Ongoing recollections

Writing these ongoing recollections has stirred up my latent interest in Landies to such an extent that I’ve now got three of them! I mentioned the Tickford last time but there’s now also a 1955 107 inch and a 1949 wreck registered JS 8864. Does anyone remember this when it was new in Scotland or when it was trundling round Somerset, presumably in the 1960s, complete with flower power symbols?

I’ve found a picture of the second Land Rover I owned back in the 1960s, which turns out to be registered UPD 736. I’d love to know if it is still around. The photo shows it rescuing the chassis of a 1911 Yorkshire van from underneath a shed. A friend still has the Yorkshire and is still looking for a 15hp White and Pope petrol engine for it if you happen to have one lying about. That Land Rover spent much of its time rescuing classic vehicles in those far off days when lots of relics lay around the country but very few people seemed to want them. UPD 736 dragged in a much heavier vehicle from the Lake District, a 1919 Caledon four tonner which now takes pride of place in the Scottish-built section of the Glasgow Transport Museum at Kelvinhall. On one occasion UPD was loaned out to drag an ancient Buick car out of an Oxfordshire farmyard and, due to a heavy foot clutch, a rear half-shaft snapped. Even then we found it quite hard to locate a replacement as all the potential donor vehicles were still at work, though the actual fitting of it was simplicity itself. In fact it was the one thing I’d been trained to do, other than make tea, during my few months of work experience in the Land Rover experimental department at Lode Lane. Because I was a “bosses son” (father being the publicity manager) I took a fair bit of stick and was assumed to be a complete idiot! However, apart from making tea I had my uses as I saved fitters from having to wait for parts from the stores. I became the ‘gopher’ going for parts for all the surrounding teams. Their job seemed to be to build up vehicles from scratch incorporating prototype components, or else to incorporate experimental bits into existing vehicles. Most vehicles look fairly normal, though there were also some of those monster 3 litre military models being built that now exist at Gaydon.

For about two months my life revolved round half shafts. The idea was to change the spec of them to ensure they were very strong, but not so strong that something else in the transmission would break first if the vehicle was abused. The Forward Control had just appeared and due to twice the load of a long wheelbase on virtually the same chassis lots of extra stresses were being pushed through the transmission. We tried all manner of different half shafts at the Motor Industry Research Association track near Nuneaton but first we had to break them. To achieve this a ton and a half of bagged sand was loaded and then one of us would drive to the top of the steepest test hill, 1 in 1.83 from memory, and staying in low-low depress the clutch and coast down the hill. At a predetermined speed the pedal was released sharply and either the vehicle came to a ghastly juddering halt or something would break and the Land Rover would hurtle onwards. The damage was usually confined to the half shaft and if we were lucky it would have sheared by the outer splines. With Land Rover’s fully floating axle arrangement it was simply a case of withdrawing the wheel centre containing the splined bit and catching the inner broken end, which if the weak spot’ was correct, still had a protruding shoulder. If it broke at the diff end bits of shredded metal could wreck the gearing and, even if they didn’t, the only way to get at the splines was to take out both end caps and push a broom handle through.

In the end I believe it was decided that the regular Land Rovers could be made foolproof but the Forward Control couldn’t, so very reluctantly bigger axles had to be used. At the same time these were also wider to offset the higher centre of gravity, all of which rather spoiled the Factory’s intention of having virtually all parts interchangeable.

To show that I don’t entirely live in the past I went to a slide show given by Land Rover loving Meet the Ancestors TV archaeologist Julian Richards (OK, I admit there’s a hint of the past in this too!). Julian was celebrating his 50th birthday that very night, no wonder the BBC youth wing calls him a veteran archaeologist! It is 31 years since he started in the Stonehenge area but his latest interest is in Vikings. Julian explained the impact of the Vikings in Britain with all those place names ending –thorpe, -by, -thwaite and –sen. Freckle is a Viking word too, though I wondered secretly if it wasn’t the Viking in the Rover badge that had got him going in the first place!

Back to a lifetime with 'Landies'