A VERY DIFFERENT PRAGUE SPRING

In August 1968 Soviet tanks rumbled into the narrow streets of Prague to quash those democratic reforms the rest of the world called the ‘Prague Spring’. Somewhat less momentously, and 22 years later, two innocent British adventurers rolled far less aggressively into town in a 1937 Lagonda, admittedly one powered by a huge diesel engine originally intended for a British armoured car, and carrying a payload of excellent single-malt Scotch

SURPRISINGLY, THERE IS A CONNECTION BETWEEN THOSE two entries into Prague – a connection called Berthold ‘Berty’ Hornung. An architect and town planner, he was born in 1925 in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, and survived Auschwitz before studying architecture and engineering. In 1950 he became a planner under the Soviet regime, and played a key role in the design of Prague’s metro system. Never a yes-man, however, he had the temerity to send back 20 train-loads of Russian rolling stock because they were the wrong gauge.

Now marked as a trouble-maker, he was forced to flee the city during the 1968 invasion along with his wife Hana and two daughters, carrying only whatever possessions would fit into suitcases. Berty then settled in Edinburgh where he became a respected town planner, devising a transport layout for the city, after which he headed the British Council team that in 1972 helped to replan Jerusalem. He also became firm friends with Pip Hills – an authority on diesel engines and Scotch whisky – in the Scottish capital. But what Berty could not do was revisit Prague – until 1989 that is, following the collapse of the Soviet regime.

In 1990 Václav Havel was inaugurated as the new President of Czechoslovakia, and the first free elections to be held there were scheduled for June 8 and 9. Berty was invited to visit the city and have his achievements recognised, and it was Pip who offered to drive him there in style in his magnificent, unique, classic Lagonda. Now read on…

Pip Hills: “The car was a Lagonda LG45 built in 1937. It was my everyday transport for 25 years. A big grand touring saloon with an alloy body and a sunroof, it had been made for just such journeys. The lid of the boot folded down flat, to take a large leather trunk which was fastened with straps of the same. It weighed two tons.

The original 4½ litre petrol engine had been removed and a 4 litre diesel put in its place by Gardners in Manchester, who at the time thought that there might come a day when there would be a demand for diesel-engined motor cars. By about 1950 they’d concluded that they were wrong and sold the car to a farmer, who sold it to me for £500. It did 40 miles to the gallon and, with five gallons of spare fuel carried in the offside wheel arch, could manage just under a thousand miles on a filling. It was a common sight around Edinburgh and participated in many improbable events.

The Gardner engine was a lovely thing: an alloy cylinder block and an injection pump whose timing could be adjusted by a dog sliding on a spirally-splined shaft, all controlled by a lever on the steering column. It made a lot of noise so occasionally I’d have to cope with the condescension of some knowing prat who thought it was a fine car with a wrecked petrol engine. Less often someone would ask, wonderingly, ‘Is that a diesel?’, and I was happy to speak to them. Just once I came across a real expert: on Granton Pier, on a sunny morning Walter Scott, marine engineer extraordinary, and his brother were taking their tea from oily mugs when I drove up. They’d never seen the car before, but Walter listened to the din and said, ‘Is that a Gairdner?’ I said yes. ‘The splines on the timing shaft are worn’, he said.

On a cold mornings the Gardner produced much smelly white smoke until it heated up. The sunroof leaked and tended to discharge pints of water down the driver’s neck when braking, (conducive neither to safety nor comfort). But the back seat was dry and on winter journeys my children would sit there covered by an ancient black bear-skin rug, and sing to me. Roadholding was poor, as was acceleration, but on a motorway the Lagonda would happily cruise at 90mph all day (barring obstacles as the brakes were rubbish).

Berty and I settled on May 1990 for our trip, but before that arrived he suffered a heart attack and the rigours of a road trip might have killed him, so he decided to fly and I would go by road and meet him there. I cast around for a companion who wouldn’t be daunted by such a jaunt, and Dick Pountain, old friend (and now brother-in-law) jumped at the chance. At the time I was running the Scotch Malt Whisky Society which pioneered the sale of unfiltered, single-cask Scotch malt whiskies, and we decided that a dozen bottles might come in handy.”

Dick Pountain: “I joined Pip at his flat in Edinburgh’s New Town, we loaded up the magnificent silver Lagonda, then set off for Hull, stopping only to fill its 20-gallon tank with diesel (it wouldn’t see a pump again until the Czech border). An overnight ferry trip landed us at Rotterdam next morning, and in glorious sunshine we hit the autobahns heading for Bonn and the Rhine: the Lagonda behaved itself perfectly. 

Travelling down the left bank of the Rhine to Koblenz, we crossed to the right bank by ferry then proceeded down the beautiful gorge lined with castles toward Bingen. Late May on the Upper Middle Rhine is Spargelfest, the time of asparagus, and for the next two days those fat white, candle-like stalks were the special on every menu at every stop. The Lagonda became a talking point everywhere we stopped: at our first hotel we described our quest in the bar and the locals explained to us that German has a word for it, ‘schwagerurlaub’ or literally ‘brother-in-law spree’. Cue crap movie starring Chevy Chase and John Belushi...

After Mainz we abandoned the river and struck out past Frankfurt and Schweinfurt for the Czech border at Marktredwitz, interrupted only by a short detour to Bayreuth for me to see Wagner’s opera house (I’m a fan, lucky for Pip that the Lagonda had neither radio nor cassette player). In those days crossing the Czech border still involved complicated juggling with currencies - you had to change a certain minimum amount, and couldn’t take any back out - but filling up with 20 gallons of diesel took care of a big chunk. Next night we spent in Karlovy Vary, aka Carlsbad, a weird combination of faded baroque splendour with Sputnik-era Soviet brutal. 

On the way into Prague we encountered our first problem. The Lagonda’s gear change started to be noisy and difficult, and in one of the outer suburbs it refused to change at all. I should explain at this point that the massive 4 litre, 4-cylinder Gardner had been connected to a Jaguar gearbox (in a custom bell-housing) with a Laycock hydraulic overdrive, sometime in the 1950s. It was the latter that was playing up, and we both got down on our knees in the gutter with the socket-set spread on the pavement. After some 15 minutes of spannering, a man in a blue boiler suit sprinted across the road and asked us what was the matter, in perfect English. He told us that he’d spent WWII in England as an aero mechanic, servicing the Free Czech Air Force’s Spitfires! With his assistance the box soon went back together, gear changing was resumed and we carried on into the city centre.

As we approached the central square, the Staroměstská, from a sidestreet we encountered dense crowds of people and a procession of classic Czech cars - beetle-backed Tartra 97s, Skoda Rapid 901 2-seaters, streamlined Skoda 935s and more. There was some kind of car show taking place, so we simply slunk into the line and entered the square where we were received quite cordially and no-one inquired about our credentials. We didn’t win any prizes but the Lagonda attracted a lot of admiring attention.

This display of lovely old cars didn’t surprise us too much, given the Czechs’ history of excellent design and engineering, which was every bit as illustrious as that of their German neighbours. One striking irony of our visit was how easy it was to drive and park our large car around the centre of Prague due to the then paucity of private cars (the biggest hazard was mistakenly entering narrow one-way streets to find a tram coming the other way). Such cars as there were were mostly cute little Trabants, made of papier maché in white or duck-egg blue. We got into conversation with one Trabbie owner who’d admired the Lagonda and he opened the bonnet for us: inside was what amounted to a lawn-mower engine, but with a large, bulbous expansion chamber exhaust coiled over the top that looked uncannily like the intestines of an animal. Knowing that they were soon to become extinct we even discussed buying one and driving it back to the UK, but fortunately cooled on the idea.” 

Pip Hills: “In Prague we met up with Berty, who had fixed it for us to be put up in a private house walking distance from the Staroměstská. We had a couple of days free before the ceremony at which Berty was to be welcomed and give a speech, so we took in some of Prague’s sights, like the Hradcany Castle, where Havel was now installed, St Vitus Cathedral and of course the ghetto with its statue of the Golem (we resisted buying any replicas). We drank a fair amount of excellent Pilsner beer, and ate roast goose with sauerkraut in Hostinec U Kalicha, favourite restaurant of the fictitious Good Soldier Svejk. 

