Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Ant Anstead Limited 2018

Images © Individual copyright holders

Cover image © John Lakey

Ant Anstead asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008245054

eBook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008245061

Version: 2019-05-24

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter One

Creating the Blue Line: The birth of the British police force

Chapter Two

These Devilish Machines Scare the Horses, You Know

Chapter Three

Adapt and Arrest

Chapter Four

Post-War Peace: London sets the way

Chapter Five

Send the Area Car

Chapter Six

Panda Cars

Chapter Seven

Traffic Cars

Chapter Eight

Police Car Livery and Equipment

Chapter Nine

Commercial Break

Chapter Ten

Performance Cars

Chapter Eleven

It’s Got Cop Shocks

Chapter Twelve

Buying Cars – Police Vehicle Procurement and Demonstration Vehicles

Chapter Thirteen

Fantasy Cars

Chapter Fourteen

Police Driving

Chapter Fifteen

Policing on the Screen

Plate Section

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

I am hugely proud of my police career, and when I look back on the years that I spent as a police officer I do so with a great sense of pride and achievement, knowing that I played a small part in what I firmly believe to be the best police service in the world; an institution that puts the great into Great Britain.

Like any typical teenager, in my youth I never really knew what I wanted to do when I was older, except that I didn’t want to follow my father into the hospitality sector. I was the second oldest of four boys; my two younger brothers were still at school, but my older brother was working as a scaffolder on building sites. I would often join him at weekends to earn extra pocket money, which I blew on car parts for the numerous classic cars I was restoring and selling from home. I had an auntie in the police, though, who was cool and I looked up to her, so I started to research joining the police. At 18 and a half I was just old enough to apply. I never told anyone what I was doing, and it was only in the week that I was packing my bags to go to police college that I told my parents of my chosen career. I was young and full of enthusiasm, and I developed a passion for the law. I loved being within the police family and still consider myself, somehow, part of that; l look back on that section of my life with great affection.

Being a police officer also taught me a lot, much of which I was able to use once I left the service, and that knowledge has given me a great sense of perspective. At the age of 23 I became one of the UK’s youngest armed officers and a full-time member of the TFU (Tactical Firearms Unit). I hold two commendations for bravery and I can recall countless incidents that took my breath away with either fear, laughter, tears or amazement. I look back at those dangerous incidents now in a positive way, as moments of great luck, and I still have the scars from them, which remind me how lucky I am. I owe a lot to the police and I am grateful for the years I spent with them. It helped me to mature, and I have the utmost respect, admiration and affection for my fellow officers.

The police service in the UK is truly a service. I think of it as a service for the people of the nation, which was the original aim, unlike in many other countries where police work has a different ethos. The police taught me about self-discipline, gave me a work ethic and, I’d like to think, some empathy (after all, the best coppering is not always about arrests or box ticking). Also, it taught me, perhaps less usefully in civilian life, firearms training. I learned how to deal with people in all different circumstances. I became fascinated by human behaviour and I use all that learning today in a positive way in my own life. People often ask me if I get nervous hosting live television to millions of viewers, and I simply say ‘No. I’ve had a gun pointed at my face, this is easy’.

Our framework of laws and the ability to enforce them is what makes modern civilised society function – without this we would have no hospitals, roads or even an economy in which to find useful work. The police are the bedrock of a civilised society; we need them in order to function and make our world bearable. We hope we never need them, or meet them, yet we feel reassured that they are there just in case. A great deal of police work goes under the radar because proper policing isn’t shouted about, it mops up the bad in favour of the good. My tutor, Terry Walker, who was about to retire after 30 years’ service when I joined, taught me about humanity and caring for the public that we aimed to protect. I joined in 1999, at a time when he had seen the worst of people during a changing police service that meant officers had to adapt too. Terry always wore his helmet, never carried a baton, never raised his voice and never asked for anything in return. He was an old-school gentleman. I remember him fondly.

I carried with me into the police a great affliction. I was a petrol-head, and the truth is I always have been. From my days pushing Corgi toys around the carpet as a four-year-old, I turned to Lego as a boy and at the age of 14 made my own go-kart from a lawnmower I bought at a flea market. I paid £2 and dragged it the three miles home before taking it apart and putting the engine into a wooden chassis. I never did get it working. I built my first car when I was 16 and bought a vermillion orange MG Midget the moment I passed my test at 17. Cars were where it was at for me. At an early age I was totally and utterly besotted with the looks, sounds, smells and shapes of cars. I had it bad! I could recognise every car on the road and I yearned to drive them. In fact, it was the cars used in police dramas on TV that also helped steer me into policing – who doesn’t love Bodie and Doyle handbrake-turning a Capri (see chapter fifteen on film/TV police cars) and who wouldn’t want to be them when you are 12 years old? I certainly did.

The British police’s relationship with the car and the motorist has at its very heart a central issue that is both contradictory and conflicting. When policing and motoring were both in their nascent stages, PCs were set to catch this new breed of people, the motorists, who were terrorising horses and the public with their frightening and, frankly, it seemed, death-defying 15mph machines. Horseless carriages (the term ‘car’ did not catch on until the early twentieth century) would be an increasingly common feature of UK life for some years before the police started thinking about using them as tools themselves.

Since then the, car has become essential to everyday life. However, it has also become a source of friction between the police and the public. Think about it; if you get burgled or attacked, the police action in catching the criminal and putting them behind bars is supported by 99.9 per cent of the public, but if a traffic cop pulls someone over for doing 83mph on the M1 at 3am, that person is quite likely to feel aggrieved, even though they have, pure and simple, broken the law, just as a shoplifter has. Society’s attitudes still mean that the speeding driver is quite likely to moan about the police to their friends and family, or even on social media, in a way that would be unacceptable for a burglar or mugger, almost as if motoring offences are kind of accepted. The number of times I pulled a car over and I was met with ‘Have you not got anything better to do?’ was alarming. And I’ll let you into a secret. The police feel some sympathy with that, too, because most cops love cars!

Motoring, whether it’s dealing with driving offences or clearing up accidents, represents the vast majority of UK police interaction with the public and is the biggest cause of friction, too. Yet deep down everyone loves a police car, even when they have been done for speeding! Whether it’s a Wolseley cornering on its door handles at 25mph, a Senator spearing down a motorway, or a Morris Minor Panda, the cars used by the police take on a special quality, so much so that countless enthusiasts collect model police cars in different liveries and particular legendary police cars have become part of the nation’s shared consciousness.

That love for the police car and the men and women who drive them is exactly what this book investigates and celebrates.

And, like many people today, I share that love affair with the Great British police car.

So I joined the police …

There have been a number of stand-out moments during my time as a police officer. I joined in what I can only describe as a period of ‘pre-red tape’. Lots of crazy stuff happened. While the police service brought me great enjoyment and I experienced some incredible events, I also saw great hurt and sadness. People can be damaging to each other, and I have witnessed at first hand the very worst of human behaviour. Researching this book and revisiting this period of my life has brought back many positive and negative memories, but I will share with you just a handful of those lighter memories, which whilst writing have made me laugh out loud and cry at the same time. The truth is, in the years I spent in the police, most of those stories are unrepeatable in a book celebrating police cars, and some events I have simply emotionally moved on from, blocking them from my mind. I was young, and revisiting this period in my life has made me reflect on the small impact that I made on public safety and that quite often the day-to-day role of the police officer needs to be secret. In truth, the public cannot know, and I think deep down they don’t want to know, what it is that the police really do.

When I joined, a senior officer described being in the police as 95 per cent mundane boredom and 5 per cent total utter fear. And in some ways he was right. As an officer of Hertfordshire Constabulary I spent the early part of my career in the affluent, rural area of Bishop’s Stortford. Staffing levels were so low I spent the majority of my two years there policing solo. The public perception was that there was a whole army of police officers patrolling the streets. Truth is, there were often only three of us. Three! Covering an area from the Essex border to the east, Cambridgeshire border to the north and as far south as Ware, the town in which I lived. This huge amount of space was known as part of ‘A Division’.

A Division was so vast that to police it effectively we needed to drive – quickly! Hertfordshire Police allowed you to drive cars based on passing various levels of driving qualifications. The entry level driving qualification was known in-house as a ‘G Ticket’. Pass this basic test and you can drive a marked police vehicle – but that’s all: no blue lights, no rapid response and certainly no car chases. It was simply a marked police taxi to get from A to B. I spent many months policing Bishop’s Stortford on a G ticket, and I remember the car of choice fondly, my first ever police car. It was a P-registered Vauxhall Astra – the rubbish one with rounded rear end and awful plastic bumpers. It had grey velour seats with that familiar generic car pattern, and the heater didn’t work. It was the most basic of cars, with a single cone blue light on the roof. This car was slow – so slow – but it got me around my patch brilliantly, never missed a beat. Boy, that car could tell some stories …

There’s something remarkable about driving a police car. It stops everyone. People stare, people behave differently, people certainly drive differently when near a marked police car. I became all too familiar with the varying degrees of public reaction and relied on that response when policing. The car, and of course the uniform, became my asset every day. The car itself became a tool for me in so many different ways; it carried a vast amount of items, it blocked roads when needed, and it became an ambulance when called upon, a refuge for victims, a safe place for informants, an escape when in danger and even a weapon when all else failed. It felt like an armoured vehicle because of everything it stood for, yet all it had was a badge on the door and a blue light on the roof – a blue light I couldn’t even use! For me it was what the car represented that made it invincible. I drove that car across every inch of A Division. I got to know my patch so well, and got to know its residents, too. In the UK we are very lucky; we police with consent, with the majority of the public behaving like law-abiding citizens and crime being committed by a small minority. It meant I saw the same offenders over and over. I got to know them, and they got to know me, too.

Once I had established myself as a local police officer I pestered my sergeant on a daily basis to let me qualify to drive with blue lights. I cannot emphasise enough how frustrating it was for me to listen to the car radio for crime and public calls for assistance, knowing I had to drive there like another car in the daily traffic, to be literally sitting at the lights while a burglary was in progress was not what I joined the cops for! The ‘Yankee’ car was qualified to attend on ‘blues and twos’ and it would often pass my Astra, waving at me while weaving through traffic. I wasn’t in the police long before I knew that I needed to drive a police car properly. I needed to get myself a Yankee ticket. And quick.

The Yankee qualification was a great course. I remember my instructor Vince really well. He was a very dry man who spoke in a monotone, and who, truth be told, really just wanted to ride police motorbikes and tell bad jokes. It took me two weeks to pass the course, which I did whilst driving up and down the country in an unmarked car with two other officers also itching to be allowed to be let loose in some county metal. After the initial days we all became quite familiar with each other, as you would when spending all day together trapped in a car. We covered various aspects of driving and I learned a lot from Vince, including how dark one man’s sense of humour can be. Once Vince felt confident that we were competent, we would BLAT (blues and twos) in a police car to different locations across the UK. Vince would start each day declaring our intention, ‘Today we are going to Southend to buy chips’. And that’s what we did. I still look back and think I had the coolest job. The Yankee course was all about passing; the humiliation of not passing would have been career-ending, and my group would never have let me live it down. Plus they all knew I was a car guy! I had to pass. At the end of the course I was handed a certificate, a piece of paper that said: ‘Anthony Anstead. Response Driver’. I still have it, in fact. And that was it, my ticket to get me to the front line of policing. My police career was about to change forever.

Once I was a response driver, A Division policing instantly became different. I could now attend all incidents as a first response. I could stop cars and chase vehicles. So far I had by default been somewhat protected from the public, but now the safety catch was off and I saw the real side of front-line policing. The really bad bits.

My first fatal car crash was horrific. It was on the A120 between Little Hadham and Bishop’s Stortford. It was a night shift, around 3am, and three young lads had stolen a lorry, set fire to it and left it in the layby, making off in a second stolen vehicle. In their haste the driver lost control of the car within 100 yards of the dumped lorry and turned it upside down. Both front passengers left by the windscreen. The driver was killed instantly and was lying in the road when we arrived, while the other was alive but had serious head injuries. He was holding his face together like it was a latex mask split down the middle. The rear passenger somehow managed to crawl free and he ran off, nice chap.

As I got closer to the scene, I used my car to block the road at the Bishop’s Stortford end and radioed for a roadblock the other side, but I knew assistance was a fair distance away. I could see the lorry on fire at the top of hill and assumed it was involved in the crash. I ran to see if there was anyone inside but the flames were so bad I couldn’t get close. I passed the lorry and used cones from my car to block the road. I asked for fire brigade and ambulance while sitting in the road with the injured man, near his dead friend. I was bandaging his head with blood pouring everywhere. He was silent, and it must have been the shock that prevented him from feeling the pain from his injuries. And the sight of his friend’s body. It was a strange moment. It felt like hours until assistance arrived, and once I was cleared from the scene I had a few moments to clean myself back at the station before I was then sent at 6am to a report of a broken window at the local Tesco. My Yankee ticket took me to the coal face of incidents and that night became the start of familiar relationship with RTAs, which I attended on an almost daily basis, as Hertfordshire has some fast open roads. I’m often asked if, as a car guy, I like motorbikes, and there’s no doubt that, because of this period of my life, and attending numerous bike crashes, my answer is a resounding no.

I conducted numerous traffic stops, mostly mundane for small incidents of speeding or poor driving, and often I just had to have a peek at a car that didn’t quite look or feel right. One stop that stands out was in South Street on a sunny afternoon. I was at the traffic lights and an estate car passed me going the other way. The boot was wide open, hinged upwards, and a young man was sitting on the tail of the car with his legs dangling over the edge towards the road and holding the front of a 15-foot rowing boat on his lap which had some wheelbarrow wheels on the rear. No tow bar, no trailer, just this kid holding a boat that was being pulled along by a car. It was one of those ‘what did I just see?’ moments. I quickly spun my car round and pulled the car over as it got to over 40mph. Just a bump in the road, a clip of the kerb would have dragged that kid out of the car. And they couldn’t really see what the issue was – what was wrong with dragging a boat by hand out of the back of the car? There’s no real obvious ticket for such an offence, but, needless to say, I didn’t allow them to drive a moment longer.

One evening around midnight I was patrolling the edge of the A Division near the M11 junction when a blue BMW roared past me. I instantly gave chase with blue lights, giving the details of my pursuit on the radio. Past the industrial estate I was doing my best to keep contact and get sight of the number plate. I was struggling to keep up and knew the car would be long gone once it was on open roads, and the M11 was nearby. I called for assistance from our faster Traffic cars and requested further help from our neighbours in Essex. I was losing the car but still revving the nuts off my little Astra, trying my very best to keep up. The BMW entered the slip road for the M11, and I was several hundred yards behind. Then the car suddenly braked, screeching to a halt as I sped closer. The driver got out, waving his arms as I closed in on my target, I jumped out to be met by this furious man who shoved an ID in my face and screamed ‘I’m fucking Special Branch you fucking prick, check the fucking number plate.’ Then he ran back into his BMW and drove off. Yes, I got my ass handed to me by my sergeant for that. But hey, the thought was there. Whoops …

I had an appetite for policing, and soon I wanted to leave the rural scene, so I transferred to the very busy K Division, covering Cheshunt and Waltham Cross. There were no green fields and farms; it was a totally different style of policing. And it was busy!

