Graham Tidd’s advice to anyone with an old chook shed on their property is to check it for treasures, regardless of whether there are chooks in it or not.
“We don’t have barn finds in Australia because we don’t have barns,” Mr Tidd said.
“But check your chook sheds. We don’t have eggs, but there might be a Morris Minor in it.”
The advice comes after his wife, Glenys, stumbled across a dilapidated and almost unrecognisable Morrie on a farm at Nathalia in 2009.
It had last been registered in 1982.
After buying the broken-down British beast for a bargain at $300 as a project car to “keep Graham out of trouble”, the couple transported it to the driveway adjacent to the Shepparton unit they still live in today.
It sat covered until the next year, when Mr Tidd, who is a welder and boilermaker by trade and once built race cars, began its restoration right there in the residential carport.
The metalsmith said there was no fibreglass on his Morris Minor and that every panel was made of strong and sturdy metal.
He removed all the nuts and bolts from the 74-year-old classic car before building it into “a brand new car”.
“If you start a jigsaw puzzle, you never give up until you’ve got it,” Mr Tidd said.
“That’s my determination.”
Once he was up to the finishing details, Mrs Tidd picked the colour of the interior’s trim, while he chose the car’s pale blue exterior before also painting it right where it sat.
Mr Tidd said Morris Minors were made to replace motorbikes and had been popular with England’s district nurses, who travelled for their work.
It was the first British car to sell over a million units, with 1.6 million manufactured in its first production run.
“They were small, economic and cheap to buy and run,” he said.
“They were little shopping jeeps for all kinds of weather.”
It has side flip-out signals to indicate safely, but no seatbelts, and is also void of climate control without an air conditioner or heater.
Mr Tidd said with a top speed of 60km/h, Morries were never built for speed, but functionality.
“The only thing it passes are parked cars. It can round them up like a blue heeler dog,” he quipped.
“A kid on a pushbike would beat this.”
Mr Tidd joked that he wasn’t the only car enthusiast in the couple’s home and that Mrs Tidd was quite the revhead, hooning around town in her Mini to a women’s social sewing group she attends that he has nicknamed ‘bitch-n-stitch’ because he’s convinced no sewing takes place, just conversations complaining about their husbands.
“I put the sewing machine in the back for her each week, but I don’t think it gets used,” he laughed.
The pair met as kids and knocked about together at Gowrie St Primary School and Shepparton High School before Mrs Tidd moved away from the area.
They met again in 2002 and were married in 2004.
The ‘GG’ plates on the couple’s Morris Minor reflect each of their first initials poetically, while the 2004 is a nod to the year they wed.
Nowadays, Mr Tidd can’t drive the manual vehicle himself after a stroke a few years ago rendered most of his left side non-functional, so he relies on friends to come and take him for regular cruises around town.
It’s a frustrating debilitation that cheats him from chauffeuring his chook shed chariot, but he reiterated that anyone should poke their head into the old hen house to see what they might find.
“There’s probably not any bird flu, but there might be a Morris Minor.”