The Ford Transit is 50 today, so we drove the oldest surviving example

The Ford Transit has been quietly fetching and carrying for so long, and so well, that we don’t notice it. It’s just… there. Like air to breathe or water to drink. It’s become a generic. People lob their stuff into the back of a small-t transit van like they clean their carpets with a small-h hoover or (to Land Rover’s endless consternation) call their 4x4 a small-j jeep.

Being so insanely fit for purpose makes the Transit ineffably cool. Happily there’s now a chance for the quiet hero to step forward and take a bow. It’s 50 years exactly since the first one was sold. I’m bumping and rattling around Dagenham Docks in what’s thought to be the oldest surviving roadworthy example.

The Transit’s formula – a compact front-engine layout that leaves space for a two-pallet load – was widely copied. Fifty years later, it is so right that it remains fundamentally the same. Never mind the imitators, the Transit utterly dominated the market it had opened up.

In those 50 years, it’s sold more than 2.5 million in the UK alone. Find me a car that’s shifted more units. And it’s still on an upward curve, largely for a reason that would have been unimaginable back in 1965. Online shopping means we all get a lot more parcels delivered at home now. Deliveries means vans, and just like we know what beanz meanz, we know what vans means. Transits.

Unlike the pickup in the US, the van here is exclusively a working tool. No one buys a new panel van to use as a car substitute. So every Transit sold (except a few campers, but really the camper is VW’s fiefdom) represents a solid contribution to the economy. The Centre for Economics and Business Research recently looked at all van-based businesses and came up with a figure of “£120 billion injected into the UK economy yearly” by them.

Not just daytime businesses, either. Nocturnal Transits have long been vital to the creative industries. For bands touring between small-time venues, nothing is more ideal than a thirdhand Transit to lug the guitars, drum kit, amps and stacks as they gig their way to superstardom or obscurity. No less so the criminal fraternity. The repeated cop-show motif of a Transit rounded on by cop cars, lights a-flashing and tyres a-squealing, is well rooted in actuality.

As far back as 1972, a Scotland Yard spokesman famously said, “Ford Transits are used in 95 per cent of bank raids.” It’s pretty clear the thin blue line had been nobbled by Ford’s ever-efficient spin machine, because he went on: “With the performance of a car, and space for 1.75 tonnes of loot, the Transit is proving to be the perfect getaway vehicle.”

For Ford itself, the Transit has been a milestone in more ways than one. A decade after they stopped making cars here, it was the last Ford vehicle built in Britain. Production at the Southampton factory ended in July 2013. All European Transits now come from Turkey.

The beginning of its life was a first, too. From pre-war to the Sixties, Ford of Britain and Ford of Germany had designed and built separate ranges. They both stayed out of each other’s home turf, but in the rest of Europe, bizarrely, they competed. (There had even been a van called the Taunus Transit in Germany, but it looked like an early VW Transporter and had its engine under the middle of the cab. Not the same at all.) The 1965 Transit was the first pan-European Ford, designed and developed for both divisions by a team in Britain.

The idea worked so well that Britain and Germany then started holding hands over actual cars too. From that came a thing called the Escort, and the rest is history.

Now, the early Escort was good enough to sell by the shedload despite being a very simple device. This ’65 Transit is a whole order simpler than that. But it sure leaves its mark, and not just because of its waspish paintjob of black and plant-hire yellow.

The sliding doors were an option over normal hinged jobs. But delivery drivers loved the sliders. They latch open, and absent any seat belts you can hop in and out with brilliant convenience. Drive off like that and you’re not pestered by any of the interlocks or warning lights that’d be mandated by today’s risk assessors.

You bowl along, wind in your willows, a perfect view alongside, feeling emancipated. Until you turn a left-hand corner and realise that it’s only your white-knuckle grip on the frail-feeling steering wheel that’s preventing an exit at best ignominious and at worst injurious. Still, the steering needs endless twirling so you won’t twitch yourself into a corner without forethought.

All of which helps with the impression of speed. You work your way through the gears at big throttle openings, and what with all the wind and rattles and commotion, you feel like you’re driving this thing at an impressive clip. But the speedo says 35. It’s not quick even when empty. It would have really laboured against a full load. And the brakes don’t so much kill your speed as erode it in geological time. Traffic moved a whole lot more gently 50 years ago.

The engine is a 63bhp V4. Yes, a pushrod V4. Thrashy as anything. But it made sense in the Transit because from its compactness followed a short engine bay and that rather elegant front end. The alternative straight-four diesel needed a goofy extended snout. Underneath, things couldn’t be more basic: solid axles and cart springs front and rear.

Indoors, the near-naked dash has a lonely circular instrument, three switches, a pair of heater sliders and a choke. Plus a metal ashtray vast enough to keep up with Sixties van man’s full-strength Capstan habit. I suspect the heater might have been optional.

Still, for a starting price of £542, who could have grumbled? I’m not. Like any resolutely honest and fit vehicle, it’s actually rather bewitching. At least in small doses.

Over the next half century, the Transit formula was endlessly refined. The driver was continually better cared for, the engines and chassis improved beyond recognition, most versions switched to front-drive, and in came most of the electronics we get in our cars.

Ford marketers eventually realised what gold the Transit name is. So now they’ve filched it for different vans from tiny to titanic: the little Transit Courier, fairly small Transit Connect, the mahoosive rear-drive Transit. Below that officially named Transit is the one that’s obviously ‘a Transit’. Ford wants us to call it a Transit Custom. We won’t. After 50 years, it is what it is.