Noel’s Caravans: How Noel became SA’s caravan king
The man behind one of SA’s most iconic businesses has died amid a battle for control of his millions. But how did he get his riches?
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Noel Faggotter, the man behind one of SA’s most iconic businesses, has died amid a battle for his riches.
Here’s everything we know about his recent struggles, and how he rose to become SA’s caravan king.
EARLY YEARS
Mr Faggotter spoke at length about his childhood in Adelaide in a 2021 episode of the podcast Ducks Don’t Get Cold Feet, hosted by John-Paul Drake, Director of Drakes Supermarkets.
Born and raised in Woodville North, Mr Faggoter was one of eight brothers and sisters.
He went to Pennington Primary School and the Technical High School in Croydon, but left after finishing Year 8, telling Drake, “I thought ‘this is a waste of time, school’.
Asked how his parents reacted to his decision to quit school early, Mr Faggotter replied “As long as I had a job and I paid board, it was fine”.
He worked briefly for a timber mill, before taking a job as a tyrefitter at Firestone tyres in Port Adelaide, which turned out to be pivotal in his budding career in business.
‘THAT DAY, I REALISED I COULD DO ANYTHING’
Mr Faggotter said he could effectively pinpoint the day that set him on a course for a life in business.
As he explained on the Ducks Don’t Get Cold Feet podcast, the then-17-year-old was working at his job at Firestone, watching his colleagues head out in their company utes to sell tyres across the city.
One day, the business had a special on two different sizes of tyres and Mr Faggotter told the manager he wanted a shot at selling some.
“He said, ‘well you grab the old ute and off you go’, so off I go,” he said.
“Seventeen-year-old boy, you know, I went out and I started knocking on doors: ‘Hey, Mr, these tyres are bloody good tyres and they’ve got a good price. Are you interested in some?’”
Over and over, the answer was ‘no’.
But Mr Faggotter kept knocking on doors.
“Then all of a sudden, I cracked a fella that was interested.”
“This place was called Harris Caravans, unbelievably, and I called into this place there on Regency Road and he said, ‘yeah that’s a good deal, I’ll have 10 of them’.
“Well, that really lifted me, so I kept going”.
There were more ‘nos’ to come, but then Mr Faggotter hit “the jackpot”.
“I stopped at this place called Klemzig Auto Wreckers, and I went in there and the bloke said, ‘mate, if you can get 50 of them here this afternoon, I’ll get ‘em, I’ll have ‘em off ya’”.
“And I was right up in the air.”
Mr Faggotter asked to use the phone so he could relay the good news back to home base.
“I used his phone, I rang the manager and he said ‘you better get that ute back here and we’ll get em there this afternoon with the two utes’”.
“And that afternoon, the state manager’s come down from the city to Port Adelaide and congratulated me, had a go at the other salesmen ‘if this kid can do it, what are you blokes doing?’”
“And I realised that day that I could do anything I want to - anything”.
“And that there has probably been the foundation of my life’.
NOEL’S CARAVANS
It might have been tyres that helped Mr Faggotter discover his passion for selling, but it was caravans where he would make his name and fortune.
As he told the Ducks Don’t Get Cold Feet podcast, his parents were avid travellers and often took their family of 10 away on holidays in “a little tiny caravan”.
After marrying at 19, and building a family home in Valley View, Mr Faggotter started buying second-hand caravans, cleaning them up, then selling them for a profit.
“I thought, ‘there’s a quid in this’, so I just kept doing it,” he explained.
“In the end I just borrowed some money against the house, and got a loan and bought six new vans at a time, and I used to sell them from my backyard and make two hundred bucks on each of them”.
Mr Faggotter said he entered the industry during a “boom” in the popularity of caravanning in Australia in the mid-1970s.
“Everyone was buying caravans,” he said.
“It was serious. I think they were selling something like 30-odd-thousand caravans in the country.”
Noel’s Caravans was born in 1974, setting up shop first on Research Rd in Pooraka, before relocating to its current premises on Salisbury Highway at Greenfields in 2004.
