LET’S face it, this is as good a way as any of deterring any would-be car thieves.

Leo the lion cub was spotted sitting in this Morris Minor Traveller in Glasgow’s St Vincent Street, one day in April 1975. He was watching out for traffic wardens while his owner, Tom Gillespie, nipped out to the bank.

Rejected by his mother at birth, Leo had been rescued by the warden of a safari park and weaned by one of the park’s Alsatian guard dogs, which had just given birth to a litter of pups. “I had always wanted a lion,” Mr Gillespie told the Glasgow Herald, “so a friend of mine who is a director of the safari park told me he had one for me with the right temperament.I have had him since he was nine weeks old and he stays in the trailer which is parked beside a service station I used to run.”

Leo’s refined palate meant that he had never developed a taste for raw meat. Instead, his idea of breakfast lay more in the direction of a plate of porridge, three or four eggs and a couple of tins of pet food. Cat food, of course. He was also partial to a warming plate of soup and the odd slice of toast, and had you offered him some trifle, he would have bitten your hand off - though not literally, one hopes.

All told, Leo the lion cub was an unexpected counterpoint to the Esso advertising campaign which urged motorists to put a tiger in their tank.