Barretts of Canterbury: 28-30 St. Peter's Street, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 2BL

The late fifties also saw the arrival of the next generation of Barrett directors. After serving a four year apprenticeship with Austin at Longbridge and two years National Service in Nigeria with REME John's son Geoffrey joined the Company in November 1956. Reg's eldest son, Douglas, joined in November 1959 after an apprenticeship with E.K.Cole at Southend and National Service with the Royal Signals.

Their arrival certainly helped with the running of the business because although John was still very involved with Civic duties for Canterbury, he had to take life a little easier having suffered a heart attack in 1953.

In the fifties the structure of the motor trade was such that the manufacturers supplied their cars to Distributors who in turn wholesaled the cars to the dealers within their geographic area. As Barretts were the Rover and Austin distributors for East Kent they were dealing with over 50 garages and responsible for the annual sale of hundreds of cars.

With the market being so buoyant, and with an eye to export sales, Austin decided to market a four wheel drive vehicle, to be called the Gypsy. Because it would compete directly with the Land Rover, the Rover Company insisted that the two vehicles could not be sold alongside each other or even by the same company. Therefore a new company, Barretts Automobiles Ltd, was created to handle the Rover franchise.

With this in mind, but also needing more shop space at St George's Street, land in Rose Lane, almost next to the store, was purchased and a car showroom was built with shop space on the first floor, offices and storage on the second and just storage in the basement. This was numbered 3 and 5 Rose Lane because, between the two Barretts buildings was number 1, a car parts factors run by AES.

As befitted a new building in 1960 it was finished in the style of the times with blue tiles on the front elevation between the windows and the showroom was painted in Cantaloupe - a greeny-yellow colour! The first floor was given over almost entirely to baby carriages, mainly Marmet and Silver Cross; by now Barretts were probably the largest retailer of baby carriages in Kent and one wonders how many future car customers started out in a Barretts pram!

The irony of the new showroom arrangements was that the Gypsy was not a success, but another car launched in 1959 kept the garages very busy over the next two decades - the Mini.