London - A death has been announced, that has caused all right-thinking British men to sob - I am less sure about women.
Last week, the manufacturers in Solihull took last orders for one of the greatest and best-loved vehicles ever built, the Defender, which will cease production in a few months.
The world will always know it simply as the Land Rover: all other claimants to the name are shams. In various incarnations, more than two million examples have roared, lurched, bumped, rattled and swum across rivers, through jungles and forests, over moors and desert sands in every continent and maybe a few oceans.
They have become as famously British as The Beatles, and their music is even longer-lived. It is estimated that three quarters of all Land Rovers ever built are still surging noisily across country somewhere.
The Defender, the most recent version of Land Rover’s rugged workhorse, is being killed off by its Indian owners, Tata, not because demand has collapsed - they still sell 14 000 a year - but because of dreary, mindless regulation.
Health & Safety had already decreed that those low, agonisingly uncomfortable bench seats that used to run lengthways down the side of the vehicle to the rear door were a threat to human welfare and had to be abolished. Moreover, the Defender can no more meet the latest EU carbon emission targets than a Victorian steam engine.
AN EXCEPTION SHOULD BE MADE
There should be a special exclusion from all this nonsense for the Land Rover, of course, because of its national treasure status. It was created in 1947 by Rover’s engineering director, Maurice Wilks, as a utility vehicle inspired by the wartime Willys jeep, and using cheap aluminium in place of scarce steel.
George VI came to inspect the first production model in the following year, in which just 1758 were sold. It was a boxy rattletrap which raised passenger discomfort to an art form, with an unyielding bolt-upright driver position and windscreen wipers Brunel would have thought archaic. Ventilation was represented by a couple of holes in the dashboard.
Slowly, however, word trickled across the land, and then to many foreign lands, that this weird green and dull-silvery creation with lots of knobbly bits was remarkable. It would carry anything from a shooting party to half a herd of sheep, and go anywhere. There was a peculiar charm about its big, tough steering wheel and pedals that banged on the metal floor every time you braked hard.
Owners from 1952 to the present day, including the Queen, learned not merely to like but to love their Land Rovers, which forgave rough treatment, never broke down or succumbed to bad weather, and did exactly what they promised on the tin. They are supremely honest, loyal vehicles.
MAKING MEMORIES
My father bought one in 1953, when I was a child, and I have been besotted with them ever since. In my 20s I thought driving a Land Rover to the north of Scotland through the night, at a speed seldom exceeding 80km/h, was an experience cooler than taking a girl to a rock concert, and only the girls disagreed.
Like millions of other happy young men, I have rattled across countless fields standing on the lowered tailgate and clinging to the canvas roof, revved up mountains making enough noise to wake the dead, and baked on Arab sands in the soldiers’ variants on this extraordinary machine.
Public opinion was against me being allowed to take passengers in any Land Rover in my young days, because I drove with what I called exuberance and others considered recklessness. Once, in Scottish hills, I took a vehicle crammed with friends a couple of miles up a track.
The cargo included Ben, a tough, blunt old Highland farmer whom I loved but was justly frightened of. When I stopped the Land Rover, Ben prised himself off one of the benches in the back, climbed down and confronted me grimly: “Right, Hastings,” he said. “Now you get in the back and see how you like being bashed over a moor at 40mph! (64km/h)” Not much, was the answer. Nobody who valued their creature comforts travelled far in the back of a long-wheelbase, which was why one saw more calves in them than women.
MILITARY MACHINE
Armies have always loved Land Rovers, and six generations of British troops have gone to war in them, wireless aerials swaying above the roofs and the bodywork stripped back to save weight. Tragically, in recent years the Army’s Land Rovers have earned a less happy name in Iraq and Aghanistan, because of their vulnerability to mines. But they were never intended to fight - simply to carry people to the far ends of the earth.
To anybody who lives in the countryside, or has travelled off-road anywhere in the world, the very word Land Rover evokes a host of memories. I have often driven a topless safari vehicle among the great animals in the Kenyan bush.
I would guess the old monster we borrowed was built in about 1960, but its owners cherish it on their ranch, many hours from any town, because the farm mechanic can solve any problem with pliers, a screwdriver and a bit of wire, whereas the electronics of a modern 4x4 demand a qualified spaceship engineer.
BUMPS ALONG THE WAY
There have been bumps in the road during the Land Rover’s history.
In the Seventies, the firm’s then corporate owners lost their way. Sales of British vehicles of all kinds languished because they were always breaking down, and also became absurdly difficult to purchase. I was once working in the Arabian Gulf, where there were thousands of Land Rovers and Range Rovers, and heard a British diplomat lament the loss of their sales to Japanese 4x4s.
“If you order a Land Rover,” he said, “you’ll wait nine months to get it. But every couple of weeks a car transporter docks in Dubai and offloads a few thousand Toyota Land Cruisers. You can go down there any time, choose your colour and drive it away”.
Today, British production and delivery have vastly improved but tastes have changed. Sales of the old Defender are restricted to real men who need a real 4x4 - explorers, farmers, adventurers.
OUT OF FASHION
No self-respecting Russian oligarch or drug dealer - or at least their wives - would be seen dead in a Land Rover. Instead, they roar through Chelsea in Porsche Cayennes or Range Rover Sports. As soon as you see a black 4x4 with tinted windows in a city street, you can be sure there are people inside whom you wouldn’t want to know.
Yet even in the British countryside we must honestly admit that many people working on the land now favour Japanese pick-ups over Land Rovers. They come cheaper, when the basic Defender costs around £25 000 (R480 000), and offer more frills. Although Defenders have been made more user-friendly in recent years, nothing can make them less painful for those of us over 6ft tall, especially in the second row of seats. The trim is still of Soviet-era austerity.
But Land Rover aficionados remain as passionate as ever in their devotion. Owners as well as dealers are stocking up with spare parts to ensure that their beloved big boxes on wheels will keep running through the decades ahead.
We cherish tools that we can count on, and the Land Rover built its reputation as a supreme travelling tool. I have been in crashes in Africa - as passenger, not driver, thank goodness - in which the vehicle turned over, yet we were able to get it back on its wheels with the help of the local village, and get moving again.
In farm buildings up and down Britain there are still thousands of Land Rovers - a few even from the legendary Series 1, made in the Forties - which their owners turn to in the worst blizzards, knowing they can cover ground that would cause a prettified modern SUV to collapse in a heap, or rather a snowdrift.
I am not in the least car-minded and often scarcely notice what I drive. But to my grave I shall remember the sounds of the dear old Land Rover: the heavy click of the catches, the clatter as doors slam, the thud of pedals on metal floors and the knitting-needle clamour of the Stone Age windscreen wipers.
A NEW ONE IS COMING
The makers say that the decision to stop production is “mainly legislation-based”, and I guess the same was said when steam trains gave way to diesel. There is to be a new model with the Defender name, made not in Solihull but somewhere in eastern Europe, but with its curious modern styling it will be no more a real Land Rover than today’s Mini has anything to do with the Austin Mini of half a century ago.
I guess the dear old Land Rover is past its time and has to go. But it has been among the very best of British, and we should raise a glass to honour its passing.
Daily Mail