I’ve had numerous memorable police chases, but one sticks out purely because I’m a car man. It was a normal afternoon on a normal weekday and I was patrolling alone in a slightly newer W-reg Astra. I passed a silver Porsche 911 convertible with the roof down, and instantly recognised the driver – a well-known local toerag. And I knew that there was no way he could afford a 911! I followed for a few hundred yards, requesting a PNC check on the plate and the status of the known villain’s driving situation. The car came back normal, owned and registered locally to an address in Little Berkhamsted. Weird how I remember that little detail? Still, it didn’t add up, and whatever the information, I was stopping that car. The moment I put my blue lights on he was off. It was now a Porsche 911 versus a 1.4 Astra – mmmm … Had he stuck to the A roads he would have left me for dust, but he didn’t. He entered a housing estate, weaving in and out of the roads and losing his back end on almost every corner. His lack of car control meant I kept up easily, and we raced around the estate until we reached a dead end, where he jumped out of the car and ran off into a park. I gave chase, and as I was a pretty quick runner back then. He was arrested within a few minutes and we walked back to the car. Of course, he had a perfectly reasonable story: the car was his friend’s, etc, etc. But I know cars pretty well, and having a simple look around it I found the poorly modified chassis number concealing that it was, in fact, a stolen car and he had just copied the number plate from another local 911 he saw to avoid suspicion. However, he couldn’t resist the temptation of some roof-down cruising. Sure enough, I had caught red-handed one of our most notorious local offenders in a stolen Porsche 911, which was then reunited with its owner, and I’d had a pretty cool police chase, too. That was a good day.

Driving police cars is dangerous and I have had numerous scrapes along the way. I once parked my police car on the A10 to direct the flow of traffic down the very tight Theobalds Lane and to block a crash scene. While waving a lorry on, the back of his rig caught the front bumper of my car, dragging it for about 20 yards while I was frantically waving my arms to get him to stop. Then ‘PING’, he pulled my front bumper clean off. It was a light and funny moment, looking back. However, that same road was also the scene of my first serious POLAC (police accident). I was a passenger in a marked police car with a member of my team driving. We were on ‘blues and twos’, pulling onto the A10 when – BANG – we were smashed into by a silver BMW. We spun off and hit a fence and he went into the oncoming traffic. It was a heavy hit. My partner Sue was stunned. I turned the sirens off and ran to the car that had hit us, trying to get the man out of the car. He wouldn’t leave the vehicle, even as I was pulling at him harder and harder to get him out. It was only when a member of the public came over and said ‘he has his seatbelt on’ that I realised what an idiot I was. Whoops. The next moment I was in an ambulance on the way to hospital. Shock is a weird thing.

K Division was crazy, a busy place to police, with varying crime and a melting pot of cultures. It was on the fringes of north London, making it a Metropolitan police area until Herts took over the patch. I was on the transition team for that takeover, sharing the patrols with the Met until they slowly thinned out to being all Herts officers. A memorable period for policing at this time was that of the petrol strikes, which crippled the nation. It was chaos! Only priority motorists were allowed access to fuel (which meant that, as a member of the emergency services, I was okay). Seeing the public descend into chaos and the queues and distress at the pumps made it clear how important the motor car is to the daily lives of so many people.

My time in K Division was great; I saw and did some crazy things in that period; there was a lot of crime and violence, but I knew that I wanted to lean towards more action, so I applied for probably the most specialist role in the police: the TFU, the Tactical Firearms Unit. That decision changed my life forever.

It’s important to remain focused on the fact that this is a book about police cars, and although I have numerous stories from my time in the police, as I’ve already said, many are not fit for this publication. There was, however, for me, a changing relationship with the police car at the moment when I was handed a gun. I learned very quickly that the police car was now both an effective weapon and a place of safety. Before being armed, I had never really considered the ballistic properties of a car, such as, when the shots start coming which areas are effectively bulletproof? It’s not like the movies; the door of a Volvo T5 won’t stop a bullet! The engine bay, however, would, and that Volvo bonnet became a regular vantage point to lean over while armed with either an MP5 or a G36 weapon. It was the Volvo that became my favourite police car. It was amazing! We used Volvos and Mercedes as ARV (Armed Response Vehicles); both were estate versions, providing more space to carry the extra equipment. The only real performance upgrades were ceramic brake discs and fancy callipers, otherwise it was pretty much a standard car. Between the front seats there was a gun safe that carried larger weapons. First the MP5, a small, compact assault weapon that was really accurate, then some months later we changed to a G36, which was more of a rifle. The safe was locked and the weapons unloaded. We would have to ‘self-arm’ when en route to incidents, and of course for immediate issues we would use our side arm (in my case a Sig Sauer 9mm self-loading pistol) that we carried each day in a holster. Open the boot of the car and there was a huge locked pull-out tray that contained loads more goodies: baton guns, flash bangs (Stun grenades), shotguns with varying types of cartridges, CS rounds and a bunch of other cool non-firearm stuff. Under this tray we carried additional equipment like first-aid kits, a defibrillator, a stinger (a bed of nails for puncturing car tyres) and so on. This ARV was basically a mobile armoury, and therefore it was heavy! The Volvo seemed the perfect choice, and I could not believe that car’s performance ability; it was rapid, but ever so reliable. I can’t remember a single moment when that car let us down – and we put her through her paces, we did not hold back! As we patrolled with two ARVs at a time there was always a race to grab the Volvo ahead of the Mercedes, as all the TFU team knew the Volvo had the edge. Strangely, of the standard road-going cars the Mercedes would be superior, but I guess the Volvo just carried the extra weight better. It was a reliable Swede. The TFU had a host of other unmarked cars, and I spent many hours concealed in the back of a green unmarked Mercedes Sprinter van, in particular. It’s amazing how dark the humour is when there are half a dozen armed coppers trapped in the back of a van. Now if that van could talk …!

The TFU also had an armoured Land Rover 90. I was told it was an ex RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) vehicle from Northern Ireland, and it certainly looked the part. Constructed with fully riveted flat steel panels and thick bulletproof glass, it weighed tons. It was also the slowest car I think I have ever driven, taking minutes to get up to 40mph, and it barely went round a corner. I drove it several times but only ever used it operationally once. It was in December one year when we received a report of a man at the Christmas-tree-sales place brandishing a gun. We entered the farm in the Land Rover using the loud-hailer to give the chap instructions. Turned out the gun was a toy.

In 2005 I left the police to follow my true passion of building and restoring cars. My television career kicked off with the Channel 4 car show For the Love of Cars, which ironically was hosted by a TV police legend Philip Glenister, who is well known for playing Detective Inspector Gene Hunt in Ashes to Ashes and Life on Mars. In For the Love of Cars I restored an ex-Scottish Police Rover SD1 known as ‘The Beast’, which went on to sell at auction for a new auction world record for a SD1. Working on that car brought back many police memories, and in the show we retraced the infamous ‘Liver Run’ in the car as a tribute to the original SD1’s dash through London with an organ that was urgently required for a patient mid-surgery.

This book was written in order to share not only my passion for the Great British police car but as a nod back to those proud and amazing years I spent serving the British public.

This is a Hertfordshire Vauxhall Astra Mk3 just like the one I started my policing career driving, only mine didn’t have a bonnet box. It wasn’t fast, but it was a faithful servant and I loved it at the time.

CHAPTER ONE
CREATING THE BLUE LINE: THE BIRTH OF THE BRITISH POLICE FORCE

In modern times we take the police for granted, don’t we? Politicians wrangle about bobbies on the beat, budgets or efficiency savings (which even in my time in the force was a euphemism for cuts!), and if a serious crime happens we’re used to seeing the police going about their business on the news. We all know we should pull over for a police car rushing to an emergency on ‘blues and twos’, and we take this sight for granted, because it is now expected that in a civilised democracy we will have a police service that will enforce the rule of law on the criminal few for the good of the law-abiding many.

However, it wasn’t always like this, and although this book will concentrate on the service cars, some background to the police is both instructive and interesting, especially when you learn how the police first dealt with the early motorists on the roads! The story starts long before the famed ‘Peelers’; although they are often seen as the origin of the British police, in fact local areas had, from the earliest days of society, utilised some form of law either by force or consent. The Roman conquest of Britain, which began in 43 AD and lasted until around 420 AD, brought with it a monetary system and a form of organised policing. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms also had a police service of sorts, based on the regional system known as a hundred or (and I love this word) ‘wapentake’. The first Lord High Constable of England was established during the reign of King Stephen, between 1135 and 1154, and those who filled this position became the king’s representatives in all matters dealing with military affairs of the realm.

The Statute of Winchester in 1285, which summed up and made permanent the basic obligations of government for the preservation of peace and the procedures by which to do this, really marks the beginning of the concept of nationwide policing in the UK. Two constables were appointed in every hundred, with the responsibility for suppressing riots, preventing violent crimes and apprehending offenders. They had the power to appoint ‘Watches’, often of up to a dozen men, or arm a militia to enable them to do this. The Statute Victatis London was passed in the same year to separately deal with the policing of the City of London, and, amazingly, today the City of London Police, dealing only with the ‘square mile’, remain a separate entity to the larger Metropolitan Police. The current City Police Headquarters is built on part of the site of a Roman fortress that probably housed some of the London’s first ‘police’, and these ‘square mile’ officers can be distinguished out on the streets by the red in their uniform and by their red cars.

By the end of the thirteenth century the title ‘Constable’ had acquired two distinct characteristics: to be the executive agent of the parish and a Crown-recognised officer charged with keeping the king’s peace. This system reached its height under the Tudors, then the oath of the Office of Constable was formerly published in 1630, although it had been enacted for many years previous to that. Sadly, this arrangement disintegrated somewhat during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and nationally nothing replaced it fully until the Victorian era. However, all police officers still hold the Office of Constable, and when I was appointed as a Constable, in 1999, I too had to take a similar oath in a rather splendid passing-out parade.

London led the way in the development of policing because by 1700 one in ten of England’s population lived in the metropolis, and the population of the area would rise to over a million before the century was out. Sir Thomas de Veil, a silk merchant-turned-soldier-turned-political lobbyist, became a Justice of the Peace in 1729 and worked out of his office in Scotland Yard. He conducted criminal hearings, moving to Bow Street in 1740, and as the first magistrate to set up court there effectively created the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. His ideas for curtailing crime were ambitious, and, following his death in 1746, the novelist Henry Fielding was appointed Principal Justice for the City of Westminster in 1748 together with his brother, Sir John Fielding. They appointed a group of ‘thief takers’ as they were initially called, who were paid a retainer to apprehend criminals on the orders of the magistrates. These men soon became known as the Bow Street Runners; by 1791 they had adopted a uniform, and by 1830 over 300 officers were based in Bow Street, some using horses in the battle against crime.

A similar process happened in Scotland, where the first body in Britain to actually be called a police force was set up by Glasgow magistrates in 1779. It was led by Inspector James Buchanan and consisted of eight officers, but by 1781 it had failed, through lack of finance. However, the force was revived in 1788 and each of its members was kitted out with uniforms with numbered ‘police’ badges on, in return for lodging £50 with magistrates to guarantee their good conduct. The force of eight provided 24-hour patrols (supplementing the police watchmen, who were on static points throughout the night) to prevent crime and detect offenders. Their list of duties, which would fit comfortably into the basic duties of policing today, included:

• Keeping record of all criminal information.

• Detecting crime and searching for stolen goods.

• Supervising public houses, especially those frequented by criminals.

• Apprehending vagabonds and disorderly persons.

• Suppressing riots and squabbles.

• Controlling carts and carriages.

Thus Glasgow had established the concept of preventative policing, and it’s hard not to wonder just how much knowledge of this Robert Peel had or how much inspiration he perhaps took from Glasgow’s pioneering force when he brought this idea into Parliament forty years later. On 30 June 1800, the Glasgow Police Act 1800 received Royal Assent, and John Stenhouse, a city merchant, was appointed Master of Police in September 1800. He immediately set about organising and recruiting a force, appointing three sergeants and six police officers and dividing them into sections of one sergeant and two police officers to each section – to some extent copying military practice while also pioneering a line of command that is not unfamiliar today.

However, in order to understand the history of policing in England we must also look at the most efficient freight vehicles of the eighteenth century – boats. The modern police service has its roots in a river security force that was set up by Patrick Colquhoun in 1798. He persuaded fellow merchants to pay into the scheme, which was designed to combat the epidemic of cargo thefts in the Pool of London (a stretch of the Thames), and which, in 1799 remember, amounted to over half a million pounds. The area was so congested it was said to be possible (most of the time) to walk across the Thames simply by stepping from ship to ship. The government absorbed this service in 1800 and renamed it the Thames River Police.

When reformist Robert Peel (whose Christian name is the reason why police are still commonly referred to as bobbies) became Home Secretary in 1822, his initial attempts to create a national police force failed. However, he succeeded in putting through the Metropolitan Police Act in 1829, creating a force with just over a thousand officers. Peel was determined to establish professional policing in the rest of England and Wales, and the Special Constables Act of 1831 allowed Justices of the Peace (JPs) to conscript men as special constables to deal with riots, and this was built on by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, which established regular police forces under the control of new democratic boroughs, 178 in all. It was not a great success and was often ignored; however, the later County and Borough Police Act 1856 built on the idea, committed proper financing and decreed that a rural police force was to be created in all counties; it was one of these, the county force of Hertfordshire, that I joined.

At this point in history there was still a way to go to achieve the police force that we have today, but the beginnings of our modern policing system could be seen in the counties and in Glasgow. By the 1860s a nationwide force of separate bodies acting to one set of rules and connected by transport links (horse-drawn initially, but increasingly using the railway system, which was expanding rapidly by 1850) existed. The car would eventually be invented in 1885, but police forces all over the world simply weren’t ready to manage this new and politically divisive mode of transport. Britain was no exception.

The Office of Constable: the basis of UK policing

On appointment, each police officer makes a declaration to ‘faithfully discharge the duties of the Office of Constable’, and all officers in England and Wales hold the Office of Constable, regardless of rank. They derive their powers from this and are servants of the Crown, not employees. The oath of allegiance that officers swear to the Crown is important as it means they are independent and cannot legally be instructed by anyone to arrest someone; they must make that decision themselves. The additional legal powers of arrest and control of the public that are given to them come from the sworn oath and warrant, which is as follows:

‘I do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve the Queen in the office of constable, with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all people; and that I will, to the best of my power, cause the peace to be kept and preserved and prevent all offences against people and property; and that while I continue to hold the said office I will to the best of my skill and knowledge discharge all the duties there of faithfully according to law.’

