Who really killed Ford Timelord?

One of my favourite blog pieces of 2019 was the final one, detailing the remarkable history of the KLF's famous Ford Timelord police car. After a year of extensive research and separating myth from fact the conclusion was that the car was most definitely dead, having been banger raced at Swaffham in June 1991 by Paul Bickers after an eventful few years in the hands of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. That seemed to be that and the case was finally closed after so many years of rumours, but now there have been fascinating further developments that shed some very different light on the situation and mean it may not be as straightforward as everyone thought...

Did Paul Bickers really kill Ford Timelord?

Darren at the hunttimelord blog was recently able to interview Jimmy Cauty about the car, and from this conversation came some amazing new revelations that blow the case wide open again just when we thought we had cracked it. When Bill Drummond casually remarked that "there were two of them", he was referring to a second Galaxie after all and wasn't confusing it with the LTD as Cauty revealed that two almost identical 1968 Ford Galaxies had taken the role of the JAMsmobile! Even accounting for his memory probably being a bit fuzzy after more than 30 years and the KLF's deliberate spreading of misinformation to add to their mystique, the story is quite convincing and maybe means both of Ford Timelord's rumoured fates are true!


According to Cauty, the original WGU 18G bought from Flinton Chalk was in fact never repaired after returning from Sweden with a seized engine. Instead, he managed to acquire a second Galaxie, almost identical to the first except that it had an automatic gearbox and was painted bright red. There can't have been many 1968 Galaxies sold in the UK so the chances of finding another almost 20 years later would be slim but not impossible. This was intended simply as an engine donor, but then the great storm of October 1987 supposedly saw the original car damaged beyond repair by a falling tree. Cauty says he transferred most of its panels, the roof lights and crucially the numberplates to the red car and painted it black and white to create a clone.

The original car with the numberplate on the bumper, indicators in the wings and no sunstrip

What remained of the first car was reportedly then scrapped and it was the second that morphed into Ford Timelord in 1988 and made many subsequent appearances with the KLF. That would certainly explain the various small changes to its look after the Swedish trip if it was really another car masquerading as the same one. Before Sweden it had a chrome front bumper with the indicators in the corners of the wings (their standard location on a '68 Galaxie) and numberplate mounted on the offside of the grille, but afterwards the plate and indicators were on the bumper, which had been painted black, and a tinted sunstrip appeared on the windscreen that wasn't there before.

Repositioned indicators and numberplate and a sunstrip by 1988 suggest this is a different car

This was the car that starred in 'Doctorin' the Tardis' and then went to Spain for The White Room, where it was covered in white paint that Cauty says was never fully removed and was still all over the car when it was filmed for the '3 A.M. Eternal' video in late 1990 but can't be seen in the close-up interior shots. The giveaway is the crumpled offside front corner that was damaged in a collision with a Dalek in the 'Doctorin' the Tardis' video, but unfortunately this part can't be seen in any of the Trancentral or Swaffham photos so there is no way to confirm for definite that the same car was involved here.

That white paint may not have been cleaned off as we thought

Cauty can't remember what happened to it after the shoot, but thinks he might have left it at Pinewood Studios, never bothered to collect it and eventually forgot about it, in which case things had come full circle as it was at Pinewood that the Timelord saga started with Superman 4. This fits nicely with Paul Bickers's involvement, as working in the film industry means he was no doubt a regular visitor to Pinewood and would easily have been able to acquire the abandoned car from there. Its condition was so poor that it required a lot of repairs and much of it was repainted for the race so any traces of white or red paint would have been eliminated, but the dashboard area appears to be red so this was the second car.

Red dashboard indicates Paul Bickers's banger was the second Timelord. Pity we can't see the front corner though.

It's possible that the car photographed by Jon Mace at Trancentral was actually the original, which wasn't scrapped in 1987 but had been dumped there ever since. Its numberplates are conspicuously missing, tying in with Cauty's claim that they were transferred to the red car, there is no trace of any white paint and it has a GB sticker indicating it had been abroad. On the other hand, he said it was badly damaged and many of its parts were put on the red one, but this car looks complete and has no visible damage so maybe that part of his story isn't quite right. If this was indeed the first Galaxie it might have survived longer than its successor and would make sense of a few things that supposedly happened after the Swaffham race.

GB sticker and no numberplate so is this the first car that blew up in Sweden?

Firstly, Jon Mace's quoted date of October 1991 could now be correct, and an unverified sighting of the Timelord being removed from Trancentral and taken to a storage compound when Cauty moved out at the end of 1991 becomes plausible. That he planned to race it at the 1992 charity event is also now a possibility, as is a suggestion that the famous incident in 1994 where the KLF burned £1 million, then wrote a contract forbidding themselves from talking about it on a hired Nissan Bluebird and pushed it over a cliff was the intended fate of the Timelord, which I had previously dismissed as nonsense as it happened three years after WGU's apparent death at Swaffham.

Maybe the Wimbledon Chevy was a substitute Timelord after all

Cauty is quite clear that there were definitely two Galaxies and he isn't getting confused with something else as he mentions both the Ford LTD and the Chevy Nova separately and confirms what we knew about them. The LTD he says was the third police car but was never used as an official KLF vehicle and was quickly sold to Gen Matthews. The Chevy, the fourth police car, was totally destroyed that night at Wimbledon and left for the organisers to dispose of, so it didn't return to Bickers's yard to be raced again and the rumours of Timelord's survival under a tarp didn't originate from this car.

JLE 67K should have become the third Timelord, not the second

Another regeneration?

Okay, there were two cars, but both died 30-odd years ago so that doesn't change the outcome of the saga, or does it? Here's where things get really weird as the DVLA record for WGU 18G has just been updated! It's still untaxed since 1989 but now has a keeper change on 23 February 2020 and a new V5 issued only days ago on 6 April. From my own experience with the Renault, it's unlikely that the DVLA would just issue a V5 for a long-untaxed car without any evidence of its continued existence, so this suggests very strongly that one of the Timelords is still alive and has just been rediscovered by a new owner! Either that, or Jimmy Cauty is onto us and playing some clever games with those researching the car, especially as 23 is a very special number in KLF mythology...

Who was that new V5 issued to, and why?

Now we know there were two cars, maybe that means both fan theories are true: one was banger raced and the other survived in storage. The DVLA update is a remarkable development that gives hope that one of the KLF Galaxies is still with us, but nothing has been mentioned about what would be a very exciting discovery so maybe it's being kept secret for now and we'll have to wait and see what is revealed in the future. It seems the car is a true Timelord after all and has displayed an ability to cheat death, travel forward in time and regenerate three decades after it was thought lost!