REVIEW: Frituur Zorro Volume 3 by Mark Barnes

The pictures are amazing and those crazy Dutch guys know how to pick them. It isn’t a book of MVs, it’s a long running love story. You remember Roger my brother in law? He has the other books and just like the stuff Les Freathy puts out you can just bask in the glow of them and feel great. I’ve looked at this book several times now and I can’t stop grinning. It’s like I’ve had my jaw wired. Like I said, it’s all about the love. It’s a no brainer. These Dutch guys are at the top of their game. I hope they’ve got more in the pipeline because this book, like the previous outings, is another dollop of pure magic.

Mark Barnes

More about Frituur Zorro:

The Summer of 1945. The fighting in Western-Europe has finally ended and the allied ‘fighting-machine’ has come to a halt. This is also the case for the numerous military vehicles which have suddenly become redundant. American, British and Canadian trucks were ‘moth-balled’ in enormous motor-pools. However, many allied and a few German military vehicles were given a new lease of life and were transformed for their new tasks. They would find their way to a myriad of small companies; builders, garages, fairgrounds, circuses and (especially in Belgium) ‘Frietkotten’, roadside ‘Chippy’s’. More often than not, their rudimentary transformation was left to the local blacksmith. The result being that the original vehicle often became barely recognisable. In the Netherlands the GMC’s and other vehicles have all but disappeared from the scene. However, in Belgium they could still be found on almost every street corner. In search of these last remaining ‘survivors’, in the nineteen-seventies, Theo Barten en Maarten Swarts drove criss-cross through Belgium, Northern-France, the Netherlands and the then Eastern-block countries. From their efforts the resulting photographs capture for posterity these unique vehicles in street scenes during that period. Especially interesting are the hand painted signs on some of the vehicles giving the photos a truly unique atmosphere. The name on one of these signs was chosen as the title of these three books, ‘Frituur Zorro‘ (‘Chippy Zorro’). We discovered this wonderful sign on a recovered Austin K2 lorry which had been given the peacetime-role of ‘mobile chippy’ in Vilvoorde, Belgium.

Frituur Zorro website and shop

 

Mark Barnes

Mark Barnes is a longstanding friend of WHO, providing features, photography and reviews. He has contributed to The Times of London and other publications. He is the author of The Liberation of Europe (pub 2016) and If War Should Come due later in 2020.

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