Vicky Turner chats to Jay Aldred about his journey to track down a Unimog 404 once owned by his late father
Jay Aldred had the perfect boyhood in Norfolk where he was surrounded by a tight and loving family. As he likes to say, he was always “destined to be into old stuff” with a granddad, dad and uncle who were all into ‘machinery’.
Granddad Clifford, ex-RAF, had bought a house near Halesworth in the 1950s and with it a fair amount of land and barns. Clifford’s first love was aeroplanes and he amassed an eclectic collection of aircraft and parts saved from scrap, which included two Vulcan cockpits, a Victor, a complete Lightning F3 jet, and cockpits from a Sea Vixen, a Meteor, four Canberras and a Hunter.
His three sons – Clive, Ivan, and Tony – developed tastes for machines too, unsurprising since they had been ‘raised on fuel’ as Jay tells it. The boys were taught to drive as children – first in an Austin Devon, which had been modified to include a lawn-mower engine and later, properly, in an Austin 10.