This is the oath that I myself took.

CHAPTER TWO
THESE DEVILISH MACHINES SCARE THE HORSES, YOU KNOW

On Monday 20 January 1896, Mr Walter Arnold, who worked for his family’s agricultural machine-engineering concern in East Peckham, Kent, was driving along the Maidstone Road through the neighbouring village of Paddock Wood at an estimated 8mph, 4mph or so below the maximum speed of the ‘Arnold Motor Carriage Sociable’ (a Benz copy produced under licence) that he was driving. Local constable J.C. Heard, of the Kent County Constabulary, saw this outrageous behaviour from the front garden of his cottage and set off in hot pursuit on a single-speed bicycle. In that one moment the relationship between the UK police and the motorist was, partially at least, set.

The speed limit in the area was a mere 2mph, so Arnold was thus exceeding it fourfold – although how Constable Heard measured this accurately enough to definitely state this is, of course, unknown. Arnold was chased (on the bicycle) and eventually caught by the presumably quite fit local bobbie after a five-mile pursuit! It is recorded, with some understatement I suspect, that Constable Heard had to pedal at his hardest for quite some time (at 8mph that’s just under 40 minutes’ pedalling time) before catching the unfortunate Mr Arnold. Arnold was charged with four offences; three pertaining to the Locomotives Act and one offence of speeding. The case went to trial, and although Arnold’s barrister, a Mr Cripps, argued that the law shouldn’t apply to the new lightweight ‘autocars’ and that Arnold had a carriage licence (a system designed for horse-drawn carriages), Arnold was found guilty on all counts and ordered to pay a total fine of £4 6 shillings, of which only a 1 shilling fine and 9 shilling costs was for the speeding offence. When you take into account that his car sold for £130, this fine seems quite paltry, but remember that cars back then were a luxury, and the average weekly wage was less than £1 for a 56-hour working week.

Arnold was not only the first motorist fined for speeding in the UK, but it is believed that he was the first person in the world to claim this dubious honour. The car as a concept was young, and, much like laws surrounding the internet in the early twenty-first century, the legislators took some time to draft new laws that applied to these vehicles. Some eminent politicians of the time even felt it wasn’t worth the bother, as they deemed that these horseless carriages were bound to be just a phase, the attitude being that they would be short-lived as they frightened the horses for goodness sake!

Arnold probably wasn’t too unhappy with the publicity that his case generated, because he was in fact one of the country’s first car manufacturers and dealers. His career began by selling new, imported Benz cars from Germany, then between 1896 and 1899 he manufactured a licensed copy of the Benz called the Arnold Motor Carriage. At this point demand for these newfangled machines was high and Arnold is quoted as saying in a newspaper report towards the end of 1896 that, ‘if we had twenty in stock they could be disposed of in a week’. No documents exist hinting in any way that he deliberately drove through Kent intending to get caught, but you have to wonder, don’t you? If he did do it deliberately he was a marketing genius and well ahead of his time. He apparently sped past the Constable’s house, and as a local himself he would surely have known where the local bobbie lived. If he did get caught deliberately, he exhibited an understanding of the media and the gentle art of car marketing at least fifty years ahead of his time – secretly, I kind of hope he knew exactly what he was doing, and thus Arnold placed down a permanent marker for all car sales people to follow. Take a bow, my man.

Arnold kept a scrapbook of press cuttings about his cars and their exploits that still belongs to the owner of the very car that he was driving when he was apprehended, so it’s a real possibility that this was a deliberate act. Having said that, that scrapbook also shows that he and other family members committed similar offences at least twice more, so perhaps they just considered this the price paid for the freedom to ‘motor’ at will. This was certainly the prevailing wisdom among motoring pioneers of the time, and the pages of the first editions of The Autocar (which began circulation in 1895) are full of motorists testing the judicial system in one way or another, using their new machines. Newspapers also picked up on this, carrying drawings of ‘future townscapes’ showing horseless carriages and stating that science had made this possible but the law was preventing it happening.

Arnold Motor Carriage Sociable, Chassis Number 1, MT20

Engine: 1200cc single cylinder with open crank case and separate water jacket.

Power: 1.5bhp@650rpm.

Range: 60–70 miles on one tank of ‘Benzoline’ oil, as early petrol was called. This cost 2s 6d per gallon in 1896.

Ignition: Electric, with enough current stored in two 2-volt accumulators to run the car for approximately 600 miles. The concept of a charging system was not initially included.

Max speed: Approximately 12mph, able to average 10mph comfortably.

Transmission: Fiat belt with movable bearings to take up slack.

Production: 12 examples made between 1896 and 1898, plus a small number of related vans.

After being development-tested in Ireland in order to avoid further persecutions by the local constabulary, Arnold Number 1 was sold to engineer H. J. Dowsing and became the first car ever fitted with an electric starter motor, called a Dynomotor. Amazingly, this was originally designed as an electric ‘help motor’ to give the car greater power when needed for hills. Yes, the concept of the petrol-electric hybrid so trumpeted by the Toyota Prius in recent years was in fact invented in 1897 by Dowsing, although its development was not pursued at that time.

Remarkably, this original car has still only had five owners from new: the Arnold Company, Dowsing, a Captain Edward de W. S. Colver, RN (Rtd), who partially restored the car after buying it from Dowsing in 1931 and whose family sold the car to the Arnold family at auction in 1970. In the mid-1990s it was sold to Tim Scott, who retains ownership today and uses it regularly on the London to Brighton run and other events.

With pollution from cars a regular topic in the TV news, and even a consideration in political campaigning, it seems counter-intuitive to say that the car was bound to catch on because it was so much cleaner than the alternative, but that’s exactly what happened. The alternative, which had existed for many years, consisted of wading through a horse-manure-based, and extremely pungent, soup. Period dramas on TV skim over this, but it was definitely a factor in the growth of motor-car use, and compared to getting horse manure all over your skirt or trousers, car exhausts must have seemed amazingly clean and green!

However, UK legislation initially made the technical and physical progress of mechanised transportation difficult, whether powered by gasoline (the word petrol did not enter use until it was patented by Messrs Carless, Capel and Leonard of Hackney Wick in 1896), steam, electricity or even coal dust. In 1865 the Locomotive Act (Red Flag Act) had introduced a speed limit of 2mph in towns and villages and 4mph elsewhere. It stipulated that self-propelled vehicles should be accompanied by a crew of three: the driver, a stoker, and a man with a red flag walking 60 yards ahead of each vehicle. The man with a red flag or lantern (when dark) enforced a walking pace, and warned horse riders and horse-drawn traffic of the approach of a self-propelled machine. After centuries of animal training and use, both the politicians and general population trusted a well-trained horse far more than these newfangled steam-driven road locomotives!

Parliament thus effectively framed legislation that trusted the established system, horse-drawn wagons, and prevented the scaring of horses, which were then the backbone of commerce. The country’s legislators put more trust in the behaviour of horses than in the safety of human-designed and built machinery … This seems amusing to modern sensibilities, but perhaps they were right to create these laws, for these early machines weighed an enormous amount, had little in the way of brakes and made all sorts of scary clanking and hissing noises which could spook even the best-trained horse. However, the development of smaller petrol and electric carriages made this law outdated by 1890, and it was this law that was most often tested by pioneer motorists who claimed they could use an Autocar on a standard (horse-drawn) carriage licence rather than the much more restrictive Locomotive Licence. Arnold also claimed this and was convicted of this offence as well as speeding. This Arnold chap is my type of guy. I like to think we would have been friends.

Although the use of motor cars was growing in the 1890s, the horse was king and would effectively remain so (at least in volume terms) until after World War I, which was, like so many conflicts, the catalyst that drove change technically, economically and socially.

The world’s first petrol-powered proper road trip …

Britain’s legislation did not help our nascent car industry to grow, but it also didn’t stop the rest of the world coming to a collective consensus about the fuel of the future. Karl Benz produced the first gasoline-engined car in 1885, and in August 1888, without his knowledge, his wife Bertha made the first ever car journey of significant length using an improved version of his design, to prove its worth to the less-than-confident Benz as well as the world.

Bertha and their two sons, Eugen (15) and Richard (14), travelled from Mannheim to Pforzheim, her place of birth, and although Bertha apparently used a hatpin to unblock a fuel line, she demonstrated the practicality of the gasoline motor vehicle to the entire world – and perhaps should have to put to bed any criticism of women drivers at the same time … Without her daring – and that of her sons – this book might have been about steam-powered police cars!

Left: Portrait of Bertha Benz. Right: Bertha Benz and her sons buy petrol during their long-distance journey in 1888.

Some UK pioneer motorists deliberately challenged the Red Flag Act, believing their new lightweight steam-, electric- or gasoline-powered vehicles should be classed as ‘horseless carriages’ and therefore be exempt from the need for a preceding pedestrian and could be operated using a carriage licence. A case was brought against motoring pioneer John Henry Knight in 1895; he lost and was convicted of using a locomotive without a licence and fined 2 shillings and 6d. However, he had neither a carriage nor a locomotive licence, so the law had two ways to turn, which meant that he was guilty of using a locomotive without a licence whichever decision was made!

Early editions of The Autocar (a weekly magazine, the first edition of which was published on 2 November 1895 and whose cover proclaimed: ‘A journal published in the interest of the mechanically propelled road carriage’) were full of lengthy reports of court proceedings being taken against motoring pioneers for a variety of reasons. Legislators caught up with the reality of mechanical development before the law created any real precedents, and the Red Flag Act was repealed on Saturday 14 November 1896, when the speed limit was raised to 14mph; a fact that was celebrated on the day by an Emancipation Day Run (in which our speeding friend Arnold took part in the very same car in which he had been done for speeding) and which today’s London to Brighton Veteran Car Run (often incorrectly called a race) celebrates.

Sadly, the first recorded automotive road fatality in the UK was also in 1896, when Bridget Driscoll, 44, was killed in the grounds of the Crystal Palace on 17 August. She was walking with her 16-year-old daughter, May, and a friend when she was run over by a Roger-Benz car being driven by Arthur Edsall. At the inquest, Florence Ashmore, a domestic servant, gave evidence that the car went at a ‘tremendous pace’, like a fire engine – ‘as fast as a good horse could gallop’.

The driver, working for the Anglo-French Motor Co., who were part of an automotive exhibition taking place at the Crystal Palace, said that he was doing 4mph when he killed Mrs Driscoll and that he had rung his bell and shouted ‘Stand Back!’ as he approached. However, it was suggested that Mrs Driscoll seemed bewildered in front of the car. She may not have interacted this closely with a motor vehicle before. Who knows? There were then fewer than twenty in the whole of the UK and the public were certainly not educated in how to cross roads safely. Edsall had been driving for only three weeks at the time, and as no licence was required, the fact that he apparently had not been told which side of the road he needed to travel on was overlooked … The case went to court, but with conflicting evidence about the speed and manner of Mr Edsall’s driving, the jury returned an accidental death verdict. Interestingly, there was no outrage in the newspapers at the time, just a sense that it was an unfortunate accident. It would be some years before the press became powerful enough to express outrage in the way that we take for granted today. It’s also worth noting that, although people had been killed by horses or carriages for many years, high-profile autocar accidents did start to bring up some public discussion of these dangerous new machines, which were loved by those who had them and often feared by those unfamiliar with them. For that reason accidents were reported perhaps a trifle more vociferously than they would have been if someone had simply fallen off a horse and broken their neck. It was, after all, the start of the unknown.

Perhaps ironically, the first death in an autocar accident was during an incident with an International Co. electric vehicle on 12 February 1898, when Mr Henry Lindfield of Brighton tried to stop his vehicle in order that his passenger, his 19-year-old son Bernard, could retrieve his bag, which had fallen off as they descended the hill off Purley Corner, in Croydon. When the brakes were applied the vehicle began to weave, before eventually hitting a post and then a tree, sandwiching poor Henry between the carriage and the tree. Son Bernard was thrown over his father and survived with relatively minor injuries, but, sadly, his father died in hospital the following day. Just over a year later the first fatal accident involving the driver of a petrol motor vehicle was recorded; 31-year-old engineer Edwin Sewell’s 6HP Daimler Wagonette crashed into a wall after a rear wheel collapsed following a rim breakage when the brakes were applied too harshly while descending a steep hill at speed. He died almost instantaneously. At the time he was demonstrating the vehicle to three passengers who were assessing it for possible purchase by their company, the Army and Navy Stores, then a well-known department store. The front-seat passenger, 63-year-old Major James Stanley Richer, was thrown clear of the vehicle with Sewell and suffered such serious injuries that he died three days later in hospital. The other two passengers were injured but survived.

The roadside plaque (unveiled on 25 February 1969) records the site of Britain’s first fatal road accident, on 25 February 1899 on Grove Hill in Harrow.

As a result, the UK police started to take cars seriously, and the weight of public pressure – and in some cases outrage – meant that they had to. As far as research can prove, it was the Met that led the way, acquiring a Léon Bollée Voiturette in 1896, or possibly early 1897. The arrival of the Bollée, as it was usually called, is important because it represented the moment when the British police moved from enforcing legislation on motorists to becoming motorists themselves. Quite what those early Met police pioneer drivers would think of today’s high-speed chases on the M25 we shall never know, but to modern eyes the pioneering car does seem almost laughably poor in both performance and engineering terms. At that time the template for what makes an acceptable usable car, as opposed to an experiment down a dead-end avenue of design, was yet to be set, and the Mercedes-badged Daimler that made every other autocar old-fashioned overnight, and so set the car on its course to dominate transportation in developed nations by the early 1920s, would not appear until 1901.

1896 Léon Bollée Voiturette

The birth of the Léon-Bollée Voiturette light autocar goes back to the 1870s, when Amédée Bollée, son of a foundry owner specialising in bells, started making steam vehicles in Le Mans, France, way before the town became part of motor-racing folklore after Renault’s victory in the 1906 French Grand Prix there.

Although Amédée Bollée was a steam enthusiast, he could see the potential in gasoline-engined cars and helped both his sons, Amédée Junior and Léon, design and build them. Léon’s design was immediately successful, although I suspect anyone who ever crashed into anything while sitting on that front-mounted chair may have disagreed! The vehicle was considered fast in its day; even in their early days the police bought the fastest car they could afford, kicking off the arms race between the good and the bad guys earlier than most of us had realised!

