A DAY IN THE LIFE OF…SARAH CRABTREE

Sarah Crabtree needs no introduction, but in case you’re unfamiliar, she’s now Sales Manager for Evoke Classics, the online classic auction house headquartered in Essex. Before that, she stole the show during Bangers and Cash, the documentary series, recently renewed, that follows the trials and tribulations of Mathewsons auctioneers.

She describes her role as ‘so varied,’ but it’s easy to break down.

Not that her daily driver, ‘Ivan’, the 1981 Morris Ital does that, you understand; known as the ‘Brown Beast’ within Evoke, her colleagues respect the car immensely and clamour for trips out in it.
Sorry, her daughter does: she drove it all through last summer when she was home from University.
That same car made a grown man cry at an event in 2021, but we’ll get to that later.

Sarah’s typical day begins after a meeting when she talks to potential customers; their needs and mentalities differ wildly. ‘It can be really difficult for some people,’ Sarah said, ‘as you can get very different scenarios. Your first phone could be someone who’s acquired [a car] three months ago, doesn’t like it, and wants to move it on. They have no connection with that car whatsoever.

It's quite an easy phone call. They know how much they paid for it and they want that back, [the amount] won’t have changed much. As long as they get that back they’re perfectly happy.’ The phone never really goes cold in Sarah’s office; she works remotely from home in a space that ‘is a shrine to British Leyland and Lego.’

One extreme usually leads to another. ‘Then,’ Sarah said, ‘the next call you’ll get is from someone who’s 80, had [the car] for 45 years and is really attached to it. They want to tell of [all of] their time owning that vehicle, the stories, the places they’ve been in it, so [the calls] are massively varied. You never who you’re going to speak to about what car and why they want to find a new home for it.’

Evoke has just celebrated its first year of selling classics online, and the company has a very sensible rule in place to preserve the sanity (and bank balances) of its staff. ‘We’re not allowed to bid on our [Evoke’s] own vehicles,’ Sarah said. As for what she regrets seeing sold the most, ‘That one’s easy. It was an 8000-mile Morris Ital Estate.’

That, of course, would have made an ideal foil for Ivan, the Ital saloon; while Sarah is planning on expanding her collection of cars, her next purchase won’t be coming from Cowley, but from Two Gates. ‘I’m always on the look-out for something else, I’m tempted every week,’ said Sarah, ‘the last time was by a Nissan Stanza […] but my next purchase this year will be a Reliant Scimitar.’

While Ivan may lay claim to being the most famous British Leyland car in recent years, challenged only by John Shuttleworth’s Austin Ambassador (Y-Reg), Ivan happens not to be from that year. Ivan remains the most famous Ital in the UK, and no Princess Anne references were made during the course of the interview. ‘I’ve got [a Reliant Scimitar] in the pipeline,’ Sarah confirmed, ‘but I’ve yet to meet it in [the plastic]’.

Niche though the Scimitar may be, other sports cars that Evoke sold were considerably more obscure. ‘The first car I thought we wouldn’t sell, was actually the first car we sent to auction as a business,’ Sarah said, ‘the Noble M10 prototype. It was one-of-one and I thought, “this is so random, who is going to want to buy this?” The car ended up selling easily, and went to a collector in South Africa.

That more or less takes care of the week’s activities, but Sarah has other duties within the classic car hobby including promoting the cause of the Association of Heritage Engineers, a sustainability organisation keen to preserve traditional methods of repair and maintenance.

Ivan the Ital made an unlikely appearance as a charity ride at CarFest North last year, the only brown entrant in a sea of supercars. By the Sunday however, Ivan had given more patrons more runs than any other car. In fact, he was sought out by a pair of friends, one of whom couldn’t believe his resemblance to an Ital run by his late father, who had not long passed.

Rarely does an Ital reduce a stranger to tears, but that’s what happened around the charity route of CarFest. Ivan made another friend that day, and in essence, that’s what Sarah’s role at Evoke boils down to, in her words, ‘making new friends, and seeing new opportunities.’