History of the Club
Sometime in 1991 three friends, Andy Hopkins, Kevin Chuck and Geoff Sims were talking classic cars in their local pub, one of them had noticed that an Andy Smallbone from Basingstoke had asked a question in 'Practical Classics' and an idea was hatched that if they could find Andy the four of them might form a Classic Car Club. They managed to track him down and the Basingstoke Classic Car Club was born.
Andy Smallbone was the first chairman of the club followed by Andy Hopkins in 1994.
The first meetings were held in The Beacon Pub, South Ham. At that time Andy was working as a painter and decorator at the Met. Office in Bracknell where he met electrician Trevor Sibley and realising they had a common interest he invited Trevor along and so Trevor joined the club.
The club soon grew to about 10 - 15 members and the Beacon pub became too small, so they moved to Hook Cricket Club's Pavilion in about 1992.
Since then, over the years the club has used the Basingstoke Post Office Club, where the club stayed for about 9 years and reached a membership of around 70, the White Heart at Sherfield-on-Loddon, Milestones Museum café, and Sainsbury's Griffin Social Club for a few months which wasn't
ideal because we had no designated room of our own and so had to share with Sainsbury's employees. From there we moved to the Moose Hall in Basingstoke town centre where we still have our monthly club meetings today.
A double historic milestone was achieved in January 2014 with the appointment of the club's first female Chairperson, Chrissie Wheeler, and a balanced male/female committee representation. Chrissie remained our Chairman until she sadly passed away in November 2021. Our current Chairman is Steve Lee who has been a member of the club since 2014.
Over the years the club has been actively involved in organising and marshalling the Classic Vehicle elements of the Basingstoke Festival of Transport, (also known as the Thornycroft Show), the Hartley Wintney Show and the Popham Aero and Autojumble. In fact it was only when the Rotary club took over the organisation of the Basingstoke show in 2019 that we stopped doing the marking out and marshalling of the club field. We are members of the Federation of British Historic Vehicle Club (FBHVC) A copy of their latest magazine may be seen here.
We currently have 65 members.