Bollée’s design for a very short-wheelbased, 3-seater motor-tricycle, the Voiturette, weighed only 264lbs, used a tubular frame and featured a single back wheel, making it far more stable than having the single wheel at the front. The engine was an air-cooled, horizontal, single-cylinder unit of 650cc that was hung beside the back wheel on the near-side and used a large, heavy flywheel. It featured suction-opened inlet valves and mechanical exhaust valves with plain bronze bearings, hand-lubricated by grease for the main bearings and a splash-lubricated big-end. A tubular con-rod kept the weight down, while hot-tube ignition and a single-jet carburettor were so close to the float chamber that fires were common. The 3-speed transmission was by three virtually unlubricated gears on the end of the crank, which could be meshed with the three layshaft gears. The drive was by flat belt, a mechanism that was commonly used then to drive lathes and other machines in workshops. There was no actual clutch; the mechanical movement of the back wheel tightened or loosened the driving belt so that drive was achieved or neutral was obtained. Full-forward movement of the back wheel applied the belt rim to a stationary brake block. In some ways it was an elegantly simple solution; one fore and aft movement of the rear wheel achieved one of three outcomes. However, the Bollée was apparently quite tricky to actually drive, partly because it featured a small steering wheel on the driver’s right with a handle familiar to traction-engine drivers, which actuated an early rack-and-pinion steering system. Meanwhile, the left hand had to ease the gear stick gingerly back and forth to engage the drive or free it. Turning the spade grip at the top of this lever engaged a gear, and, in order to stop, the lever had to be hastily pulled backwards. I can’t imagine many of my former police colleagues (or myself, for that matter) taking it easily, but perhaps sheer fear would have engendered that on this device …

The Voiturette was powerful for its size and weight, and its low build made it stable, but the short wheelbase made spinning on slippery cobbled roads quite common, and comfort was not a priority because they had no suspension, relying on pneumatic tyres and a C-sprung seat to provide a modicum of relief. However, driven by what we must assume were men made of granite, they dominated their class in early motor races, famously occupying the top four places in the 1896 Paris-Mantes-Paris race, and winning their class in the 1897 Paris-Dieppe race with a time that was 0.6mph faster than the best four-wheeled car. Legendary English racing driver and Le Mans winner S.C.H. Sammy Davis bought an example in 1929 to use in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run (a Léon Bollée Voiturette was apparently the first car across the line on the original Emancipation Run in 1896) and was pleased to achieve a maximum speed of 19mph when testing it at Brooklands! This would have been impressive in 1896; the first Land Speed Record was recorded in 1898 at 39mph. Amazing to think now how far we have come.

After being developed in the family’s Le Mans workshop, the car was produced in Paris, at 163 Avenue Victor Hugo, and at Le Harve by Diligent et Cie. It’s believed that around 750 units were made; Michelin ordered 200 and the Hon Charles Rolls (we all know who he was) was a customer in 1897. By 1899 new four-wheeled Bollées were being produced, some with much larger 4.6-litre engines, but the marque was bought by UK maker Morris in 1924, who produced the Morris-Léon Bollée until 1931. It finally faded away for good in 1933.

What’s in a name?

Léon Bollée’s tricycle may have been short-lived, but the word he appears to have invented to name it, Voiturette, lived on and became the generally accepted term for a small lightweight car. It comes from the French word for automobile, voiture, and became so ubiquitous that it was used to name a specific Voiturette racing class for lightweight cars with engines of 1.5 litres or smaller. The supercharged Alfa Romeo 158/159 Alfetta that so dominated F1 on its inception was, in fact, originally designed as a Voiturette class racer.

CHAPTER THREE
ADAPT AND ARREST

Or, ignore and watch them flee …

The police force had started policing roads prior to the advancement of the car, and complaints had been made about congestion in cities, especially London, in the first half of the nineteenth century, almost 100 years before cars caught on. Horses had a will of their own and were not always as well trained as they should have been … Indeed, the Great Exhibition of 1851 had taken traffic congestion at Hyde Park Corner as a theme, with various solutions being hypothesised. The passing of the Metropolitan Public Carriage Act 1869 vested many responsibilities into the hands of the police with regard to both Hackney and Public Carriages. By 1895, horseless carriages were appearing and major cities were getting motorised omnibuses or trams.

However, it’s easy to forget that in the 1890s it was by no means clear what cars were going to be. They were obviously going to be something, and that something was going to be important, but what that was, no one was quite sure. Some saw them as a miracle cure for congestion (they took up less space than a horse-drawn wagon) and some saw them as evil machines likely to kill everyone who came into contact with them. Most people, of course, held opinions that were between these two extremes. Petrol eventually came to the fore as the way forward for powering cars, but prior to that, steam, electric (which it now seems was 120 years or so ahead of its time, because battery technology and electronic control have only recently made this viable and it is now very obviously the future) and even coal dust and various other strange ideas were explored.

However, by 1901 the Maybach/Daimler-designed Mercedes had built upon the 1891 ‘Système Panhard’ (a mechanical layout which set the front-engine transmission then rear-wheel-drive layout on most cars until the 1960s) and basically set the template for the twentieth-century car: a petrol engine, a gearbox, and brakes on a separate pedal. Everything else that appeared – from disc brakes to fuel injection and rain-sensing wipers – is a refinement of that original concept.

So the government had to act, and in 1903 came the Motor Car Act, which was the first parliamentary legislation pertaining specifically to the internal combustion engine. The original intention appears to have been to abolish speed restrictions on open roads, but ultimately that did not happen and a blanket 20mph limit was imposed instead, which lasted, officially at least, until 1 January 1931. The fact that it displaced legislation known as the Locomotives on Highways Act tells us much about the rapid rate of technological change and the British government’s typically measured approach to this. Only in the last ten years have the basic principles laid down by this been seriously challenged by technology, and as self-driving cars become a reality the legislators will have an ever-greater role in managing traffic and perhaps they will even control traffic flow through a central computer system.

In the same year, 1903, a Royal Commission on London’s traffic was set up, and after three years of investigation, having heard evidence from all interested parties, it made the following recommendations to the Home Secretary:

• Improved regulations for traffic.

• Street improvements.

• The regulation of street works.

• The regulation of costermongers.

• The removal of obstructions to traffic.

It also recommended that an advisory Traffic Board be set up for the Greater London area. In making this recommendation, the committee stated that it was of the opinion that the creation of such a board would enable traffic matters to be considered as a whole, and not in the parochial manner of existing local authorities. Apart from the phrase ‘costermongers’, whose meaning I confess I had to double-check (it’s a street trader, and I for one think we should try to bring it back into regular use! It’s so much more elegant than ‘street-trader’ or ‘pop-up shop’), that set of recommendations could have been written last week … It was a serious business, though, as London had reported around 10,000 traffic accidents a year alone in the preceding few years, and some other large cities had little better statistics.

However, as cars became more numerous on the roads, so motorists devised ways of warning each other of speed traps, which, in the early 1900s before World War I, were numerous. As early as 1901 the importers of Panhard et Levassor cars operated an official service for their customers to notify them of the location of speed traps. That’s the equivalent, in today’s terms, of Ferrari sending text messages to owners saying, ‘Go on, we’ve checked the M54 is clear today, go and max out your 458, you know you want to!’ The Automobile Association (The AA) also warned of speed traps, having advised its members to stop if a patrolman failed to salute – the driver would then be given information about ‘road conditions’ ahead, which usually meant police speed traps in which officers used a stopwatch to calculate whether or not a car was going too fast over a measured distance. Oh, how times have changed … Amazingly, the AA continued this practice until 1961.

The police remained faithful to using foot patrols and horses during much of this period, especially in poorer and rural regions, and in some areas even bicycles were discouraged; for instance, Lancashire did not supply bicycles to their officers until 1908, although since 1903 they had paid a ‘cycle allowance’ to those constables wishing to use their own bike. Some forces’ hierarchy regarded the ever-faster rise of the motor car as a bad thing for society as a whole; humans have not changed much in the last 200 years, save getting a touch bigger on average, but I think we have got better at adapting to change, haven’t we? There is proof, too, that the police were often negative towards car owners simply because they had a car, and that may have as much to do with Britain’s long-standing class war as it does with the car. This is to some extent proved by the Inland Revenue, who, until at least 1906 (and maybe beyond), levied a tax of 15 shillings a year on ‘Automobilists who employ Male Servants as a motor-car driver’ … I assume female chauffeurs were tax-free?

Even after the advent of the 1903 Motor Vehicle Act, driving was still very much seen as a recreational activity, and, as this 1904 advert makes clear, the dress required to go any distance tended to confirm this.

As cars became the norm and horses the exception, this changed. However, that unenforceable 1903 law had pitched the police into conflict with the motorist, and the pages of The Autocar, The Motor and other publications throughout the early twentieth century are filled with tales of pioneer motorists battling what they considered to be overzealous police. As speed cameras and average speed zones proliferate today, you could argue that that’s never changed, but the British police like to police by consent and the media has now educated large sections of the public to the dangers of speeding, so it’s no longer socially acceptable to boast of speeds attained on the road in the way that it was up until the 1980s.

The first occasion on which a motor car was used by the police to apprehend a criminal was, as far as we know, on 15 August 1900, the very beginning of the twentieth century, at Moor Edge, Newcastle upon Tyne. A rider of a horse, who was drunk and causing havoc, was chased for a mile and arrested by a constable who had commandeered a Gladiator Voiturette from its owner, one F.R. Goodwin, who, perhaps unsurprisingly in this era when cars were few and far between, later achieved some fame as a racing driver. There are many subsequent incidents of private cars being commandeered by the police, so that fantasy of Clint Eastwood getting in your car and shouting ‘follow that car’ (or horse) may well have been more likely in 1904! Oh, and for the record I have, of course, commandeered a number of cars belonging to members of the public, and yes, of course I said the very same words. The Moor Edge incident demonstrates initiative and a grasp of then-current technology on the part of the arresting constable; both elements that were in shorter supply among the higher echelons of the police at this point. Much was made of this in the press and it certainly helped further the cause of the motor car over the horse in the general population’s mind, so it was a significant moment for the motoring ‘movement’ as a whole.

Gladiator Voiturette

Ironically, the Clement Gladiator 3.5hp Voiturette could not have been a more unlikely motorised hero, and it was far from the fire-breathing performance machine that its name suggested. It featured a 402cc single-cylinder engine and had a top speed of about 20mph, which it could obviously sustain far longer than a drunk man on a horse …

Bicycle magnate Adolphe Clément first made a fortune producing pneumatic tyres, then later whole bikes, cars, motorcycles, airships and even aeroplanes! He saw the potential of the motor industry early on and invested in or promoted several marques. His Clement Gladiator was basically a Benz copy made by one of these firms, Cycles et Automobiles Gladiator of Le Pre Saint-Gervais, France, which was imported then by Goliath Co. of Long Acre, London. It’s thought they probably made a small number in the UK as well, although sources disagree on that.

Rather wonderfully, the first cars officially recorded as having been purchased by the police are two 1903 Wolseley 10hp wagonettes (remember this is RAC hp tax, not BHP), touring cars which were purchased for use by the Met’s Commissioner of Police and the Receiver (a strange title to modern ears, which makes you wonder if the police have been placed in receivership, but it is actually the title of the officer responsible for the financing of the force). They were numbered A209 and A210; these number plates were still being used until very recently – A210 was on the Home Secretary’s car in the 1970s, but I’ve not been able to find out where it is now. I’d not realised that the police loyalty to the Wolseley marque stretched back to what were really the first proper police cars in the UK. It gives me a rather warm glow to think of this.

1903 Wolseley, and why the police used this marque for so long

The last Wolseley-badged car, an ADO 71 ‘Wedge Princess’, was produced in 1975, but even today, mainly because of the proliferation of period crime dramas from Miss Marple to Buster, the Wolseley brand is indelibly associated with police cars. There is actually a reason of sorts, but you’d never guess it in a million years because it is to do with, wait for it, submarines …

In 1900 the ailing car side of the Wolseley machine tool business, which had grown from sheep-shearing machines, had been for sale for some months and had not found a buyer. The board had decided that making cars was too complex and, after some exploits that had not been entirely profitable, decided to concentrate on what they knew. That company still exists, successfully, today. The car side of the company was offered with their chief designer, one Herbert Austin, who would of course go on to found a motor company of his own. After almost 12 months of being touted around, and just when the directors were losing faith that it could be sold, the company was purchased by Vickers, even then a much larger concern with interests in defence engineering. The Wolseley car-making operation was moved to an existing Vickers factory, at Adderley Park, in Birmingham, in 1901, and new models were planned.

Vickers was then working on Britain’s top-secret new weapon, the Holland-class submarine, which was the first submarine built for the Royal Navy. This project was meant to be conducted in great secrecy initially, although unfortunately an Edinburgh newspaper leaked the details and left the Admiralty no alternative but to admit to its production. However, although they had been considering diversifying into car production for some time, in hindsight it’s fairly clear that Vickers’ main motivation for the purchase of Wolseley was to set up a discreet operation to work on developing and then building engines for the submarine engineering project; which they did. Doing this in a car factory in Birmingham, many miles away from the boat’s development centre in Barrow-in-Furness or Vickers’ facility in Sheffield, was also of some value when it came to keeping the details secret. Of course, this meant that Wolseley was effectively the car arm of major government defence contractor, Vickers, so what was more natural than ordering government cars from Wolseley? They were actually genuinely very good cars, with a reputation for reliability forged in long-distance trials and a customer list of the great and the good, including royalty both at home and abroad, plus celebrities of the time such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and politicians such as Cecil Rhodes. Wolseley continued to supply a variety of the War Office’s needs (the name of this department was changed to the Ministry of Defence in 1964), including re-engineering the SE5 fighter aircraft’s troublesome Hispano Suiza HS-8 liquid-cooled V-8 engine into the much more reliable higher-compression Wolseley Viper used in the SE5a.

Between 1902 and 1906 Wolseley supplied 27 vehicles to the War Office, including large heavy tractors and six 10hp cars, which were fitted with ‘special tonneau’ bodies for the Royal Engineers. The 10hp wagonette cars ordered by the Met featured a 2-cylinder horizontal engine (not opposed) of 2606cc, lying transversely across the car and allowing the driving of the rear axle by means of chains through a transmission of three gears, although later examples were of a 4-gear design. The engine only revved to 750rpm, which, proclaimed Austin, ensured a longer life than that of its rivals that revved faster. The cost was approximately £370, although that depends on specification since customers could, for instance, choose pneumatic or solid tyres. The first car delivered to the Met was number 284, a 10hp wagonette (meaning the seats in the rear were running along the length of the car rather than facing forward), delivered in May 1903, and the second, number 479, another 10hp wagonette, was delivered in June 1903.

A further car, number 480, yet another 10hp wagonette, was apparently also delivered in June 1903, but there is some doubt over whether this actually was supplied to the Metropolitan Police or to another government agency.

