the registration 7990 TD, and it was the product of a very specific era of British motoring.
The 105E model was introduced to the UK public at the October 1959 Earls Court Motor Show, launched at the exact same event as the Mini. The two cars shared the exhibition floor, but while the Mini relied on radical front-wheel-drive packaging to draw crowds, Ford relied on Transatlantic styling. The Anglia was instantly recognisable by its distinctive Z-back reverse-rake rear window. It was an unconventional aerodynamic feature influenced by American Lincoln designs, but it served a highly practical purpose in the damp British climate. The sharp angle was promoted as a way to keep the glass clear of rain and improve headroom for the rear passengers.
Beneath the reverse-rake glass, the engineering was strictly conventional. The original factory specifications featured a 997 cc overhead-valve four-cylinder engine mated to a four-speed manual gearbox. It produced 39 brake horsepower. The top speed was 79 miles per hour, and the sprint from zero to sixty miles per hour required a glacial 27 seconds. It was not a fast vehicle, but it was an enormously successful one. Ford UK produced over a million units of the 105E. Over one and a half million Anglias of various model designations were built at Ford's Dagenham and Halewood plants before the line was finally discontinued in 1967 to make way for the Ford Escort.
It was the sort of car that littered British driveways for decades, slowly decaying from respectable family transport into cheap, battered motoring for teenagers.
The Getaway Driver
The Anglia entered literary history in Chepstow, Monmouthshire. A young J.K. Rowling was attending Wyedean Comprehensive School when, at the age of eleven, she met a boy named Sean Harris.
Harris eventually became a teenager with a driving licence and an old Ford Anglia. His particular car was painted turquoise. To Rowling, the little Ford was not just a means of transport. It was a lifeline. She later stated on the record that the turquoise car meant freedom and an end to having to ask her father for lifts, which she called the worst thing about living in the countryside when you are a teenager. Some of her happiest memories of that period involved zooming off into the darkness in Harris's car to sit under the Severn Bridge and talk. He was the first person she confessed her ambition of becoming a writer to, and the only one who told her she was bound to succeed. Years later, he would float her an emergency financial loan to help her survive a desperate period as a single mother.
When Rowling began writing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, she needed a flying car for the Weasley family. She envisioned it as a turquoise Ford Anglia, a tribute to her memories of driving around the Monmouthshire lanes. Harris served as a real-life inspiration for aspects of the character of Ron Weasley. Rowling made the connection permanent on the opening pages, dedicating the novel directly to him. She referred to Harris in the official dedication as her "Getaway driver and foul-weather friend."
The Fourteen Wrecks
For the film adaptation of Chamber of Secrets, special effects supervisor John Richardson was tasked with physically making the 105E fly. A single surviving 1962 runabout was insufficient for the production schedule.
The crew sourced a fleet of sixteen different Ford Anglias. Because the script required the flying car to violently crash-land into a magical tree known as the Whomping Willow, the survival rate of the classic Fords was low. Around fourteen were wrecked or destroyed during production. Translating a book dedication into cinema turned out to be exceptionally brutal on vintage Fords.
Some of the surviving cars were physically modified to accommodate the bulky camera equipment required for interior dialogue shots.
Then there was a prominent film prop. This was an authentic blue 1962 model wearing the registration 7990 TD. To prepare it for the flight rigs, Richardson and his crew had to drastically lighten the car. They gutted the vehicle's interior. The gutted shell was then fitted onto a rotating crane using a special joint called a gimbal head. This apparatus was bolted to the back of a specially adapted American pickup truck fitted with heavy-duty suspension and wide outriggers. By driving the pickup truck and manipulating the gimbal, the crew could capture the rolling, pitching, and flying motions required for the film.
When the cameras stopped rolling, 7990 TD was retired. The engineless shell ended up parked at South West Film Studios in Cornwall, sitting quietly under a tarp.
A Getaway Without Horsepower
The Devon and Cornwall Police arrived at the St Agnes lot in late October 2005 to find a patch of empty dirt. They quickly deduced the physical reality of the crime. Because the car was missing its engine, the police concluded it was not drivable and would have had to be towed or lifted.
They issued a public appeal to the press. PC Baxter Provan addressed the media with a statement of masterly understatement. "It's definitely seen better days," Provan told reporters. "We understand there's no way it would have been able to drive away under its own steam."
The police formed two working theories. The first was that the heist was carried out by a fanatic, someone obsessed enough with the cinema franchise to steal a movie prop. The second theory was that a classic car enthusiast had spotted the shape under the tarpaulin and mistakenly believed they were stealing a functional vintage vehicle for restoration.
Whoever took the car immediately ran into the central problem of art theft. A famously stolen object is unsellable. Pictures of the Anglia were broadcast across global television networks. The thieves had stolen a car too well-known to easily sell, too recognisable to display, and incapable of being driven. They owned a famously iconic Ford, and they had to keep it in a shed.
The Carn Brea Anomaly
The stalemate lasted for nearly seven months. The thieves sat on a gutted shell, and the owners sat on a missing asset, until the Devon and Cornwall Police received an anonymous phone call tipping them off that the missing car had been abandoned. Officers drove out to recover the vehicle. It was located less than ten miles from the St Agnes film studios. Towing an engineless car there without drawing attention was its own minor miracle.
They found 7990 TD dumped on the grass. The thieves had managed to hide a famous flying car for half a year, only to abandon it a few villages over from where they stole it. Forensics officers examined the car. The trail ended there. The getaway drivers were never publicly named.
The saga of the film's Anglias ended with a neat piece of familial symmetry. Following the production, a surviving prop was acquired by Nigel Grint. He was the real-life father of actor Rupert Grint, the boy who played Ron Weasley and piloted the car on screen.
The Grint family did not hide their car under a tarpaulin. They subsequently loaned a prop to the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, Hampshire, where the modified 1962 Ford took its place as a star attraction in their On Screen Cars exhibition.
Meanwhile, the famous stolen car was in no condition to move under its own power at the time. It had to be towed all the way.