Plans were made and Interstate Imports were employed to bring the car to England, and bar a  couple of  hitches, the Catfish arrived safe and sound on 13th March 1998.  As luck would have it the customs clearance was undertaken at a firm in Charlton, South London which is just a fifteen minute drive from our home.  A transporter then got it to my workshop late in the day so all that was done was to unload, take some pictures, push it in to its new home and lock the door.

I took the next week off to assess the work that the car would require.  Firstly I would have to run the engine to discover if it would have to come apart.  The battery was dead of course, so a large booster was acquired, a new set of plugs fitted and a quick look at the timing gave me the chance to spin her over, and bingo!  Yes you're right it didn't fire.  I had discovered that an earth wire in the distributor had come off and so there was no spark at the plugs, also a remote petrol supply had been set up but the carb' had jammed up.  So off with it and another, which was with a whole bunch of spares in the trunk was rebuilt and fitted.  It took three days but finally up she went and a good even rev was achieved.  I ran it for twenty minutes so as to bring the motor up to normal temperature, there was no smoke in the workshop, no expensive sounds, and a large smile came over my face.
While I had the motor running, the power brake was tested and found to be working even though the brakes themselves weren't, oh well, you can't win >em all.
Now for a bit of history.  The Catfish was built in Atlanta, Georgia and purchased in Gloster, Mississippi in 1956 by the Grandparents of the previous owner who's sister, then aged seven, went along for the ride and remembers seeing the car being driven down from the workshops to the showroom, and remembers how big and shiny it was.  All three of the Kemp Grandchildren, Rocky, Mark and Marsha, learnt to drive in it, and Marsha tells me that she could never see over the wheel so had to look through it.                                     She has also very kindly told me some stories about how they used to sell water melons out of the back, collected empty coke bottles in to make money while at college and once, on a trip back from college, there was a terrible thunderstorm and the vacuum wipers gave up.  So with fishing line coming in each side window via the wiper arms and then pulling back and forth, managed to get a clear windshield for the rest of the journey.