A 1903 Wolseley 10hp wagonette taken from a Wolseley company advert.

Herbert Austin left Wolseley to start his eponymous company in 1904, but the company carried on producing well-engineered cars and became one of the pioneers of mass-production OHC engines, with a design that was in some ways similar to that used in the submarine and aero engines … Unfortunately, Wolseley over-extended themselves in the early 1920s and went spectacularly bankrupt in late 1926. William Morris then bought the company, privately, and integrated it into his car business, which already contained Morris and MG and would, 12 years later, also include Riley. The distinctive illuminated radiator badge, or ‘Ghost Light’ as it was often called, was introduced in late 1932. The formation of BMC in 1952 was effectively a takeover of the Morris (or Nuffield) Group by Austin of Longbridge. Sadly, Herbert Austin had died in 1941 so he never saw his own firm merge with the one where he had built his initial reputation. However, that link and the police’s loyalty to the Wolseley brand, forged in the early days of motoring, continued, especially in the Met, until the Wolseley 6/110s went out of service in the early 1970s.

If you wish to learn more about Wolseley’s fascinating history, I heartily recommend Anders Clausager’s excellent book, Wolseley, A Very British Car, and the importance of his research in uncovering the story above must be noted.

The last Wolseleys used as liveried police cars were 18/85 S Mk2 models used by the City of London Police in 1970, which were based on the BMC ‘Lancrab’. A very small number of the ‘Wedge Princess’ Wolseleys were used as government transport and security cars in London but, as far as we know, not as liveried police cars.

By 1906 the Met Police had six Siddeley vans, which were of a curious technical make-up to modern eyes and reflect the diversity of car design in this experimental era, being fitted with single-cylinder vertically mounted, 6hp 1173cc engines. To show that the car industry has not changed all that much, they were advertised as being ‘Essentially British’ despite the larger models being basically copied from Peugeots! The smaller ones used by the Met were actually re-badged Wolseleys because the Siddeley and Wolseley companies were intertwined at this time, which is no doubt why they were purchased.

At least two were used as despatch vans for carrying correspondence from the Commissioner’s Office at Scotland Yard to the various divisions, and in 1907 they were joined by two larger, 10hp, Adams-Hewitt vans. The Adams-Hewitts were made in Bedford but designed in New York by the Hewitt Motor Co. and, to modern eyes, had quite the most ridiculous advertising slogan: ‘Pedals to Push – That’s All’, because they used a 2-speed epicyclic gearbox. One is tempted to ask whether they steered themselves … By 1912 the Met had added a small number of De Dion-Bouton vans as well.

What’s interesting at this point is that although other forces were following the Met’s lead and buying vehicles, they were basically for use to move messages, equipment or, in some cases, men; they were not at this point actually being used for (what I would call proper) police work, which was still done by constables on foot patrols. Instead, they took the role of support vehicles, vans to move things, or cars to transport the higher echelons of the service between different police divisions. Chief Constables tended to be the first to get a proper car rather than a van (and perhaps hindsight could argue that they were the ones who least needed them …), and these were usually reasonably prestigious large cars, nearly always British machines, and often built locally to the regional force that used them. That was not always the case, though; the Chief Constable of Bedfordshire used a Scottish-built Arrol-Johnston, which was, like most of these cars, chauffeur-driven by a constable. Essex Police Chief Constable, Captain Showers, ordered a Belsize 10/12hp car in 1909 and Kent constabulary was quick to adopt this car too, as they had, at this time, the highest percentage of motorists in the UK, probably because Kent was among the richest areas in the country. It should also be remembered that most police officers could not drive, and paying to teach them was an expense that the police tried to avoid, at least initially.

That slow adaptation of mechanised transport and move away from the horse would probably have continued were it not for World War I. In 1914 the army was basically a horse-drawn service with around 120,000 men and fewer than 100 mechanised vehicles in total, including motorcycles. By the end of the war, in 1918, 6.7 million people had joined the British armed forces, and its quantity and variety of vehicles was huge. World War I really was the engine of invention and it’s true to say that it was a major contributor to the advancement of the internal combustion engine; aviation in particular drove advances in engine design and ignition. At the start of the conflict most planes were lucky to make 50mph, but by the end both sides had fighters capable of nearly 150mph. In four years that is astonishing progress, by any measure.

The war also taught a huge number of people, well, mainly men but some women, to drive, so when the government, in debt and battling other issues such as the post-war flu pandemic, decided to sell off the military’s massive vehicle roster there was no shortage of qualified (or otherwise) drivers. Suddenly war-surplus trucks were cheap and most tradesmen could afford to buy one and pension off their horse because the truck was substantially cheaper to run, more reliable and much faster. This was also seen as a move to clean up a society that had been literally awash with horse manure for many years, but in historical terms it was almost an overnight change – from the war ending in a still largely horse-drawn Britain to massive auctions of war surplus vehicles, such as Mac Bulldogs, being sold cheap to anyone who wanted one, in less than a year. This presented three very separate new issues for the police: vehicle theft became a problem, and in addition criminals could use this sudden availability of vehicles to get to and from crime scenes, and the roads suddenly became congested and needed policing – a wholly different problem that put the police into potential conflict with ordinary and normally law-abiding citizens. Policing motorists for speeding or parking wrongly was and remains a totally different problem than catching criminals.

The motor car had come of age, the public were falling in love with their cars, motor-racing heroes such as Sir Henry ‘Tim’ Birkin and Malcolm Campbell were celebrated for their achievements in the new cinema newsreels, and Brooklands was the place to be and to be seen. The post-war world was going to be a wholly different place and Britain’s police service simply had no option but to become a properly mechanised service in order to keep up.

The police ambulances

As the police service became organised and matured through the nineteenth century it may surprise you to learn that a major part of their work was operating an ambulance service and sometimes even a fire service for the local area. This was usually with a hand ambulance – a cart that an officer pulled – while richer boroughs, or areas with a bigger distance to cover, had a horse-drawn ambulance. This continued into the early part of the twentieth century, when both tasks were gradually devolved to separate services in various ways. The government formally devolved the responsibility for ambulances to local authorities in 1930 and, of course, the creation of the NHS in 1948 launched a whole new service. For reasons of space I have focused on ‘policing’ duties and vehicles in this book, as the fantastic work done by ambulance and fire crews deserves a whole separate volume. On a personal note, I worked alongside both services during my time in the police force and I have huge admiration for their professionalism, competency and, it must be said, humour; they do a fantastically difficult job brilliantly well.

CHAPTER FOUR
POST-WAR PEACE; LONDON SETS THE WAY

The Met police reorganised their management of traffic just after World War I started and placed it under one commissioner’s auspices, which, in hindsight, can be seen as the beginnings of the first traffic department. At this time congestion from the mixture of horse-drawn and motor traffic was far worse in London than anywhere else in the UK, even during the war: a conflict which was initially seen as a short-term inconvenience likely to end by Christmas.

However, this scenario lasted five years and the practical experience gained by policing the city’s traffic during the war years had shown the value of having a separate department to deal with these matters in London. The Commissioner, too, saw the wisdom of this and, in writing to the Home Secretary at the end of the war, stated that he proposed to make the temporary wartime arrangement a permanent one. He went on to state that, ‘with the object of securing still further continuity and uniformity, it was desirable that a department should be formed to deal with traffic and to devote its resources to the study of the various and intricate problems that were constantly arising. This would act as an intelligence department by noting all points arising in other Public Departments, or in the press, and also the effect of the statistics prepared by the Executive Department and the Public Carriage Office.’ The Commissioner also said that he ‘envisaged that the new department would also provide a member for the Committee for the examination of Parliamentary Bills and, when required, for the Cab Drivers and the (splendidly named!) Noise Committee (no, this is not a Monty Python sketch). It would also deal with all correspondence on the subject of traffic, including by-laws and licensing. In addition, it would also generally collect and collate all matters appertaining to every phase of the traffic question.’

The Commissioner’s ideas on the need for a new department were accepted by the Home Secretary, and on 24 May 1919 the department officially came into being, having responsibility for all traffic matters, whether vehicular, aerial or pedestrian. The Commissioner, Sir Nevil Macready, in his annual report for the year, said of its formation that:

‘Owing to the increasing complexity of matters concerning traffic, it has been necessary to form a separate department to deal with this matter. The traffic advisers are in close touch with the Ministry of Transport and are thereby enabled to issue and co-ordinate suggestions. There is no doubt that the congestion of the traffic in the Metropolis is, to a great extent, due to existing thoroughfares being out of date and unadapted, either to the volume or the nature of the present traffic conditions. Another factor is the length of time taken to repair streets and roads, no attempt being made to work at night, with the result that traffic becomes hopelessly congested in main thoroughfares for a period which could probably be very considerably curtailed if more up to date ideas prevailed.’

And it appears that almost a century later nothing much has changed!

Traffic policing was born and the new department was to be responsible to the Assistant Commissioner ‘B’, Mr Frank Elliott, and came under the immediate control of Mr Suffield Mylius, a civil staff member, and Superintendent Arthur Bassom, who was in charge of the Public Carriage Office, both men carrying the new title of ‘Traffic Advisor’.

Arthur Ernest Bassom OBE KPM (14 June 1865–17 January 1926), Director of Traffic Services

Bassom was, in many ways, the father of UK motorised traffic control; he thought far ahead of most of his contemporaries and was famed for his incredible memory and encyclopaedic knowledge of all aspects of the motorisation of society. Police Commissioner Sir Nevil Macready admitted publicly at the time that Bassom was the one man in the Metropolitan Police who was indispensable! When he reached the retirement age of 60 (for officers below the rank of Chief Officer), in 1925, he was promoted to Chief Constable and given the title of Director of Traffic Services in order to retain him. He died the following year, still in harness. He was also awarded the Road Transport (Passenger) Gold Medal by the Institute of Transport, just two months before he died. As a mark of respect, it was decided not to fill his position after his death and his duties were absorbed by Assistant Commissioner ‘B’, Frank Elliott.

Bassom joined the Royal Marine Artillery as a gunner at 17 and passed his gunnery examinations with flying colours, which meant he was therefore almost certain of promotion. However, in 1886, just before his twenty-first birthday (the minimum age at which he could be promoted), he joined the Metropolitan Police as a constable. He was posted to ‘D’ Division (Marylebone), and the following year was transferred to the Public Carriage Office at Scotland Yard, where he spent the rest of his career. In 1901 he was appointed Chief Inspector and given charge of the branch just at the time when it was being forced to regulate motor vehicles.

He had a detailed knowledge of motor mechanics and engineering, having qualified in the subject at Regent Street Polytechnic, and kept pace with developments in this area. He produced the Police Regulations for the Construction and Licensing of Hackney (Motor) Carriages, 1906 (The Conditions of Fitness for Motor Hackney Carriages). This included the requirement for a 25-ft turning circle, something that immediately influenced the design of London cabs, and still does, and has had echoes worldwide as well. In 1906 he was promoted to Superintendent on merit. He visited nearly every town in the United Kingdom and many in Europe to observe their traffic problems and learn from their errors, without being too proud to learn from their successes. He framed ‘The Knowledge’, the test undertaken by all London taxi drivers, and devised the Bassom Scheme of London bus route numbers.

He was awarded the King’s Police Medal (KPM) in 1919 and appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1920 civilian war honours list.

I’d like to have met Arthur Bassom. His obituary in the Commercial Motor contained this paragraph, which rather amused me:

‘As a matter of fact, however, he was in nearly every instance able to give better advice than he received. One of his attributes was imperturbability, and he always had the courage of his convictions. He will be sadly missed by the Commissioner of Police, the Assistant Commissioner, Mr Frank Elliott, with whom he came into daily personal contact, and his associates at the Yard.’

You could argue that he was one of the most important men in British history; his theories and actions certainly affected everyone’s life, hugely, and still do today, although very few have heard of him.

Amazingly, as the war commenced, the Met’s records show they still only had two cars – the 1903 10hp Wolseley wagonettes – so at least we can be sure the taxpayer received value from these vehicles, which did at least 11 years’ service! However, the police did have a number of commercial vehicles and forces around the country that subscribed to this principle, with commercials being used to carry messages and equipment and one or two senior officers having cars, although the records of different forces are harder to pin down and some have even been lost. This is why the Met is discussed so much when talking about this early period, and also the Met’s policing of the nation’s capital tended to create policy that other forces followed in this era to a greater or lesser extent. It’s interesting to note that in 1919 the Met actually started to keep a record of its vehicle fleet as a separate entity, acknowledging, at least clerically, that this was going to be a significant part of policing in the 1920s. Following the established principle, the first car purchased in 1919 was a Vauxhall Tourer for the use of senior officers. This model had been a popular military staff car during the war and had an established record of reliable service. It’s worth noting that Vauxhall, in this period, some six years before GM bought them, were known as makers of high-quality, superbly engineered sporting and large luxury cars. GM sent the company in a different, more volume-led, direction.

By the time the traffic department was created in late 1919 they inherited a fleet of 35 vehicles together with workshop facilities for their servicing and repair, which consisted of:

• 1 Vauxhall Cabriolet, for the Commissioner.

• 1 Vauxhall Tourer, for Assistant Commissioner ‘A’.

• 1 Austin 15hp Landaulet, for Assistant Commissioner ‘B’.

• 1 Austin 15hp Landaulet, for the Receiver.

• 1 Siddeley 14hp Tourer, for Superintendent B.3.

• 4 two-seater Humbers, for District Chief Constables.

• 11 two-seater Fords, for Superintendents on outer divisions only.

• 5 Ford vans and 4 Warwick tricars as despatch vans.

• 2 Austins and 1 Arrol-Johnston as ambulances.

• 1 Austin 15hp Landaulet, 1 Renault 11·٣hp and 1 Crossley 20hp Open Tourer, to be used as needed.

On 21 February 1920, The Autocar reported that ‘the London Police are to be provided with motor cars for controlling traffic, the object being to speed up traffic generally and the confining of slow-moving vehicles to the kerb’, where one has to wonder if in London’s narrow streets they would get in the way and create bottlenecks … That statement, though, is important because it’s the first example I’ve seen of the essential dichotomy of traffic policing in the UK. The police have a dual role, to keep traffic flowing and to ensure the safety of all, whether they be pedestrians or motorists. That statement, which was printed in the magazine but obviously comes from a government announcement, shows that commerce and the free movement of the population were still, at this point, being thought of as the pre-eminent problems, and that accidents were just a sad but inevitable consequence. The opposite is, correctly, very much the case today.

