|
Kimbolton 2007 (and How We Got Here) |
|
Its now 18 years since myself and Mike Norton organised the very first event that has since turned out to be Kimbolton Country Fair. In 1990, both Mike and I had recently met as we both owned Triumph TR’s, his a wedgewood blue TR 3A and mine a rather splendid TR 5. Both our wives attended the same nursery school with Emma and Adrian (now both 21) and I think it was a case of, ‘My husbands got a TR’, ‘Well so has mine’ and a friendship was born over a pint at the Glatton Arms discussing the respective merit of each others car. I had recently finished my car’s rebuild and had attended the 1990 National TR 5 day where I met another now long term friend (Neil Reynolds), who conned me into organising the next years event. I seconded Mike and we went looking for a venue, Wimpole Hall as it turned out. Well to cut a long story short, the event went well beyond the 75 No TR 5’s, we had expected and at the end of the day we had 400 odd cars on our hands from various marques .As we had charged these guys to enter we had a rather embarrassing £4000 of spare change kicking around the day after. Enter another long term friend and Bears stalwart, Malcolm Andrews who knew a certain Chris Glasbey , who might know what to do with the money.
We all joined the Sporting Bears the very next week, initially I must confess, just to get rid of the money, as we had fallen out with the Triumph Register over the whole event. This was quite ironic really as I believe that Chris actually formed the ‘Bears’ over a very similar set of events between him and the Register. So the Event was born and over the next 4 years it outgrew Wimpole Hall as in 1995 it was estimated that over 1000 classic cars attended as well as the thousands of visiting public. A brief and unsuccessful foray to Old Warden and The Shuttleworth Collection followed but we eventually ended up at Kimbolton Castle in what turned out to be the perfect partnership with Kimbolton Castle Rotary Club. Kimbolton Rotary had been assisting in organising Tilbrook Country Fair which was raising money for a new village hall at Tilbrook , a small village up the road from Kimbolton. Funding was complete and the village had received a lottery top up, so we had a country fair and an organising committee with no motive and a major car event with an organising committee looking for a new home. A marriage made in heaven, that’s to be sure. So we are now bang up to date and I shall continue this tale with how we got on this year in our 17th year, which is where I came in. Andy Mitchell |
