Down a long driveway and through a triumphal arch, visitors to the home of Les and Dee Searle can be in no doubt that they’ve found the right place. This is not your usual country estate – the triumphal arch is made not from stone, but from the outstretched arm of a tracked excavator; where other families make a display of hanging baskets, the Searles have suspended a wartime Ford GPW from an old Foden crane.
The Searles have occupied their beautiful Sussex farmhouse for more than a century. After establishing themselves as threshing contractors early in the reign of George V, they branched into earthmoving in the 1940s. Instead of fields, the homestead is now surrounded by large industrial sheds containing all sorts of heavy machinery, but for all that, the old house and its neighbouring brick sheds remain quite unaffected by the noisy operations which have grown up around them. When the Searles very generously open their gates to members of the Veteran Car Club for the South-East Centre’s Spring Opener, the impression upon visitors is one of taking a step back in time or, at the very least, visiting a living museum.
Les and Dee’s collection of mainly pre-war cars is lined up along the driveway, but they are. The Burrell was originally supplied to C & G Yeoman of Canterbury for light haulage duties and joined the collection in 2008, having the previous year completed a charity drive from Land’s End to John O’Groats, after which it was christened . was new to Wilkinsons at Edinburgh’s Leith Docks and remained there until it entered preservation in the 1990s, being acquired by the Searles in 1994. Before long, some of the younger Searles and their friends who help keep the engines going are running these around the site, letting some lucky visitors take a turn at the steering wheel of the Burrell.
