When Mike Hodgson was 15 he started saving pennies on his window sill until the pile was big enough to buy his first car.

It was a £5 vintage Austin Seven. He now has a collection of nine classic Austins worth thousands of pounds, but his pride and joy remains his first acquisition.

It has chugged from Land's End to John O'Groats six times and over the Alps on charity runs. But the only time it let him down was when he needed it most - on his wedding night.

On the way back to Sussex from the ceremony in Oxford, the car, called Katie, kept conking out and it took Mike and his bride, Elaine, 11 hours to get home, finally arriving at 5am.

Mike, 58, who lives in Storrington, recalled: "It had never broken down before and to this day I don't know what was wrong. We were coming back through Oxford and it started to misfire and then started and stopped all the way back to Storrington.

"It took us 11 hours to do 140 miles and my wife tells me I was getting very annoyed. I kept saying, 'Why are you doing this to me now, Katie?'"

Having raised an estimated £30,000 for NCH Action For Children, Mike has now decided he is too old to make the long bone-rattling charity journeys and has handed the reins to his son, Stephen.

He said: "I did the last run from John O'Groats to Land's End non-stop and it took me 23 hours, 20 minutes. People always worry about me getting tired but what they don't realise is it is not like being in a Mercedes - with a heater and music. When you are rattling about in an Austin Seven you know you are driving."

Mike raised about £4,500 for NCH Action for Children during his final marathon at Easter, which he completed with Stephen, 26, who drove an Austin 23.

Mike restores classic cars for a living and his nine Austins, dating from the Twenties and Thirties, have made regular TV appearances in Heartbeat, Poirot, House of Elliot and Dad's Army.

His lifelong passion has also proved to be a lucrative investment. He snapped up the earliest known Austin Seven, dating from 1922, for £350 and recently sold it for more than 20 times the amount.

Mike, who placed an obituary in the Times when Austin Rover changed its name to Rover, said: "I love Austins because they are so well built. There used to be an old advert saying you buy a car but you invest in an Austin and that has certainly proved true. The engines just keep going and going.

"Modern cars are not built with pride. All people are interested in is making money. They keep putting these whiz-kids in charge of companies and they are all going bust because they don't know what they are doing.

"To improve the British motoring industry they need to start building cars that keep going for years like they used to."