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Fishmonger's friend: a mystery motor with a fascinating conversion

Fishmonger's friend: a mystery motor with a fascinating conversion

  • Fishmonger's friend: a mystery motor with a fascinating conversion

Belgian fishmongers, your attention, please! This here is your colleague Jacques Victor, seen making his round in and around the city of Genk, we think not too long after the Second World War.

It’s his mobile fish shop that we are interested in mostly. It's no horse drawn contraption, or the usual dogcart of the day. This is a clever motor for sure, with the rear and side windows turned into roller shutters and the boot lid into a fish cleaning platform with all the tools needed to remove tails, heads and bones.

What is the base vehicle? It looks to be rather smart, with smooth body, two-tone paint and the spare wheel now recessed into the wider side. Surely the work of a respected coachbuilder?

Words: Jeroen Booij; picture: Heemkring Heidebloemke Genk
 

Published:
Tuesday May 28th, 2024

Comments

A. Bass jh. Van Ittersum
03 June 2024, 19:18
The wheels give away a car of likely American origins: the late pre-war Ford springs to mind. Being in Belgium, it might not be so much a Ford as a Matford, by the French motoring pioneer Mathis. The style of the body is strongly reminiscent of coachbuilt utility cars of the early post-war years. Belgium at the time had quite a few of these coachbuilding firms left, fighting for work as the pre-war commisions were a thing of the past by then.
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David Liepelt
28 May 2024, 21:00
The shape of all four fenders, and wire wheels and caps leads me to think it's a 1935 Ford ½-ton pickup chassis with this custom body. The '36s had steel wheels.
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