When chef Antony Worrall Thompson was aged 20, he was well known to the local police, who tailed him constantly. His souped-up Mini Cooper S looked highly suspect, with its go-faster stripes, wide wheels and “Mean Machine” sticker. “It was real boy-racer stuff,” he says. “I sprayed it black and gold like the John Player Special Formula One car. A friend of mine fiddled with the engine to increase the horsepower.”
Anthony Thompson, who was a cook on-stage at the British Motor Show, paid more in police fines than he did on buying the car in 1972 for £300. But it wasn’t just speeding and illegally wide wheels that got him in trouble. He once spent 36 hours in a police cell. “I was studying at a catering course and the back of the car was full of meat knives and a bloody apron. It was bad luck when I parked outside a house where a woman had been murdered.”
Anthony had used a cheap spray-can to black out his Mini’s windows, hoping to stop snoopers peering into his car. But, as he explains, the DIY spray wasn’t entirely effective. “Whenever I had a sexy moment in the back of the car, the spray on the windows would start melting because of the condensation.” With shag-pile carpets on the floors and a bearskin rug on the back seat, the car was certainly intended as an inviting prospect for women. Unfortunately, the back seat was more often covered in kitchen utensils and ingredients for Thompson’s early recipes. “I even drove the Mini all the way to Sardinia to set up my first restaurant there. I slept in a tent in lay-bys as I couldn’t afford hotels.”
Today he owns several restaurants, including Wiz and Woz in Holland Park, North London. He drives an Audi A8, which he considers far more grown-up, and says that his old Mini Cooper would be too small for the gourmet that he is today.
“When I rolled it on to its bonnet going too fast around a corner, a few local farm-workers pushed it upright again and off I drove, albeit a little bruised.” But Anthony still thinks fondly of the Mini he owned for four years. “I loved the smell of the leather wheel and leather seats. Men are always sentimental about their first car and first woman,” he says.
“My Mini was perfect for a young show-off. When I sold it through Exchange and Mart, the advertisement said just that: ‘Perfect first car’.”
February 2001