My writing career

Apart from last month’s intro to my long affair with Land Rovers my writing career has tended to cover other types of vehicle. Back in the 1970s it was commercial vehicles, in the 1980s it was classic cars and since then it has been a mixture of all sorts. Really the only time it got close to Land Rovers was through the 'Observers' books and Diesel Car, especially when that magazine briefly called itself Diesel Car and 4x4.

Through this period I tried most of the latest models and their alleged rivals, and this continued when I got my only real Land Rover job, which was the Shire Album No.221 called Four-Wheel Drive and Land Rover. A revised edition came out recently containing some different pictures and with the story updated. This week the latest royalty statement has just thumped onto my doormat. Dropped like a feather might be more appropriate as I’ve earned the mighty sum of £120.19 of the 655 copies sold in 2001. Hopefully the new edition will boost sales a bit because at that rate I can only fill my fuel tank four times a year!

Since the first edition appeared in March 1988 it appears that 11154 copies have sold, so it certainly hasn’t made me rich. It hasn’t done a bundle either for David Shepherd, editor of All Wheel Driver, who took the cover picture of Andrew Stevens with his 1948 machine.

Back in 1983 he also kindly sent me some shots of the 35th Anniversary run, from Solihull to Maurice Wilks’ farm in Anglesey where the concept had been born and prototype testing had taken place. The Land Rover Register and Land Rover Series 1 Club mustered seventy early vehicles and Rover lent one of the new 110s. The earliest vehicle present was Bill Newport’s number 29 and the route took in the A5 Holyhead Road, which must have seen the passing of many Land Rovers in the formative years. Telford’s famous old road was also used by Sentinel of Shrewsbury to test their far weightier steam wagons and their shortlived postwar diesel lorries. I have several snaps of them on test in the days before the factory became home to the Rolls-Royce Diesel Engine Division.

Although I wasn’t on the run to Anglesey, and until recently haven’t been a member of any of the Clubs, I used to be a mad-keen participant in Land Rover Owners Club events. I’ve just been looking at the Club’s Review publication, of which I only have very few copies. September 1960 is the earliest I can find, which is Volume 3 and the newest is Vol.11 in 1968, which by then was still called Review but was headed Journal of the Rover Owners Association. It being a very small world I see that in 1960 the editor was John Tracey, who later became Midlands Advertisement Manager for the Autocar, the respected motoring magazine founded in 1895 that I was lucky enough to work for after a spell in the Land Rover factory and at the firms’ Swiss Importers (more on this another time).

From the same September 1960 issue I see that the Committee of the Club consisted of Rover Sales Director Geoff Lloyd Dixon as President, my father as Vice President, J. Arnold as Hon. Treasurer and as Hon. Sec. Tim Harding, who had been events organiser and was taking over the Review from John Tracey. Browsing through the 1968 issue I was pleased to find a picture of my first Land Rover 2430 WD at Eastnor Castle and astonished to learn that we’d won the September 23rd 1967 event with Ken Davies second and Jeff Miller third. I remember the event but had completely forgotten the win, which must have been a complete fluke as there is no record of further successes in other issues.

From the report I see that Eastnor’s owner, Major Harvey-Bathurst, was made an honorary member of the Midland ROC by Ken Davies and that “he looked forward to the day when Eastnor would be the site of the National Rally – perhaps in the near future.” The Major had certainly shown his seriousness by employing his quarry manager and a bulldozer to carve some near-vertical tracks into the Malvern Hills. I’d been at school further north on the Hills and done Cadet training at Eastnor so can well imagine that the Malvern Hills Conservators were not impressed. Indeed they’d made Dodge distribution W.M. Hastelow fill in the quarry where he’d parked all the part exchanges he couldn’t sell. He showed me the log books of the buried vehicles, and a mouth-watering assortment they were too, going back to a Daimler of the teens.

Mr. Hastelow let me have piles of his Commercial Car Journals from America and even allowed me to ride in his Second Wold War petrol engined Federal 6x6 wrecker. He also had the remains of a First World War FWD with rotten wooden wheels out of an orchard near Worcester. I used a block and tackle, 200 yards of nylon rope and my Austin 1100 company car to extricate it one tree at a time! If only I’d had a Land Rover at that stage it would have been a doddle…

Continue my story with my ongoing recollections