The car that the Met adopted for this role was the Bean 11.9hp, which had won out after extensive tests of over 10,000 miles, and chosen because it was the most suitable and affordable. The Met ordered at least four of these cars, probably the largest single order for police cars made in the UK at that time. The force remained loyal to Bean throughout the early 1920s and had at least three other larger examples, plus two or three vans. This was absolutely the beginning of mass motor-car use by the police, and statistically this matches the wider population’s adoption of the car. In 1919 there were 109,705 private cars in the UK, and by 1924 this was 482,356. By 1930 it was 1,075,081 and by 1939 it had just been pushed to over two million. However, the war surplus commercials that were being sold off by the government at least doubled the early 1920s’ figure, although reliable statistics are harder to find on that.

Bean 11.9hp: the UK’s first Traffic car

The Bean 11.9hp was an adaptation of an Edwardian pre-war car (it seems even then that the police purchasers were conservative of mind and favoured tried-and-tested technology) called the Perry, which had been designed by Tom Conroy from Willys-Overland and launched in 1914. It’s believed that around 300 were made before World War I broke out, which curtailed production at Perry’s small facility in Birmingham. The design was purchased by Bean Cars from Dudley, just outside Birmingham, in 1919, apparently for around £15,000, which was quite a sum in 1919. They got a separate chassis of unusual strength for the period, in which was mounted an inline 4-cylinder side-valve engine of 1796cc, mated to a 3-speed gearbox. It cost around £400, nearly twice the price of a Ford Model T. However, Ford were not considered British, despite building 46,362 Model Ts at their plant at Trafford Park, Manchester, in 1920 alone.

The Bean cars’ story is a fascinating tale of ‘what might have been’, and it should have succeeded. The tale begins in 1822, when the splendidly named Absolom Harper founded the iron foundry A. Harper & Sons, Dudley. George Bean married Absolom’s granddaughter in ١٩٠١, became the company’s principal shareholder and expanded the company. They entered the car market in 1919 with a new factory built on what was then a large-scale production model by a company with a reputation for being good engineers. They had, correctly, identified that the motor industry was a good way to make money and was about to boom, so they recruited a sales manager from Austin, Mr B.G. Banks. They planned 2,000 cars for 1919 (which was a lot then for a British manufacturer starting out), 10,000 by 1921, and expansion thereafter, and they had good financial and technical backing and a link with large sales group BMTC. The Harper Bean group was capitalised at an enormous, for the era, £6 million and equipped its former munitions shops in Tipton for assembly and its former shell building shop at Dudley for bodywork. They had moving track assembly lines and in July 1920 produced 505 cars. However, financial chaos ensued and the car soon became outdated in comparison to Morris’s offerings, although Bean did produce new and larger models. They were rescued from bankruptcy in 1926 by Hadfields of Sheffield and eventually ceased making cars in 1929, their dream of being Britain’s biggest car maker shattered by Morris, Austin and Ford of America, although the firm lived on as a component supplier. Bean did build one last car in 1936, the enormous ‘Thunderbolt’, which was powered by two Rolls-Royce V12, 36.5-litre engines, each delivering 2,350bhp, and weighing 7 tons. Captain George Eyston used it to break the land speed record three times; his final record of 357.5mph was set in September 1938.

Like most of the Midland’s motor industry, Bean eventually became part of British Leyland and began to cast engine blocks, axle cases, etc. In 1988 Beans Engineering became freshly privatised and bought Reliant … which went bust in 1995, taking Beans with them. The Tipton factory was purchased by the German engineering group Eisenwerk Brühl, who invested heavily and at their height made 40,000 tons of cylinder blocks yearly. However, the business suffered from financial problems because the German group had not managed to recoup the investment and left the company in debt. For a second time, the management team purchased the business, which then became Ferrotech. By then one of the most modern and efficient foundries in Europe, the new business became a large supplier of castings to MG Rover, but when they went into administration in 2005, Ferrotech failed to find replacement work and the factory closed its doors for the last time in August 2005. Thus ended the story of heavy industry on this site.

The police both in and out of London benefited from those ex-war office commercials, too. In 1919, the Metropolitan Police was split up into four detective areas and each division was allocated two ex-Royal Flying Corps Crossley Tenders, a design that would now be called a pick-up. These are again significant because they were the first vehicles allocated to do real detection and arrest work, rather than just being used to transport people or equipment between different police facilities, although in my head Crossley Tender will always be the ‘Lesney Model of Yesteryear’ that I was fascinated by as a kid and is a model vehicle that I still own now.

Crossley Tender – the first proper police cars were pick-up trucks!

Crossley of Manchester are actually one of the oldest names in the British motor industry and were the first company to make a four-stroke internal combustion engine in the UK. Amazingly, they were making units under licence from Otto and Langen of Deutz in the early 1860s, some years before the ‘car’ was invented.

Crossley came to car manufacture in a slightly circuitous way. Having become well known for the quality of their engines and other engineering products, early pioneer car dealers Charles Jarrott and William Letts asked them to make a high-quality British car to address a perceived gap in the market. Ironically, the first Crossley, which was announced in 1904, actually used mainly Belgian and French components which Crossley assembled. It was well received, however, and the firm expanded their car-making while Jarrott publicised the marque by making a record-breaking drive from London to Monte Carlo in 37.5 hours, a record that was broken by C.S. Rolls only a month later using one of his own 20hp Rolls-Royce Tourist Trophy models. Wonderfully, Jarrott complained that Rolls had done this by breaking speed limits that he had obeyed!

The legendary 20hp series was launched in 1908 and remained in production until 1925, albeit gradually modified, rather in the way that Porsche evolved the design of the air-cooled 911, becoming the 20/25 in 1912 and the 25/30 in early 1919. Designed by A.W. Reeves, it was launched as a fully equipped short-chassis touring car for £495 (in an era when coachbuilding was still common on larger cars especially) and featured a side-valve 4-cylinder engine of 4531cc and a 4-speed gearbox.

The War Office purchased a batch of six 20hp Tourers and were impressed enough to think about ordering more with differing body styles. By the time World War I broke out, the nascent RFC had around 60 (figures vary slightly), and by the time the war finished, 6000! Any childhood fans of Biggles’ Great War adventures will recognise this. In all, well over 10,000 Crossleys of all types were used by the military in World War I as staff cars, ambulances, RFC Tenders and vans. Most of these were sold off cheaply when hostilities ceased and, having contributed greatly to the war effort, then contributed to the commercial motorisation of Britain as traders abandoned horses for ex-War Office Crossleys of one sort or another. This of course meant that the examples used by the Met blended in, in a similar way to how a Ford Transit would today. So successful and highly regarded was the basic design that Crossley bought back a few, especially staff cars, and refurbished them to 25/30 specification. They continued this operation until 1925, alongside production of new examples which finished in the same year.

Unfortunately, Crossley never built a car that captured either the government’s or the public’s imagination in the same way again and eventually ceased making cars altogether in 1937. They continued to make trucks, though, and were acquired by the Associated Commercial Vehicles Group, better known as AEC, in 1948, who acquired Maudslay at the same time. The Crossley name faded away in 1956 and eventually became part of the British Leyland melting pot. It was a sad end for the marque that had been the backbone of the British military’s move to motorisation during World War I and subsequently provided the UK’s earliest police patrol and response vehicles. Rest in peace, Crossley.

The Crossley also played its part in the formation of the Flying Squad, formed in October 1919 after a post-war crime surge; it became known as ‘Sweeney Todd’ in rhyming slang quite quickly, then just Sweeney, and initially consisted of just 12 officers. Manchester City Police followed London’s lead in forming what was originally called a ‘Mobile Patrol Experiment’ and patrols were made using a horse-drawn carriage that had been borrowed from a railway company. However, it was soon re-organised and issued with Crossley Tenders, the first vehicles used in Britain for actual police work rather than just moving things and people between police facilities. The Crossleys were heavy and fairly simple beasts that were apparently quite easy to skid in wet weather, but they did provide a good basis for patient underworld observational work and were used successfully in this role. They were much loved by the officers who used them because they were reliable and capable workhorses. Most were fitted with van-type backs, or, at the very least, a canvas tilt. They were actually liveried at times with false trade names to appear as delivery vehicles or furniture removal vans to aid their undercover work, the first time this was ever done in the UK and probably even around the world. These disguises were easy to believe because, as discussed, war-surplus vehicles were very common in the early 1920s, although apparently it was quite some while before most criminals cottoned on to the fact that the police also owned some of these vehicles. However, by the mid-1920s these vehicles had become outmoded and had begun to be replaced.

By May 1926, just as the TUC called a General Strike that plunged the country and the government into conflict with the unions, the Met’s fleet consisted of 202 cars:

• 6 Austin saloons, used by the Commissioner and his assistants.

• 2 Austin ambulances.

• 6 Bean saloons, used by HQ personnel.

• 5 Bean saloons, used by CID.

• 4 Bean saloons, used by District Chief Constables.

• 12 Bean saloons, used by Superintendents in outer areas of the Met’s jurisdiction.

• 4 Bean saloons, used as spares by whoever needed them.

• 18 Bean vans, used on inner and outer dispatch services.

• 4 Bean vans, used for accumulator service.

• 6 Bean vans, used as spares by whoever needed them.

• 17 Tilling Stevens, used as prison vans.

• 1 Dennis, used as a prison van.

• 52 Crossley Tenders for many and varied uses from Flying Squad to radio testing and everything in between

• 41 Triumph Solos and Combinations, used by sub-divisional and Detective Inspectors for patrolling.

• 24 Chater-Lea Combinations, used by sub-divisional Inspectors and Inspectors for patrolling.

And that is the last list of cars you will see in this book – you’re welcome!

The General Strike is important in the history of the police car because it marked the very beginnings of police officers being moved around to deal with troubles, something I became all too familiar with in my time as a police (and especially PSU/Riot) officer. This particular role depended on motorised transport to get officers to scenes quickly, and the lack of this sort of capability within various UK police forces was soon exposed nationally to both the government and media. From this time on, policing fleets got bigger and bigger across the UK. At the early stages of researching this book we did look at trying to come up with a definitive list of cars that the police have used, but we gave up quite quickly, simply because it encompasses pretty much everything, with local forces sourcing cars individually and in some cases buying used as well as new, especially immediately after World War II. No records exist for many forces, and in the early days local philanthropic lords of the manor would sometimes even loan cars to the police as a gesture of public spirit, which meant that police officers were sometimes seen in the most unlikely of vehicles, from station wagons to Rolls-Royces. I can’t imagine a member of the public today lending their car to the police to borrow. I wouldn’t!

Car registration

The Roads Act 1920 had established the Road Fund licence and introduced tax discs to windscreens. This scheme was run by local councils, which meant it was fairly easy to register a car with a number plate that was also being used elsewhere because there was no central list of vehicles at this stage. The criminal fraternity exploited this regularly (as I discussed on the Channel 4 show The Lost Lotus, following my restoration of a mysterious Lotus Elite); a UK-wide system of checks was not properly introduced until the DVLA started to computerise information in the mid-seventies. This legislation, and consequent government revenue, was needed though, because by 1930 vehicle numbers had risen to a million (when the UK population was around 45 million, around 20 million less than it is as I write this book in 2018), but drivers were not educated in how to handle their cars in terms of etiquette, skill or plain common sense. Road deaths and casualties were rising alarmingly, and while the prevailing attitude was a feeling that ‘one took that risk if one drove’, the government felt they had to do something. Cars in this period were improving rapidly as well, getting cheaper and faster every year, with better handling and brakes. I’ve driven vintage cars (can I just say, vintage actually has an official meaning in the car world, referring to cars from post-1918 and up to 1930. Everything seems to be described as vintage these days, from Mk1 Escorts to 60s plastic handbags. Gosh, I sound like my dad!) and while they may seem, to modern eyes, very heavy to drive and possessing very poor brakes, they are much more usable than their pre-Great War cousins. It’s quite possible to cruise at motorway speeds in the larger-engined vintage cars (remember vintage also encompasses Austin 7s and similar economy cars, but somehow the term ‘vintage car’ produces a picture of a Bentley in the mind’s eye, or is that just me?) and they have 4-wheel brakes which, if properly adjusted and maintained, can actually stop a car reasonably well.

This increase in the performance of cars (and, perhaps perversely, the improved brakes as well, for humans will often go faster in a car that has good brakes! Indeed, legendary designer Alec Issigonis has been cited as saying ‘putting a dagger on the steering column would lead to a great improvement in driving standards’ and he was only half joking) led to the 20mph speed limit being so widely ignored as to be laughable, and the Road Traffic Act 1930 effectively removed speed limits, which caused much public debate. However, in short this was done because the speed limits then were just not enforceable and had become a joke. In fact, it was stated in Parliament in 1931 that, ‘the reason why the speed limit was abolished was not that anybody thought the abolition would tend to the greater security of foot passengers, but that the existing speed limit was so universally disobeyed that its maintenance brought the law into contempt’. So many people were breaking the speed limit that the police could not cope and the government dealt with this not by increasing the police’s budget or improving the equipment at their disposal, but by getting rid of the law! The police had realised the situation was untenable and had by then been lobbying politicians to deal with this unenforceable law, and, certainly in the post World War I era, enforcing it with a light touch – code for often not enforcing it at all because they simply did not have the manpower to do so, although officers seeing driving they considered reckless or dangerous certainly did intervene, at their discretion …

What the government did was bring in the Road Traffic Act 1930, the first paragraph of which read:

‘An Act to make provision for the regulation of traffic on roads and of motor vehicles and otherwise with respect to roads and vehicles thereon, to make provision for the protection of third parties against risks arising out of the use of motor vehicles and in connection with such protection to amend the Assurance Companies Act, 1909, to amend the law with respect to the powers of local authorities to provide public service vehicles, and for other purposes connected with the matters aforesaid.’

[1 August 1930.]

