In the final part of our interview, Jon Pressnell, author of ‘Mini - The Definitive History’ (published by Haynes), talks about the impact the Mini had on the Sixties. (Photographs taken from the book and reproduced by kind permission.)

A number of celebrities owned Minis - manager Brian Epstein gave a Mini-Cooper S to every member of the Beatles as a present - and they seem to have delighted in customising them. In your book, you quote actor Peter Sellers telling a coachbuilder in 1963, “Anything you boys can think of, you have my full permission to do”!

JP: I think the great thing about the Mini was, it was literally a blank canvas for people like John Lennon to have psychedelic patterns on his customised Mini. It was very Spartan inside and it was very plain outside, and that gave you the opportunity to make it more comfortable and more luxurious and more different to the guy next door’s. Few other cars really offered that opportunity. Because it was designed to be so simple and straightforward, you’ve got more scope for making it less so.

And why did the Mini eventually fall out of fashion?

JP: Because other cars came along that did its job better, is the short answer. Also, it was not developed and improved. Even when BMC was supposedly at the cutting edge of things, it was not a capital rich company and its profits were falling away. The Mini was always going to be replaced, but they never quite had the money and the resources to do it, and if you don’t improve a car, it becomes less attractive. You also had the situation where what had started out as a young person’s car ended up becoming an older person’s car, and that was the kiss of death for its image.

So, as you said earlier, the Mini was very much a ‘child of its times’, the Sixties?

JP: We forget that in the Sixties, we had a Labour government that was very keen on pushing the idea of Britain being at the technological forefront and I think the Mini dovetailed perfectly into that. Iit’s part of the whole multifaceted Sixties’ thing.

It was the last moment when people were prepared to wave the flag. As the Sixties progressed, more and more people turned away from their Triumphs and their Rovers and their Vauxhalls to buy Volvos and Saabs and cars like that. It was that wonderful moment in the sun when a lot of people felt it was great to be British, and the Mini symbolised that. I mean, three wins at the Monte Carlo officially and one when it was widely perceived that we’d been cheated out of our victory by the French! It felt good to be British when these tiny, ridiculous shoeboxes of a car were thumbing their nose at bigger, more powerful foreign vehicles!

And the final thing is that the Sixties was the rock and roll decade. In the old days, people were famous if they were the great and the good. The Sixties was the decade when celebrity culture really started, and who were those celebrities? They were young, wild, irreverent rock stars and what better car for a rock star than something that was cheeky, unconventional and huge fun!

Did you own a Mini back in the Sixites? Share your memories and your pictures here: