The last 2 days have been a blur of rewiring.
The eventual arrival of the rest of the wiring loom meant that Martin could come back and finish the job, and finish it he did. The whole job took him around 15 hours.
At around 3pm yesterday, after final checks were complete, we connected the battery and turned the key..and she started!
There was initial trouble because she wouldn't run properly which perplexed me a bit as I hadn't actually touched either fuel or ignition system at all and she had run so well before. Eventually the penny dropped. Fuel tank was absolutely empty. 5 litres of fuel alter and she's running like a 2 bob watch.

I've come to accept that most of the rocker switches are unreliable at best and have ordered a replacement set, along with new fuseboxes.  we've had too many dodgy connections and shorts.

Running the car or course meant filling the cooling system. I was fairly disapointed and then fairly worried when coolant was seen to run briskly out from under one corner of the water pump. Assuming that I'd somehow damaged the gasket I took the pump off, cleaned facing surfaces and reinstalled it with a new gasket. And it still poured coolant. By this time I was worried that I had somehow misinstalled one of the 9 water pump bolts and cracked the water jacket in the block. Given that I had photographed them on removal I thought this unlikely but...
Lacking any credible cause I decided to put the old (probably servicable) water pump back on in place of the newly reconditioned one from SC Parts. Unbelievably, no leak. Even more unbelievably, the recond unit had a rust hole in the cast iron in the back of it! It's heading back to the UK for a replacement. This puts SC Parts ratio of usable to unusable parts to below 50%.