The Act required all police forces to institute motor patrols to improve driving behaviour by example, advice and ultimately legal sanctions and prosecution. There was a budget for this which was initially quite small, and because of this motorcycle combinations were often the chosen vehicle for such patrols. However, accidents proved this to be an unwise choice and they were quickly phased out of mass use in favour of cars. Some three-wheelers, especially the BSA, which, like the Morgan had two wheelers, at the front and was thus reasonably stable, were quite popular in various police forces for a short while after they were launched in 1929, until four-wheel cars came down to their price point and higher speeds made officers ‘nervous’. These patrols naturally became engaged in other activities – preventing crime and dealing with emergency situations – and the line of the responsibilities became blurred. Judged on immediate results, the Act has to be looked at as a failure, for Britain’s worst ever year for road casualties was 1934 when there were 7,343 deaths and 231,603 injuries recorded. However, in hindsight it was actually a very far-sighted and prescient piece of legislation that built on Britain’s reputation for policing by consent and sought to educate the public into safer behaviour and only punished them if they really refused to come into line. I think it’s important here to underline just how different the prevailing attitude to risk was in this era compared to what is, today, sometimes disparagingly called our health and safety nonsense. These modern regulations are a good thing, despite the press they sometimes get, because they actually make us think about risks and encourage us to take steps to minimise them – that can be anything from making sure your car has good brakes and tyres to putting your seatbelt on. In the 1930s these sensible steps evoked a society-wide mocking and were largely seen as not making any difference; but hey, smoking was good for you then as well …

Health and safety in racing

Oddly, motorsport has a very important role in changing this attitude and creating society-wide acceptance of the concept of risk management that gained social traction during the 1970s. Even in the 1960s, when Jackie Stewart started seriously to question why racetracks had trees on the side that would kill you if you skidded off and hit one, he was greeted by derisory calls of ‘coward’ from drivers and racing journalists alike, who, having recently fought in a war, even said things like ‘this is safe, at least no one is shooting at us’. Jackie had thought it through, though; he was getting paid for his skill and courage, not to take what he quite rightly considered to be stupid pointless risks. After all, the racing and skill needed were the same whether the circuit had safe (ish) barriers or very dangerous trees. Jackie blew every other driver away on a wet Nürburgring and won three World Championships, so no one could credibly call him a coward, but it took a long time for that seemingly utterly sensible piece of thinking to become the societal norm. Jackie undoubtedly has a place in the history books for his racing achievements as one of the greats; however, it’s his innovative thinking, which has became so mainstream as to seem obvious now but was revolutionary in the 1960s, and his tireless work on safety that are by far his biggest contributions to both motor sport and the world as a whole. His work had a massive impact on us all in one way or another. However, it’s arguable that the government’s determination to save us from ourselves when it came to motoring started with the Road Traffic Act 1930, and you could, thus, call it the very glimmer of health and safety culture.

First ever driving tests

Like so many other motoring firsts, the first ever driving test was taken in France, under the Paris Police Ordinance of 14 August 1893. It was introduced on a voluntary basis in Britain on 13 March 1935 but did not become official in Great Britain until 1 April 1935, and was not compulsory until 1 June 1935. The first driving test pass certificate in the UK was awarded on 16 March 1935 to the rather ironically named Mr R.E.L. Beere of Kensington.

As the Road Traffic Act came into effect, the UK police were becoming a motorised force and one major development was in its fledgling stages, which would totally change policing and the way in which the police used vehicles. The technology was called … radio.

Radio was first used by the British police in 1923. Again, the Crossleys enter our story here because the very first radio experiments were conducted using these cars with hilariously large bedstead-type aerials fitted. Nottingham and Lancashire Police were also at the forefront of this, only a year after the Met.

The introduction of police boxes had shown that communication was key to keeping pace with faster society, so it was logical that the next move should be radio. However, in the 1920s talking radio was not yet available; instead, police vehicles used Morse code radio telegraph. There were plenty of (mainly) men around in this era who understood this because it had been taught in the military, so that was the basis of the system fitted to cars. Its reflection of the change in health and safety culture is very evident. Today you are, quite rightly, not allowed to drive even an automatic car with a small mobile phone. These police drivers were expected to drive a car with a crash gearbox while tapping out a Morse code message, listening and translating while wearing a headset. The job of radio operator soon became the norm as the equipment was moved to the back seat.

World War I and the telegraph

World War I was the engine of much technological change, including wireless telegraphy, which used Morse code, and later what was then called radio telephony, which transmitted a voice. Both were refined and made more secure during the conflict, while radio communication took great leaps forward. Telegraphy was famously used by two-seater planes doing artillery observation (known as art-obs) above the trenches, where they tracked troop movements in order to improve the aim of their side’s own gunners if they were firing beyond the line of sight, by giving signals to the aimers to shoot slightly to one side, further or less far. This was a fluid operation, as wind conditions changed almost minute by minute, so having instant updates was important. The early planes in question had a long aerial hanging underneath them which was wound in and out on a drum so they did not drag it along when flying to and from the observation area. The industrial production of radio valves made telephony a practical proposition, however, and in 1916 the Royal Flying Corps started developing this, which meant that planes could tell ground stations where shells were landing by voice rather than coded message. In this embryonic stage this was a one-way signal; those manning the ground station would raise a flag to show they could hear. By 1918, the British had mastered plane-to-plane radio communication, which would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. After the war, this first generation of radio operators became the roots of the amateur radio movement, something that would lead to broadcast radio.

The first major police operation that was assisted by using radio telegraphy was the 1923 Epsom Derby, where the force used aircraft as well as the Crossleys for traffic control, not crime prevention. The Met arranged for the use of a radio-equipped Vickers (Type 61) Vulcan fixed-wing passenger aircraft to cover the Derby traffic. This bi-plane was unwieldy and under-powered; its single 360hp Rolls-Royce Eagle engine gave it a maximum speed of about 105mph, but it had restricted banking capabilities and very restrictive small windows so it was unsuitable for observation duties, especially over the confines of the Epsom Racecourse. It was, wonderfully, nicknamed the ‘Flying Pig’. The blue and silver Vulcan the police used, G-EBBL, was operated by Instone Airline Ltd and it carried the name ‘City of Antwerp’. The head of the Met’s Traffic Department, that man Arthur Bassom, was taken aloft along with two police wireless operators and their equipment by Donald Robins, the Instone pilot. The police team were in constant touch with Percy Laurie, who was in charge of the control room at Epsom, from where dispatch riders took instructions to traffic officers at the affected road junctions.

From these beginnings the radio technology developed quickly, and although we are not covering it in detail here, make no mistake, the organisation of police force cars into the categories of use discussed in the following chapters only happened because the police relied ever more on the improving radio technology.

CHAPTER FIVE
SEND THE AREA CAR

Operator: | ‘Police emergency, how can I help?’
Caller: | ‘A bloke’s going berserk with a knife down at the Rose and Crown.’
Operator: | ‘OK, we’ll get a unit to you straight away.’
Operator: | ‘Foxtrot five-one.’
Crew: | ‘Foxtrot five-one go ahead.’
Operator: | ‘Make the Rose and Crown pub in the High Street, male going berserk with a knife.’
Crew: | ‘Foxtrot five-one making.’

A typical ‘send the area car’ call. All over the country, every hour of every day, divisional area cars and their crews will be dispatched to attend local emergency calls just like that one. This was something I was all too familiar with during my time in the police force. The area car is the emergency response unit for each shift, the backbone of the force – the real front-line cops.

The divisional area car, or response car as some forces call them these days, will generally be a mid-range saloon or estate with a fair degree of performance. The aim is to get a double-crewed unit to the scene of any local emergency as quickly as possible. It’s worth noting at this point that your area-car officers are usually hand picked because they have a lot of front-line experience, are trusted to make life or death decisions, to take control of certain situations and have driving skills that are way above the average, having completed a four-week intensive driving course. Current-day models undertaking this role include the BMW 320d, Skoda Octavia vRS, Ford Mondeo 2.0d and the Vauxhall Insignia.

A Vauxhall Insignia area car deals with an RTA in Birmingham in 2016.

Unlike the panda car, whose introduction was down to one man and has a confirmed starting date, the origins of the area car are slightly more difficult to define. Nottingham Police may have been the first to have wireless cars in 1932. They used two-way wireless telegraphy (Morse), which was fully operational in vans, combos and single-manned cars. The method of operation was bizarre and would have gained them a £200 fixed penalty notice and six points on their licence today, whilst the health and safety people dived for cover to fill out their next claim form! Using his left hand, the driver would operate a Morse key on a large box where the passenger seat would normally have been fitted. He listened via an earpiece attached to his hat, whilst continuing to drive using his right hand! The Chief Constable of Nottingham in his 1940s book Mechanised Police Patrol refers to Radio Motor Patrols in an area scheme and in specimen exercises speaks of No.1 Area Patrol, No. 2 Area Patrol, etc., so it is likely that the term was eventually shortened to just Area.

The other early form of system came from the Metropolitan Police, who, in 1934, introduced the ‘Area Wireless Car Scheme’, whereby the Metropolitan Police District was divided into 75 wireless areas, each patrolled 24 hours a day by a radio-equipped car, manned by two uniformed officers in direct radio contact with the Information Room at Scotland Yard. Their mandate was to deal with all matters and incidents that required immediate police attention. The Met’s very first area wireless cars were Ford 14.9hp saloons, followed by Hillmans, Wolseleys and Humbers.

In 1937, Wolseley produced a special ‘police tourer’ version of the 14/56 chassis. It was not offered to civilian customers.

One of the earliest forms of area cars belonged to the Southampton Borough Police, who in 1956 devised a new concept in mobile policing that is still used today. Called Team Policing, it involved the use of Series 1 Hillman Minx estate cars, one being placed at each of the six sub-divisions within the Southampton Borough, and they were responsible for attending emergencies that fell outside of the remit of the Traffic Division. The cars were painted dark grey with a light grey roof and the only police markings consisted of a telltale roof-mounted radio aerial. To get through the traffic, crews would put the headlights on, and that would be enough in those days to ensure that the public would obligingly move out of their way! The team car experiment was a huge success; in later years the word ‘team’ was dropped and the term area car was adopted.

Unlike the panda car and indeed the Traffic Division cars, which were vehicles of a very specific type, the area car could be almost anything, depending on the force it belonged to and how it utilised the role. For example, in the 1960s the Cardiff City Police were using the Austin Cambridge A60 as an area car, whilst the Met Police used the much more powerful S-Type Jaguars, and by the late 1970s Kent County Police were sending their crews out in Morris Marina estates whilst the Met again gave their boys Rover 2.6 SD1s. We will concentrate on the most common cars, with perhaps an occasional oddity thrown in for good measure.

One of the big hitters in the 1960s was Austin and its Farina-bodied Cambridge. With its B-series 1622cc engine and 80mph top speed, it was used by a fair number of police forces as an area car. Although the Cambridge was an Austin design built and conceived at Longbridge, these cars were effectively the same model in five versions, because the Morris Oxford SeVI, Wolseley 16/60, MG Magnette MkIV and Riley 4/72 were basically the same cars with different lights, grilles, interior trim, or, in the case of the MG and Riley, more powerful 72bhp Twin Carburettor engine. The Austin was the cheapest of the range, which is one of the reasons why it was the most used by the police. BMC churned out around a million of these cars, in all badges, and they were used successfully. However, they were based on a floorplan and mechanical package, including all-round drum brakes, that went back to 1954 and by the mid-1960s were starting to be slow and under-geared for police work, which increasingly required more high-speed work, especially on the new urban dual carriageways that were starting to be built in this period.

The Austins did not catch on quite as much as had seemed likely, as the area car role was fulfilled by more modern designs such as the Mk2 Cortina. Why BMC never raided the corporate parts bin and updated this fundamentally sound if unexciting range by fitting the MGB’s 1800cc version of the same B-series and its matching overdrive gearbox is one of many missed opportunities in the complex world of BMC/BL history. Many members of the Cambridge-Oxford Owners Club, which is a thriving group of enthusiasts restoring these cars, have fitted MGB engines and gearboxes, which says it all really! (There was in fact a quasi-official attempt at this.)

It would be 15 years or so before another Austin product got the green light as a prospective candidate for area car use, with the Maestro and Montego both finding favour in several forces including the Met, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cumbria, Hertfordshire, Dorset and the West Midlands forces. They had adequate performance and a reasonable amount of room but suffered in the reliability department, like so many other British vehicles at this time. That said, let us not forget that the area car has an incredibly hard life; it’s on the road 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and gets caned by a variety of different officers during its relatively short but high-mileage police career. I certainly would not want to own an area car that my team and I had used …!

Hertford area car, Austin Montego 1.6.

Morris only ever produced one car that was used as an area car, but that didn’t stop it gaining legendary status; sadly, though, this was for all the wrong reasons. The Marina was virtually force-fed to the police by a government desperate to keep its ailing and by now state-owned car industry from total collapse, and by the mid-1970s several forces had been ‘persuaded’ to take them on, including Essex, Hertfordshire, South Wales, Cheshire, Hampshire, Thames Valley and the West Midlands. It wasn’t the fact that bits would fall off or its tendency to boil over at regular intervals that gave it its bad reputation, but more its legendary handling – or, rather, its complete lack of stability whilst negotiating anything resembling a curve in the road! It was quite simply appalling. Official complaints were made to senior officers that the cars were unsafe, with some officers refusing to drive them at all. Those unfortunate enough to crash one were hailed as heroes by their colleagues for managing to get rid of the car! The photo shown here comes from the Hampshire Constabulary and is an official photograph taken to show how bad the car was. It is a 1.8TC saloon negotiating an average-sized roundabout at less than 20mph with massive understeer and a suspension set-up that induced motion sickness.

Ford has made more cars that are suited to the role of area car than just about all the other manufacturers put together, thanks largely to the Cortina. The original Mk1 wasn’t particularly popular, with only Wakefield City, Surrey and Bedfordshire Police experimenting with them. But in Mk2 guise it received far more attention, especially in 1600 GT form. The car was good for 100mph, with decent handling and a fair degree of street cred to go with it. Essex Police, Devon and Cornwall, Cumbria, Merseyside and Hampshire all bought Mk2s for area car duties. The Mk3 Cortina was just as popular, although its 1970s build quality left much to be desired. As a police car it looked terrific, and several forces even used the estate variant as an area car, including the Devon and Cornwall Police and the Lancashire Constabulary, who painted theirs bright orange. Mk3 saloons were used by Kent, Surrey, Hampshire, Lancashire, Thames Valley and South Yorkshire Police, with most opting to use the 2000 GT model. But these were no ordinary versions, oh no – in order to keep the price to a minimum the plush GT seats with their integrated head rests were replaced with the standard 1300L seats with no head rests or back adjustment, the carpets were replaced with a rubber matting and most of the other interior GT fitments were also missing!

In 1976, with the launch of the Mk4, the Cortina had become a firm favourite as a company rep-mobile and found more police customers, including the City of London, Essex, North Wales, Cumbria, Dyfed-Powys, West Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, Hampshire and Thames Valley Police. In 2.0S trim it came with the excellent 2.0-litre Pinto engine married to a slick and very precise 4-speed manual gearbox. It also got an all-black interior and black treatment to the window frames and bumpers, giving it a rather mean look. By the early 1980s the Mk4 had got some slight cosmetic updates and became the Mk5, but few forces seemed interested as other cars were starting to make a dent on Ford’s monopoly.

Along the way there were a few Ford oddities thrown in, such as the Mk3 Zephyr 4 from the mid-1960s, whilst in the 70s quite a few forces used the Consul GT and later the Mk1 Granada, including the fabulous 3.0S. The Granada was one of the few cars that managed to fulfil both traffic and area car roles. It was a large car with a good strong engine and excellent road holding for its size, although manoeuvring the thing at low speeds without power steering took some doing. Even the Ford Corsair got a look-in with a couple of forces, including Cheshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Bath Constabulary and the Wolverhampton Borough Police. The Ford Orion saw service with Hertfordshire and Devon and Cornwall Police.

