See that charming green wagon up there? Or, sorry, see that charming green estate car up there? I didn’t recognize what it was at first, because it happens to be a variant of a car that, in sedan form, has such a famous and well-known look, especially in profile, that it completely overshadows the other variants. Do you recognize the car?
It’s an Anglia! A Ford Anglia, from 1965 to be specific.
Let’s take another look at this appealing little pea-green machine, why not?
This wagon is also a good example of a two-door wagon that is not a shooting brake. I think it’s common for a lot of people to call two-door wagons shooting brakes, but that’s not always the case. A shooting brake is about intent. It has to intend to be sporty, like a Reliant Scimitar GTE:
…and not just a wagon with two doors, like, say, a Volkswagen Type 3 Squareback:
There’s a difference! Anyway, that fine little Anglia wagon up there gets overshadowed by its sedan counterpart, because, I think, of two things.
First, it’s that reverse-rake rear window. It’s such a distinctive styling choice, not shared with many other cars (off the top of my head, I can only think of the Citroën Ami, Toyota WiLL Vi, that one Lincoln, and um that’s it this second) that it really becomes the image of what we all think of when we think “Ford Anglia.”
Of course, a big part of the reason anyone under the age of 100 or so thinks about Anglias at all now is because of that movie with the kids at that wizard school with the messianic kid and a lot of lavish food. There was a flying Anglia in those books and movies:
That’s done more for Anglia Awareness than all those PSAs we saw in the ’80s.
This old Anglia brochure has a few other notable things I think you need to be aware of as you go about your life today. Like this lovely but sort of unsettling picture of its 1200cc inline-four engine:
There’s something about just how much this thing has been cut away that makes me feel uneasy. Especially that opened oil pan. It makes the whole thing feel so skeletal and fragile!
Okay, speaking of fragility, let’s get to this next part. The brochure has this interesting and I think kind of tender depiction of the interior of the car:
I like that all of the floor and sides have been eliminated, likely with some painstaking X-acto blade work, from the photograph. The punctum is, of course, the child sleeping on the back seat, which for many of us likely brings up a lot of childhood memories, and in my case also brings up memories of one particular Peanuts comic strip from August 6, 1972.
I read it a bit later, of course, as I think I wasn’t yet literate in 1972, so I probably saw it in a book of Peanuts comic strips when I was probably 9 or 10 or so. The strip was notable for two main reasons; first, it was one of the only times I saw the front end of a car rendered in a Peanuts comic strip:
We see Peppermint Patty and Charlie Brown’s faces inset into the massive headlights of what looks like a car from the 1930s or so, maybe 1920s, something perhaps Bugatti-ish? It has the curved grille and massive, rounded fenders that have a sort of French coachwork feel to them. Also note the hint of attention given to what could be the oil pan and some suspension bits!
But that’s not really why this strip popped into my head. It has more to do with the discussion of sleeping in the back seat of a car and the specific-to-childhood comfort that brings, and then the realization that such comfort and joy must end.
Dammit, Charlie Brown, why do you have to be like that? I adore Peanuts, and have since I was a kid, but in hindsight I’m always a bit baffled by its popularity. This was a comic about kids mostly sitting around and talking about the difficulties and struggles of human existence, examining the often grim business of life in disarmingly frank terms and in detail. How was this so wildly popular?
It’s wonderful and I love it still, but damn, how did this happen? I think it speaks well to the mass of humanity that it did, though. Even if I find Charlie Brown’s insistence on reminding me that the innocence and freedom from worry of being a sleeping child on the back seat of a car is lost to me, forever, a little bit cruel.
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Found this at the new site….some guy named Jason wrote it. https://www.theautopian.com/reverse-rake-rear-windows-were-cool-and-are-all-but-extinct/
This Peanuts comic strip has been in my memory for over 50 years. When I first saw it I was having the same realization of what it meant to go from comfort in the back seat to adulthood. I’ve always wondered if I’d ever come across it again. As soon as I saw the headline I knew right away this could be it. Thanks for the article and the chance to see the comic strip again!
The Peanuts characters shilled for Ford for several years in the early- to mid-’60s, mostly in Falcon ads, and there are one or two strips from 1965 or ’66, I think, where Charlie Brown is showing somebody his dad’s new car, and it’s clearly a new LTD.
Schulz was a bit of a car guy. He had an E-Type at one point in the early ’70s, though when he was going through his divorce from his first wife, he had to scale down to a Pinto; later, he and his second wife, Jeannie, who I knew a little bit some years back, were frequent fliers at the Mercedes dealership. She was driving a W221 S-Class when I knew her.
Thank you, Torch! You have cracked a car mystery that I was once very intent on solving but then forgot. There is a really cool looking car in Clive Owen’s Monsieur Spade that I thought was a Citroen but couldn’t confirm. Now I know it is a Citroen Ami 6. There is also a cool Panhard CD in the same series.
The first time we ever went camping as a family was in my dad’s Mk1 Escort two-door saloon. Parents and baby sister up front, three boys crammed in the back. Two tents: my parents and the baby in my oldest brother’s first hiking tent. My two older brothers in my toy pup-tent.
I slept on the back seat of the Escort, under the raked rear window. It was during a meteor shower: I don’t think I have seen so many shooting stars in total since that trip, about 55 years ago.
Anything I see mentioned here is cited as “blurring the lines” of whether it is a shooting brake. So: what cars are clear-cut shooting brakes?
I had to pause for a second because the side window arrangement look a lot like a Fiat 128 Station Wagon
You missed the Mercury Monterey Breezeway!
That Charlie Brown, what a blockhead.