In 1983, Mr Faggotter launched his own brand of pop-tops and caravans, called Island Star and in the early days recruited SANFL legend Neil Kerley as a brand ambassador - a role he held for several years before, literally, handballing duties to AFL champion Malcolm Blight in one of the company’s many local TV ads.
RELOCATABLE HOMES
The company rode the caravanning boom, but by the mid-to-late 80s, Mr Faggotter explained on the podcast, “the industry really went down into a hole”.
Sales in Australia, he said, fell by a factor of 10, from about 30,000 a year to three thousand.
Mr Faggotter pivoted, launching a new business, Island Star Homes, selling “relocatable homes”, the kind often used by permanent caravan park residents and affixed with an annex.
While the caravan business struggled, the housing market thrived.
“I made a lot of money out of my homes,” Mr Faggotter said.
“I remember one year I sold 108 homes, which is quite a few homes”.
Mr Faggotter sold homes for 14 years, selling 585 units before exiting the business in the late 1990s to focus on caravans, which were “starting to gain momentum again”.
THAT FAMOUS JINGLE
Noel’s is famous in SA for its famous TV jingle, a catchy calypso-style tune with the tagline “Noel’s Cara-vans, Noel’s Ca-ra-vans” performed in strong Northern English accent.
Asked how the jingle came about, Mr Faggotter told the Ducks Don’t Get Cold Feet podcast he was looking for a new TV spot around 2005 and approached Michael Forrest at Creative Forrest to work something up.
“He was the one who got some fellas together and they came up with this little jingle and it just stuck,” he said.
After becoming an SA advertising icon, the jingle was given national exposure in 2019, when it was featured on Channel 7’s AFL show The Front Bar.
As Mr Faggotter explained, he was holidaying in the Northern Territory, when a producer from the show called and asked if they could use the jingle to poke gentle fun at brand ambassador Malcolm Blight on the show.
“I said ‘yeah, go for it’ and I didn’t know what to expect,” he said.
“I got to Glendambo a couple of nights later and watched it on the television there, and to my surprise, it was just unbelievable, national television.
“They said ‘Malcolm Blight, now (he’s become a) caravan salesman’, they were taking the piss out of him, my old mate Malcolm.
“He rang me that night and he said how good it was, and the next day I rang him again
“And I had people ringing me everywhere, ‘Noel, you’ve hit the jackpot, bloody national television’”.
At the end of the show, guest panellist Leigh Matthews was presented with a meat tray, but there was something a little more special for Blight; a live rendition of the Noel’s Caravans jingle by a group of singers and dancers.
“And I thought, how good advertising is this? It was unbelievable,” Mr Faggotter said.
“I will never ever take it (the jingle) out of my ads, unfortunately, it will always be there.”
ILLNESS AND DEATH
As The Advertiser’s Riley Walter reported in August, Mr Faggotter had been battling a terminal brain tumour after being diagnosed with the illness in March, 2022.
“It’s just a very sad thing,” Mr Faggotter’s new wife Rosemary Dunn said.
She said he had been planning to buy a house and retire in Darwin before his diagnosis.
She said he had undergone chemotherapy and other treatments but the tumour on his brain had grown and could not be fully removed.
He struggled to talk and communicate as his health deteriorated, she said.
She said doctors had not given him an exact prognosis but he was taking it “a day at a time”.
“He’s accepted it,” she said.
“He’s a very, very honest and caring man and Noel never every complains”.
Mr Faggotter was still the sole director, sole shareholder and owner of his business.
His Blanchetown caravan park was destroyed in the recent Murray River floods and Ms Dunn said “one of his biggest wishes” was to see the park “back up and running”.
Mr Faggoter died on September 4.
LEGAL BATTLES
As The Advertiser reported in late August, Mr Faggotter’s children, daughters Naomi Joy Porter and Torie Lee-Anne Cooper, took legal against their terminally-ill father and wife Rosemary Dunn over his capacity to manage the million of dollars he earned through his businesses. Read the full story.
Meanwhile, as The Advertiser also reported, the rebuild of the Blanchetown caravan park has been abandoned amid the bitter legal dispute over the caravan mogul’s millions.
Read the full story.
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