AA National Monument...

Here’s the second ‘right under your nose’ object.

TWO:
The AA box № 580 at Boduan, between Pwllheli and Nefin, N. Wales.

This old AA box is a designated national monument and has to be one of the smallest national monuments in the UK. I pass it most weekends when I’m in Wales on the A497 Pwllheli Road, and I can’t pass it without it reminding me of my childhood.

When I was a child cars used to break down on a daily basis. Our first family cars were old when we got them, very old, 1930’s old (would that we still owned them). Our very first was an old 1938 Singer that was bought from the butler at Tetsworth Manor for £25 with running boards, starting handle, and arrow shaped orange indicators that flipped out of the door frame and flashed furiously. How effective they were was anybody’s guess, but I used to love watching the indicator pop out as we turned at a junction.

Belonging to the AA or the RAC was a privilege that for many years we went without. I remember numerous seaside holidays, with the obligatory five-o-clock start, where (before we’d even turned out of Wellington Street) the car had started making funny noises and my Dad’s head disappeared under the bonnet for the next three hours or so. We always seemed to arrive in Skegness / Clacton / Morecombe / Mablethorpe far later than we’d planned - not that it mattered much because it was always raining when we got there, and it didn’t stop raining until we left for home at the end of the week.

At some point in the sixties we joined the AA. I remember that at the time it was felt in our house that by joining the AA were we standing fast with the proletariat, and that the RAC was for the ‘toffs’. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (of Steptoe fame) even wrote a radio play about it; Impasse – an old banger meets a Rolls Royce in a very narrow country lane somewhere in Cornwall, and both drivers refuse to back up. Between the AA (old Banger), the RAC (Rolls Royce) and the Cornish police, a solution is finally found. It isn’t a bad play and it immortalises the class driven distinction concerning automobile club membership very well.

In our road AA members didn’t talk to RAC members and vice versa. RAC members worked in offices and banks, AA members in factories. AA members went to the football, RAC members watched cricket. RAC members smoked a pipe, AA members smoked No.6 untipped cigarettes. You were either in one club or the other, and there was no middle ground.

Anyway, we were in the AA as befitted our station in life. AA membership brought three exciting things into the life of a six year old boy – One: The metal AA badge that was bolted onto the front bumper of the car, all chrome and shiny yellow shellac. Two: the salutes that the motorcycle riding AA men (as a child I wanted to be an AA man when I grew up) gave to you when you passed them on the road (proper salutes not two-fingered ones). Three: The individually numbered key to the AA box. (Do ya wanna take the money, or open the box – ‘open the box, open the box’).

Once, on a very wet, dark night, we were driving through the New Forest looking for a camp site. I can’t remember why it was so late, but it was pitch-black and it wasn’t just raining it was ‘dropping buckets’. The car had been spluttering for half an hour or so and my dad was frantically looking for a box as he drove along - ‘fat chance’, thought I. Then as we turned a corner the engine died and there it was - an AA box! We were saved! Dad took out his key, opened the door (take the money!) and made the call. Within twenty minutes a helmeted AA man arrived, fixed the car, saluted briskly, and rode off into the distance. What a hero – he even managed to get the rain to stop.

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The AA has no need for boxes these days. When I was a boy we didn’t even have a phone in the house, but today everyone has a mobile. If you break down you don’t need to find an AA (or an RAC) box, you can simply call for assistance from the comfort of your vehicle.

There are a few AA boxes left. I pass AA box 373 at Mere, just down the road from where I live in Cheshire, regularly - and there are others – Grasmere, Aysgarth, Amberley Working Museum.

Here is a link to all the surviving boxes (apart from some in private ownership) and a few RAC boxes - which of course are far too posh for me to even look at, let alone enter as a member.

AA Box Link