M
y chum Jim French once claimed that adding the sound ‘er’ to the end of an
English word automatically translates it into German. So, by Jim’s reckoning,
“Anglophile” becomes “Anglophiler”. This linguistic trick helped immensely
when visiting this month’s Tally-ho Hero, Herr Klaus Klinghammer, and I was
pleasantly surprised to learn that “Anglophiler” is indeed the right word. Klaus
owns a specialist garage/private hoard of British Leyland motors deep in the
Eifel mountains of Germany. A row of lightly corroded Minis, some crashed
Triumph 2000s and other oddball Austin stuff sits outside his workshop. His
enthusiasm for all things English is infectious. “Rust can be fixed easily”, he says, and hydrogas
suspension is worth repairing because Klaus believes that the ride quality of these cars is
unsurpassed. If only Longbridge had employed people like Klaus. He loves BL. He ran a Rover SD1
when neighbours had BMWs; he also believes the Austin 1300 GT is a thing of beauty.
I met Klaus quite by chance and think his love of British rotters is nothing short of heroic. I am
not quite sure where the lines between his hobby and business lie though; for example, when we
dropped by he was plopping a 1.8-litre K-Series into a Metro. Why? “For fun!”
After a lengthy anecdote about a trip to Leeds to buy a Montego, and the inevitable lengthy
discussion about head gaskets, Klaus closes up shop and folds himself into his daily driver: a
smoking British Racing Green MG Metro Turbo. What else would an Anglophile drive? We went
to the pub, and found that Jim’s language trick works wonderfully: asking for Beerer gets you not
one, but two beers. Prost!
27