The Citroën 2cv (“two horses” or “deuche” as affectionately known in France) was often seen in the teachers’ car parking areas of Kent’s secondary schools where I taught in the 1990s and early 2000s and represented a kind of lefty middle class rejection of consumerism. The basic 1940s design being an icon of affordable motoring for French farmers, and if you were teaching languages or woodwork in a secondary school, your two-tone 2cv in the school car park earned you the scorn of the children, the raised eyebrows of other staff, but the smug assurance that everyone knew you must read The Guardian.
This presence of 2cv saloons in the school car parks rekindled a memory of my childhood in Ibiza, but not a memory of saloons (the upturned umbrella shape of the “deuche”), for I remembered the 1960s Citroën vans in Spain. When I was at school in Ibiza in the early 1960s these vans started to be imported into the island. They arrived in the port of Ibiza on ships like the Rey Jaime 1, Ciudad de Ibiza, Ciudad de Palma etc., the ships of the Compañia Trasmediterranea that docked in Ibiza harbour (long before roll-on-roll-off ferries) and the cars were unloaded from the deck by cranes onto the harbour side. So when an E-type Jaguar arrived in 1964, or a whole consignment of Citroën 2cv vans for the small businesses of Ibiza, everyone gathered to watch the vehicles landing on the flagstones of the harbour from the ship’s cranes, with the car wheels held in rope nets like stranded fish.
The 2cv AU had been manufactured in Spain’s Citroën factory in Vigo (Pontevedra) from 1958. This was still the Spain of a command economy under Franco and the commercial motor industry was mainly nationalised with truck and bus firms like Pegaso, Ebro, and Barreiros, but the licence built Citroën 2cv was the key to energising small businesses in a growing Spanish third-sector economy.
So this is where the 2cv van entered my life in 1965. I had been doing a Saturday morning job in a grocery shop in ‘Casas Baratas’ (cheap houses) two kilometres out of Ibiza town on the road to San Jorge and Ibiza airport, and the owner of the shop was Antonio Roig. My job was fetching and carrying. I used to deliver crates of gin and tonic by handcart to Mr & Mrs Thorpe – half a kilometre away, over rough unpaved roads – and weigh kilos of sugar and flour in paper bags for customers. Antonio had a three-wheel “pop pop” motorbike carrier van to bring fresh produce like fruit and vegetables from Ibiza market, but one marvellous day he left the three-wheeler at home. He parked the new vehicle outside the shop. Everyone came to admire it, including the Guardia Civil with their carbines who always stopped for coffee at the bar next door, and everyone changed from talking in Ibicenco (a banned language under Franco) and spoke in Castellano. And they gathered around Antonio’s Citroën 2cv van, admiring it and speaking in the official language of Franco’s Spain, with a nod to the presence of the Guardian Civil…
in Vigo (Pontevedra) Spain.
The 2cv van had been revolutionising small businesses across Spain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it arrived a bit later in Ibiza – as everything arrived later – and Antonio had one of the very first, with his name stencilled on the grey doors, in blue and yellow graphics. It was a wonder to behold.
So that is the background to my own desire to own a vintage 2cv van, which was at the back of my mind for a while. Since I had achieved my main goal, to own a set of Spanish donkeys, and had successfully developed that over fourteen years; when I saw a remarkably well restored 2cv van in a secondhand Citroën dealer’s yard, I just had to buy it! It became my “Amelie”.
Many people have written about the 2cv but I shall provide a Spanish angle to the Citroën production story, and particularly its part in the growth of the Spanish economy in the late 50s and early 60s. Part 2 published for Constitution Day, December 6th 2024.