Keen Collectors

Trudy and I are both collectors (we hate selling or throwing anything away) we started collecting Edwardian satinwood furniture and our large lounge in Hamilton Avenue, bit by bit, was completely furnished with fine satinwood pieces.

Over time we have also had a collection of Jensen cars and various Asian antiques.


Classic Jensen Cars

We also got involved with Jensen classic cars, having bought a CV8 (the fastest four-seater car in the world at the time) to replace our MGB. The CV8 was featured on TV as the car for 'The Baron' and Sean Connery (star of the first James Bond films) had bought a CV8 for himself.

Eventually we had 8 Jensen 541S cars and two CV8's. We joined the Jensen club and successfully entered their concours events. We were so impressed with these fibre glass, hand-built cars which we believed were really undervalued.

Particularly the 541S, had a poor reputation, as being rather slow, but this was due to all the reviews being based on the automatic version. What was not well known is that twenty-two were made with a Moss manual gearbox and these were fast! jncohen.net/Jensen

So, we decided to buy all the second-hand manual drive ones we could find, thinking we would promote them ourselves. Unfortunately, after many years they still failed to increase by anything like as much as certain other classics. When we emigrated, we decided to sell them, and they were all except one (that we had given to our son) sold to a Mr Jensen in Denmark (not related to the Jensen brothers).

Part of Our Jensen Collection

Our very special CV8 was sold a bit later together with my registration number '1 JON' to someone in the Midlands.

The registration number '1JON' was an amazing gift for my 21st birthday from my Aunty Rosemary Cohen, she was very friendly with the man controlling new car registrations in Birmingham, and it was through him that she arranged for this number to be issued for my new MGB car.

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