Despite his recent heart attack Berty was in good spirits, in the home-town he’d thought never to see again. Which prompts an aside about how we first met. When Berty arrived in Edinburgh friends found him a sparsely furnished flat, and he had very little money. However before his incarceration in Auschwitz in (I think) 1942, he’d been a cabinet-maker in western Bohemia, so if he could find some timber, he could make furniture. I heard about this from mutual friends and mentioned it to my Dad, a docker and connoisseur of fine eastern hardwoods (don’t ask why), who happened to have a large quantity of teak, from which Berty, delighted, made Bauhaus-style tables and chairs. We became firm friends and spent a lot of time looking at cities and working with wood together. He it was who taught me how to sharpen edged tools: a chisel won’t do unless you can take a sliver of skin from the tip of your middle finger without drawing blood.

The reception thrown for him in Prague was an uplifting affair, and we organised a tasting of the society’s whiskies for those who attended. Afterwards we all dined in a spectacular restaurant perched on the hillside above the city. The next day Berty flew home and we took to the road again, as I’d formed a plan to sample the relatively undiscovered white wines of Southern Moravia, as a possible extra string to our whisky bow.”

Dick Pountain: “On June 9th 1990 the free election resulted in sweeping victory for Havel’s Civic Forum, and a great outdoor concert was held in the Staroměstská to celebrate. Czechoslovakia’s three best symphony orchestras, the Prague, the Brno and the Bratislava, occupied three corners of the square and were conducted by Rafael Kubelik in a performance of Smetana’s ‘Ma Vlast’ (My Country). A sea of joyful people waving little tricolour flags, and as The Moldau theme swelled I found myself leaking a little salt water... 

We met a friend of mine who was covering the election for the Financial Times, and he took us to lunch and introduced us to some young staff members of Lidové noviny, the oldest Czech daily newspaper. They were excited about the prospects of democracy, and equally so about the prospects of being able to buy their own apartments. Welcome to the Western World. 

Next day we set off for the vineyards of Southern Moravia, by way of Pilsen and a visit to the Urquell Pils brewery (where we saw one of their enormous oak vats being re-tarred, and had our best meal since leaving Germany, in their canteen). In Pilsen we also witnessed upsetting scenes of Dickensian squalor in a Roma section of town, a stark reminder of the uneven way the old regime had bestowed its resources. 

The vineyards turned out a disappointment too, the wines flabby, insipid examples of the Müller-Thurgau grape. This was, remember, at this point still a Soviet-era economy: we drove through town after town where it was impossible to find any accomodation or restaurant; there were miles of agro-prairie planted with barley for the beer industry, which had no villages at all. As we turned and headed back toward the border, we drove through the heavily-forested nature reserve of Třeboňsko, miles of dense forest with few villages, and it was there we had our only proper emergency of the trip. 

We were bowling along at around 60mph enjoying the scenery when there was an almighty clang followed by hideous scraping noises. On stopping we discovered that the exhaust pipe’s holding bracket had fractured and the silencer was dragging on the ground. We hadn’t seen a town for miles, nor were there any ahead, and mobile phones were still some years in the future. Were we dismayed? We were not, because both Pip and I have Black Belts in the art of bodging. We both understand the universal curative virtues of Araldite, gaffer tape and wire, though I’ll admit Pip has the better of me in that: while for me wire means coat-hanger, for him it means fencing wire (a great coil of it in the boot, along with proper parallel-jaw fencing pliers to make crisp right-angled bends in it). We soon knocked together a new bracket from the wire, but the problem was how to attach it.

It was clear that we needed to Araldite it to the cross-member from which the old one had broken off, but this was so covered in dirt and grease that there was no way that epoxy would bond to it. A degreasing agent was required. It did feel faintly wrong as we poured out the 100-proof Ardbeg whisky, but it certainly did the trick, and we attached the wire bracket with a paste of Araldite reinforced with nearby sand. It held all the way back to England, and there was quite enough Ardbeg left for a couple of drams before we set off for home.” 

Coda 

Berty Hornung continued to advise the Czech government on planning matters until his death in Edinburgh in 1997. He created training courses and forged a link between the Technical University of Prague and Heriot-Watt University that persists today. Pip Hills sold the Lagonda in 1998, now lives in Montrose and drives a sensible Land Rover Discovery. Dick Pountain lives in Camden Town and has his Freedom Pass.