Whose photographs were in this 1953 Beetle's glovebox? The search has reached Takeley

Table of Contents

• What was in the glovebox
• How the street was found
• Why this Beetle is worth the trouble
• Who might know them
• Do you know them?

In 1975 Dave Pragnell, then in his twenties and now a retired bus mechanic, saw a yellow Volkswagen Beetle in Loughton, Essex, and could not leave it alone. It was a split-window car, a 1953, with a dead engine. He bought it from a student, towed it home to Waltham Abbey, and found crumpled colour negatives in the glovebox.

Fifty-one years later the Beetle, and the negatives, are with Julian Robinson, who runs a Volkswagen restoration yard in Arlesey, Bedfordshire. He wants to find the people in the pictures, and he is getting close. BBC East reported the story first, and the photographs themselves are on their page. Our picture above is an illustration, not the car.

What was in the glovebox

Pragnell, now 75, thought the film was too badly damaged to be worth developing and left it for more than a decade before he had it printed. What came back was a handful of ordinary afternoon snapshots, which is exactly what makes them so affecting.

A young man lies across the Beetle's bonnet. A girl in a pale jumper sits in the passenger seat. An older woman stands in the street beside two parked cars, the Beetle and a Hillman. "Is that mum? Is that auntie? Is that just a stranger passing by?" Robinson asked the BBC.

The cars date the pictures. Robinson says the Beetle came into the country in 1966, and the Hillman in one frame is a 1968 car. Pragnell bought the Beetle in 1975, so the photographs were taken somewhere between 1968 and 1975. Anyone in them would now be in their seventies.

Pragnell's own trail went cold quickly. He had bought the car from a student living in west London, and it was registered in Dorset. When he moved to Harlow in 1987, the Beetle went into storage.

How the street was found

The breakthrough was in the background of one frame: a "house for sale" board. Robinson and Pragnell worked out that it belonged to Sworders, an estate agent then based in Bishop's Stortford. Robinson posted the story on social media, where it has had around 200,000 views, and joined a Bishop's Stortford community page.

There, a man named Raphael recognised the road. He has lived on it for 27 years. It is a close in Takeley, the village beside Stansted, and Raphael has been knocking on his neighbours' doors ever since.

That is about as far as an online appeal can take it on its own. Somebody on that close in the late 1960s or early 1970s knew a family with a yellow Beetle. The question now is whether any of them are still around, and still in touch with each other.

Why this Beetle is worth the trouble

Robinson plans to have the car back on the road by next summer, to recreate one of the photographs in the same spot and, he hopes, to reunite the people in them with the Beetle. He is restoring something rare either way.

Volkswagen built the Beetle with a two-piece "split" rear window until 10 March 1953, when the single oval window replaced it. The split-window cars made in the last five months, from October 1952, are known to enthusiasts as Zwitters, German for hybrid: split-window bodies with the dashboard and much of the trim from the oval-window cars that followed. If the 1953 date for this car is right, it is almost certainly one of them. The quick check is a split rear window with an oval-era dashboard, and the survivors are prized: RM Sotheby's sold one in Arizona more than a decade ago.

Who might know them

This is where the clubs come in. Volkswagen people have long memories for cars, and a yellow split-window on a Takeley close in about 1970 would have stood out even then.

• The Historic Volkswagen Club is based in Hertfordshire, just over the county boundary from Takeley, and looks after Beetles built before 1979. It also dates early Volkswagens and helps owners reclaim their original registration numbers, so its members know how to dig into a car's past.
• The Association of British Volkswagen Clubs links independent VW clubs across the country, so one email to it reaches a great many members.
• The Volkswagen Owners Club (GB) and the Air Cooled Are Us group on Facebook are worth asking too.

If you are in any of these clubs, or in any club in Essex or Hertfordshire, please pass the BBC's photographs round. Somebody out there drove this car.

Do you know them?

If you know who the people in the photographs are, or you remember the yellow Beetle or the family it belonged to, please get in touch through our contact page. We will pass what you tell us on to the club best placed to help, and report back here when the search turns something up.

"Wouldn't it be nice to see some photographs of yourself, that are probably nearly 60 years old, that you haven't seen in that period of time?" Robinson said. It would.