OH, to have been a fly on the wall the day a young Ian Grange sauntered through the foyer of the Midland Hotel wearing only his Y-fronts and clutching the keys to an E-Type Jaguar.

In the heady days of the early sixties, the maverick car dealers of Manchester would convene every week, aptly, in the very place where Rolls first met Royce.

"Every Thursday night all the big dealers used to go to the Midland Hotel and have the best of everything, drink Cristal champagne and deal among each other," says Ian Grange, proprietor of Southern Cars in Princess Road, Chorlton. "I had been trying to get into this clique.



"I arrived to find a primrose-coloured E Type, which had only just come out, parked right outside the hotel. The concierge said it belonged to Mr O'Connor. Harold O'Connor was the best dealing man I have ever known. He always dressed himself at Savile Row and had hand-made shoes.

"I asked him how much the E-Type was. He said `How much have you got, son?' I pulled out £1,600. He took my £1,600, and he took my jacket, my trousers, my shirt, tie and shoes and left me in my Y-fronts with the keys to the car, and I walked through the foyer of the Midland Hotel, which was a very sprauncy hotel in those days."

Then there was the day Grange jokily sold a fellow dealer a boat. "He screamed because it was on the bottom of the Bridgewater Canal," he recalls. "I said, `Well, I didn't tell you it was floating'. That was the kind of thing we did. You would have them one week and they would have you the next week."

Forty years on, Grange, now 62 and ailing after multiple heart by-pass surgery, is still dealing but he is the last of that colourful breed, doing big deals on an irrevocable handshake.

His latest proposed deal is simple, if unusual. He wants to swap a painting for a £1m house in London - somewhere to spend more time with family in the capital. It was through just such a deal that Grange acquired the artwork in the first place. He took it as payment for his Hollywood home from "just a guy I met" while Grange was in the throes of divorce during a five-year period spent as a tax exile in the USA in the eighties.

"There is no adventure in taking money off anyone. If you have a swap and a change, it is just wonderful," says Grange, from Hazel Grove, Stockport.

But he adds: "I am open to any deal. I have had my enjoyment out of the painting. Now someone else can have it." The painting is A New Dawn, by John Pitre, the most bankable living American surrealist. And the special selling point of A New Dawn - which took Pitre 18 months to complete - is immediately apparent. It shows a loincloth-clad man standing in front of the jagged wreckage of a New York skyline, the street sign from 5th Avenue, Manhattan, visible in the rubble.

Conceived in 1965 as a commentary on the escalation of nuclear weapons between the USA and USSR, the image now seems like an uncanny anticipation of September 11.



Rockerfeller

"In the seventies, governor Rockefeller was buying this painting to give to the city of New York, but he died in the meantime," says Grange.

THE painting has, over the years, hung in various of Grange's houses and even at the showroom of Southern Cars, but now resides, because of increasing insurance premiums, in a bank vault. Pitre's work is so popular that practically every student in America had one of his prints on their wall in the sixties and seventies.

One painting alone reaped over $50m in poster sales. Since A New Dawn was valued at $1.7m in 1997, it begins to look as if a £1m London home may be a cheap price to pay for it.

"I am an old-fashioned dealer," Grange explains. "You have always got to leave something in for the next man otherwise the world stops going round."

Grange, twice married and with five children aged 17 to 33, was born in Stockport and left school at 15 with no qualifications. "I was very dyslexic, and just a dunce as far as the school was concerned," he says. "I am still a little bit dyslexic. If I am reading a document, I have to read very carefully."

He went into the motor trade after doing National Service in the Royal Navy and, working long hours, built up a lot called Red Lion Autos in Cheadle before specialising in classic cars and moving to Chorlton. The most expensive car he has sold was a 1928 SSK Mercedes at $450,000, while his favourite car to drive was a Facel Vega - France's failed attempt to rival Rolls Royce.

King Hussain's Lincoln Continental from the early sixties has also passed through his hands, along with a Bank of England governor's bomb- and bullet-proof Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, and - still for sale - George VI's Daimler convertible, whose other previous owner was entertainer Max Bygraves.

"I sell toys for big boys," he says in the office of Southern Cars, the doorway almost blocked by a huge and imposing Aston Martin Lagonda. "My clientele is everyone from dustbinmen to lords."

While most motor traders see their stock as rapidly depreciating assets, Grange reckons his cars actually increase in value the longer they stay in the showroom. That was not always the case, though. "In 1987 to 1989, it was amazing. The car enthusiasts were not buying. But you were getting bankers, solicitors and stock market people buying. Then, in 1990, the bottom dropped out of the business literally in two to three months. I saw what was coming and I lost £600,000. But I was happy to do it. It put 60 per cent of classic car dealers out of business."

One of the deals Grange does regret is the sale of Handforth Hall, the Tudor house he had to leave behind when he went into tax exile. But he is not about to stop looking for the next swap or a sale.

"I am terrible at relaxing. I should not even be here," he says, sitting at the desk of his showroom office. The doctors think I don't do anything, but if I stop I'm going to die."

There is even some bartering attached to our interview. He will tell us his story, but in exchange, we must get the article under the nose of multi-millionaire Donald Trump - just the kind of man who may be interested in buying an expensive painting on a New York theme.

"It would be a great thing for him to buy it for the people of New York, and it is a drop in the ocean to him," says the lifelong dealer.