Back in the heady days of the 1970s, my boss Bob Wyse at Safer Motoringmagazine, realising that many Beetles owned by our readers were already up to 20 years old and on the way to becoming ‘historic’, had the idea of compiling a register of these while they were still (mostly) running around.
Thus was born the Ancient Beetles Register, for which entries soon rolled in, from all over Great Britain and Ireland, as well as overseas, with a full-page list of 50 or so cars and owners published at regular intervals. I’m sure there were some sort of initial rules as to age, and although we no doubt used our discretion, the list in the October 1974 issue, for example, contains nothing later than 1960, with most cars being…
