When England footballer Francis Lee met his 1970 World Cup Cortina

What happened to those Ford Cortina 1600Es, given to the 1970 England World Cup football team? James Ruppert reunites one iconic motor with its former owner

Grease lightning! Lee, second from left, inspects the 1600E he used to own (James Ruppert)

In 1970 England’s World Cup squad were each loaned a Ford Cortina 1600E. Yet after a year they had to give it back, or buy it at a discount. I wondered what happened to those iconic Dagenham-built cars and the truth is that most ended up in the scrapyard. A handful belong to a reclusive collector.

I did trace Nobby Stiles’ Cortina to a back garden in Derby belonging to John Heywood. It was a very sad. Then, out of the blue, I was passed on the details of Ken Gratrix who owned Francis Lee’s 1600E – and it was roadworthy.

So how did Ken Gatrix come across the car? “A garage that looked after my company vehicles had something parked in the corner with a dust sheet over it,” he says. “I said ‘What’s under there?’ He said oh, ‘It’s one of those World Cup Cortinas’. I’d never heard of them and anyway when I tugged the sheet back it was in such a state.”

Gatrix adds: “I asked him why he hadn’t bothered restoring it and he said there was no money it. I suggested that we could do it together but he wasn’t keen. I certainly thought it was worth bringing back to life and it took a few years to wear my mate down and, eventually, he sold it to me. The documentation had Francis Lee’s name on it and his company, so I definitely knew that it was his.”

Then a few years ago, Gatrix says he was at a social event at a golf course in Alderley Edge when he spotted a familiar figure striding confidently along in the distance and thought, “I’ve got your old car”.

“So I told some of the people I was with and then, later on, the familiar face of Francis Lee appeared,” he says. 

“What a car!” Lee, aged 74, said, Gatrix recalls. Garix adds: “He wanted to know if it still had the cross flags on the wing. Then he said, ‘Imagine what it would be worth if we had won’.

The moss-covered Cortina whose owner eventually agreed to a sale (James Ruppert)

To this, he replied: “Imagine what it will be worth when we win the World Cup again.”

Gatrix says: “I don’t think he had thought about that. He seemed keen to see it and maybe one day he will.”

The good news is that sometimes dreams do come true. As I happened to be writing a book about the World Cup Cortinas, I spoke to BBC1’s The One Show about finding a way to reunite Francis Lee with his Cortina he’d not seen since 1971. It almost didn’t happen. The night before Ken was a having a problem starting his Cortina. (Old cars, eh.)

It was a fuel pump which had decided to stop working on what is arguably the second most important day of its life, after it was handed to an England player. Don’t panic though, Ken is a can-do bloke and he got it fixed. Fixed in time to drive to the famous Oulton Park racetrack where we meet up with a TV crew and presenter Andy Kershaw.

Francis Lee meeting his former vehicle, returned to glory, at Oulton Park (James Ruppert)

First of all the film crew has to record the look of surprise on Mr Lee’s face when he meets his old car for the first time in 43 years.

“This was a top car at the time,” says Lee. “My wife drove it and when the year was up I recall paying around £600 to £700 for it. The only problem I had with it was the stickers as it attracted too much attention. If some people who supported a rival team knew it was my car then they would leave their mark. Over the years I had three cars quite badly damaged. So after about six months I part-exchanged it at a Ford dealer for £1,250. They wanted me to have a Zodiac, but I really didn’t fancy that at all.”

Lee can now tell me about the realities of car ownership in the 1970s and beyond which basically boils down to, don’t buy British. That explains why Lee is happy to admit that he is on his 33rd Mercedes. 

“By far the worst car we had was an MGB GT,” he says. “Everything broke on that, it was always in the garage. Then there was the Daimler Sovereign. It was a V12 and the piston actually punched itself out of the block. Many years later I helped out a pal by taking on a Bentley Mulsanne and that was unbelievable. You’d press the front window switch and the rear would go down. It was a nightmare and Bentley never managed to sort it out properly.”

Alongside a Maserati, today’s Premier League footballer car (James Ruppert)

Over his career it is no surprise that uniquely among professional players, Francis Lee had the most expensive motor not just in the player’s car park, but also the management section. “Yes I’d always have exactly the same or better cars than the chairman and they hated that,” he says.

Today though Maserati has been persuaded to bring along a Grancabrio. It has a 4.7 litre V8 engine and the Sport version costs half the wages of the toppermost Premier League player at £102,615. This was the equivalent of an E-Type Jaguar, which is what George Best would have probably owned. Indeed, a Jaguar F-Type should well have been parked next to the Cortina, but hey, even Jags are a bit common for the current crop of footballers. So perhaps the Maserati is spot-on for comparison purposes.

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The thing is that side-by-side the eye is quickly drawn to the rectangular Cortina. With the engines started, the Italian V8 rumble is incredibly sexy, but once the 1600E gets going, it too sounds the performance saloon car part. The BBC camera car even has trouble keeping up with it on the circuit. The 1600E is not out of its depth especially if a footballer wanted to draw attention to themselves. On a busy M6 it may not have stopped traffic, but it certainly slowed it down as drivers and passengers took a much closer look and most significantly of all, actually smiled.

Francis Lee smiled a lot that day too, it clearly brought back a lot of happy memories. Memories of a time when life was a bit simpler and Footballers were happy to drive a Cortina. Just like the rest of us.

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