In the early 1980s Ford gave us the ‘jelly mould’, otherwise known as the Ford Sierra, in both hatchback, saloon and estate variants, and it was a very popular choice for area car services in virtually every force in the country. Here was a medium-sized car made available with a number of engine options from 1.6, 2.0 and 2.3 litre that the police could choose from, and they bought them by the bucket load. The car even starred in that new TV series of the era, The Bill, and was an integral part of the opening credits, with PC Alan Stamp, the Relief Area Car driver, behind the wheel.

In automotive terms, the Sierra was quite short-lived, being replaced by the first series Mondeo in 1990. Even though the cars were pretty similar in size and specification, the Mondeo was nowhere near as popular in police use. As the car morphed into the Mk2 Mondeo things did improve slightly, but by the mid-1990s there were huge changes taking place with the advent of common rail diesel engines being pioneered by BMW and Peugeot, which had Ford and every other manufacturer playing catch-up. It was over a decade before Ford could fight back with the Mk3 Focus that a lot of forces opted to take on in an era where costs were playing a significant role once again. At this stage, it’s worth noting that just changing a car is only the tip of the police car iceberg. Before that decision is taken, the car has to be thoroughly tested to assess its suitability for the role, then the workshops have to be kitted out with all the latest computer software applicable to that make and model; specialist tools would often need to be purchased, and in some cases technicians were sent off to the manufacturers’ training establishment to undertake courses to learn about the latest technology involved. However, at the end of the day, if the bean counters upstairs didn’t like the figures there would be a sharp intake of breath through gritted teeth as they stated rather firmly that they didn’t think the car was ‘best value’. So in twenty-first-century Britain you’ll find a huge number of Ford Focus area cars in your neighbourhood, although you might find it nigh on impossible to decipher which is the section car (current term for panda car!) and which is the area car, as they will both look identical, dressed in their modern Battenburg clothes.

Yorkshire Mk2 Cavalier after being involved in an RTA.

Vauxhall’s area car contribution in the 1960s included the Victor FC with its 1600cc engine, which was similar in styling to the later Mk3 Cortina but not as popular with either the public or the police. Most of Vauxhall’s other models were either the bigger-engined Traffic cars or the panda car range, with little in between. It wasn’t until the advent of the front-wheel-drive Mk2 Cavalier that Vauxhall produced a car that would be able to cut it as an area car. The Cavalier was a good, strong workhorse made available as a saloon and a hatchback with a willing engine that produced reasonable performance, and, like the Cortina, it soon found its niche as a response vehicle. Merseyside, Derbyshire and Sussex Police took on the Cavalier, and, in later Mk3 and Mk4 versions, forces like the Met and Lancashire also brought them on board. But just like Ford in the mid-1990s, Vauxhall were caught napping and missed the move towards diesel power, and it was several years before we started to see cars like the Mk2 Vectra and the Mk5 Astra make a fight back towards the lucrative police market.

This picture of Woolwich Police Station yard in 1968 shows the eras changing, new Escort panda cars coming in to replace Anglias, but an S-type area car still being used along with a Hunter, Rover P4 and Mk2 Cortina.

Think Jaguar and most of us will think Traffic car; whether it be a 1960s Mk2 or the latter XJ6 range, we generally remember the big cats for cruising the country’s motorway network. But the Metropolitan Police decided that the S-Type Jaguar would make an ideal area car – and who would possibly argue? Certainly not the boys tasked with driving them! Probably one of the best-looking saloon cars of all time, the S-Type Jaguar still stirs something in most of us, and in police trim it looks positively fabulous. The Met employed these cars as both traffic and area cars, with the former painted in white and the latter in black. These cars were produced on a separate production line – but only at the weekends – and were some 33 per cent cheaper to buy than the standard production car, but then there were some significant changes to facilitate that reduction that makes these cars unique. For starters, the 3.4-litre engine was changed in favour of the more powerful 3.8 unit, which was married to an automatic gearbox and a low-ratio Power-Lok limited-slip differential. There was no power-assisted steering and the tachometer was removed. But it was the interior where most of the savings were made, by removing the polished walnut veneer dash and door cappings so often associated with the marque and replacing them with very cheap wood painted matt black. Out came the deep-pile carpet and in went rubber floor matting. The door cards were plain black vinyl affairs with no door pockets or arm rests. In total there were more than 150 changes made to each car, and between 1966 and 1968 the Met Police bought 266 S-Type Jags, making it the single-biggest order for one model ever made. Of those 266 units, 183 of them were black area cars whilst the remaining 83 white cars were designated as Traffic cars. It must have been quite a thrill to drive one, on a shout with the Winkworth bell chiming away through the streets of 1960s London, although it’s doubtful whether it was possible to get anywhere near the car’s 120mph top end very often. A total of only five police-spec S-Type Jaguars have been saved and restored to their former glory, with three of them being area cars. As a restorer, personally I think it’s a shame that more of these cars were not saved.

Prior to the Met buying S-Type Jags, their area car of choice was the Wolseley 6/110. The big Farina cars were powered by a 2.9-litre straight six engine mated to a 3-speed gearbox. They were all finished in black and carried a large PA speaker on the roof. The cars were good for just over 100mph and the officers who crewed them rated them as the best area cars they’d ever had. In most other forces the cars were used as Traffic cars, with the last ones still in service as late as 1972. Their subsequent success on the banger racing circuit (big BMC Farinas were the banger of choice in the 70s and 80s) oddly required much the same qualities as those needed in a police car. Shame so many got destroyed, though.

Rover’s foray into the police-car market didn’t really begin until the introduction of the P6, but with it came instant cult status. Prior to the P6’s introduction a couple of forces had dabbled with the P4 – namely Cheshire, who had an entire fleet of them in green! Like the Wolseley 6/80 and the Jaguar Mk2, the Rover has become an iconic police vehicle revered by many, especially those officers who were tasked with driving them. Although many forces used the 3500 V8 as a Traffic car, with some using the smaller 2200 as an area car, only the Met sought to use the V8 as an area car, taking over the role from the outgoing S-Type Jags. They were all finished in Zircon blue, with a single blue light and a couple of Mickey Mouse spot lamps adorning the roof, and they will no doubt be remembered by Londoners of a certain age. You know who you are …

However, in 1975, when Rover replaced the P6 with the all-new SD1 3500 V8, the Met’s area car crews were all reduced to the 2.6-litre model. Out went the spot lamps and blue paint, in came white cars with orange and gold stripes along the sides and little else to distinguish them from Traffic cars save the single blue light instead of twin beacons. Both the P6 and SD1 served the Met brilliantly over a period of 15 years, and that aforementioned cult status isn’t a label applied lightly – although elsewhere in chapter eleven you can read more details about the SD1 and why the choice of the 2.6-litre, 6-cylinder over the 3.5-litre V8 made by accountants backfired spectacularly.

City of London Police Triumph 2500 Pis at speed.

Rover’s biggest challenge came from Triumph, when it launched the 2000 range at about the same time that Rover introduced the P6 in 1963. Another big four-door saloon with a decent engine, it was seen by many forces as a Traffic car rather than an area car, and in later Mk2 Pi trim, even more so. However, some forces did utilise the Mk1 Triumph 2000 as an area car, including the Stoke-on-Trent City Police, Somerset and Bath Constabulary and the Nottingham City Police, who had their cars finished in black with the city coat of arms placed on the front doors. The Met Police used the Mk2 2500 TC as area cars about the same time as the Rover P6 models. They were painted in either Delft blue or Pageant blue and were said to be lighter and easier to drive than the Rover but did suffer from engine overheating when in heavy traffic and from a number of other niggling faults. The City of London Police used the Mk2 saloon as area cars, all of them finished in white to differentiate their cars from neighbouring Met vehicles.

A Rootes Group publicity image from 1970, taken to publicise their range of special police vehicles.

The Rootes Group, usually using their Hillman badge on smaller cars and Humber on larger cars, produced some ideal cars to fulfil the role, especially with its Hunter and Minx saloons. For a decade from 1966, the company produced this solid four-door saloon with a 1725cc motor capable of achieving 95mph. It had dependable handling and was a tough and solid car. It was everything an area car should be, and those officers who once crewed them remember them with a fondness not afforded to other cars. Many forces utilised the Hunter and its round-headlight twin the Minx, including the Sheffield and Rotherham Constabulary, Durham, Hampshire, Surrey, the British Transport Police and the Ministry of Defence Police. Developed under the internal code ‘Arrow’, the Hunter range is often forgotten now but it achieved an enormous amount in its quiet understated way, not just with the police. Not only did Andrew Cowan, Colin Malkin and Brian Coyle win the 1968 London–Sydney Marathon in one, but it also remained in production, latterly only as a pick-up, until 2015 in Iran where it was known as the Paykan, which is, apparently, Persian for Arrow.

The later Hillman Avenger was even more popular with forces such as the Avon and Somerset, West Yorkshire, Sussex, Dorset and Kent Police. Although it had a slightly smaller engine, at 1598cc, it was almost as quick as the Hunter/Minx and, being the younger of the two models, was obviously a more modern drive. Its styling wasn’t to everyone’s liking, though, due to its rather heavy-looking rear end. Sussex Police in particular bought lots of them and they remained the area car in that county for many years.

Volvo. Yes, Volvo. Many years before those legendary figures ‘T5’ hit the automotive headlines, Volvo had enjoyed a modicum of success with a few forces but none more so than in Hampshire, who had pioneered the Swedish brand in 1965 when it bought the 121 Amazon estates as Traffic cars, followed by the 144DL in 1968, again for traffic patrol, until about 1973 when the car got downgraded to area car role because more powerful cars like the Rover 3500 V8 and Mk2 Triumph 2500 Pi were now the favoured tools. But the force stayed loyal to the Volvo 144DL, which was followed in 1975 by the new 244DL with its 2.1-litre engine. Every station in the county had one as their area car, although a number of other cars like the Hillman Hunter, the Mk3 and Ford Cortinas were brought in, but in very small numbers along the way. Forget all the very unfair journalistic ‘tank’ labels given to it over the years, the Volvo was a big, solid, dependable car that was perfectly suited to the role. In 1979 Volvo upgraded the engine to a 2.3 litre, added fuel injection, a 5-speed gearbox, alloy wheels and a few other bits, and all of a sudden the ‘tank’ would top 115mph with a 0–60 time of just nine seconds. Those stats are identical to those of the Mk2 Ford Escort RS2000 that those same journalists all raved about! In 1985 Volvo introduced the 240 Police Special, built to Swedish Polis specification. It got the same 2.3i engine and performance figures, but Volvo built the car with frontline police work very much in mind, with steel wheels instead of alloys, half-cloth and half-vinyl front seats, all-vinyl rear seats to facilitate the mopping up of blood and vomit, no rear window winders and a rubber compound on the floor instead of carpet. The first 244s were released in 1975 and the last 240 version in 1990 – during which time the Hampshire Constabulary bought no fewer than 276 of them, all for area car use. There can be few other cars that have spanned 15 years and managed to outgun all the new arrivals, staying the course until it was no longer available. There were many police officers who genuinely mourned its passing – and you can’t say that about many cars. Certain officers who were unfortunate enough to be driven into by other road users also credit the Volvo with saving their lives, at a time when few other manufacturers were prioritising occupant safety in accidents.

One of Hamphsire’s 1985 Volvo 240PS area cars, photographed at Brooklands’ annual Emergency Services Day (which is well worth attending, by the way). It’s been restored by ex-Hampshire officer Steve Woodward and is the only one preserved in police livery of the 276 244/240 models the force used. The light bar really was a roof-rack-type bar with two lights on, as this image clearly shows!

They were fitted with a switch panel for the police accessories which became almost legendary within the force, because the switches had a particularly tactile, satisfying action. And, okay, I’m admitting it here, I love a good switch action, so I totally get why the purple switches were so loved.

Left to right

S - Stop box on boot flashing stop

P - Police sign

B - Blue lights

H - Headlamp flasher

TT - Two-tone horns

In 1995 BMW entered the medium-sector police market like a bull in a china shop by giving us the 325 TDS. What? Diesel-powered patrol cars? Diesel? Really? No, this must be some kind of a wind-up, surely? Diesel is for tractors and buses! Coppers all over the country were now looking for the culprit who started this vicious rumour. But it wasn’t a rumour; in fact, far from it. BMW had refined the diesel unit to such an extent that it gave the car a huge amount of useable, low-down torque, which was delivered in a very smooth manner without the clanking sounds of previous diesel-powered cars. It was an ideal power plant for area car use, with the added bonus of better fuel consumption and higher mileage possibilities before resale. And, of course, BMW had built its previous reputation on being a driver’s car, so within seconds every copper had a smile on their face once more. Without a shadow of doubt the BMW 325 TDS was a huge success story, not just for BMW themselves but for the police service as a whole. The car had very few vices; it was fast, comfortable, handled well and had that all-important ingredient: presence. It looked the part. Forces all over the UK took them on, and over the next few years and into the twenty-first century the 3 Series has continued to dominate the area car sector because quite simply it’s almost the perfect package.

Volvo story

The early Volvo 244 GLT cars were actually used as Traffic cars for a while alongside BMW 525 saloons. The Volvos were fitted with very nice-looking five-spoke alloy wheels; a first in its class. A traffic unit driving a Volvo 244 GLT picked up a Triumph Trident motorcycle one night that was suspected of doing a big drugs run into the city; the bike failed to stop and a very high-speed pursuit started, with the bike reaching speeds in excess of 100mph. The bike entered the city but its speed rarely dropped below 60mph. A second Volvo area car now joined the chase and positioned itself behind the Traffic car. As they sped towards a large crossroads the Triumph didn’t slow down at all and went straight across it at 60-plus mph. The traffic Volvo hit the brakes hard and the rear nearside of the car slewed to the left. A huge arc of sparks, some 20 feet high, was seen coming from the rear before the car travelled across the same crossroads. Less than two miles later the biker fell off his machine and was arrested. A two-pound bag of heroin was found under the seat. After everything had calmed down a bit, one of the officers present called the traffic officers over to look at their car. We all stood in disbelief as we looked at the rear nearside alloy wheel, which now only had one of its five spokes left! A shudder went down the spine of the driver when he realised that after hitting that kerb he was still driving the Volvo at over 80mph.

Police Constable Gledhill GC

On the night of 25 August 1966, Police Constable Gledhill and his colleague PC McFall were on patrol in ‘Papa 1’, a Metropolitan Police area car, when they got involved in a high-speed chase with heavily armed robbers who ﬁred fifteen shots at them during the pursuit.

For his bravery that day Tony Gledhill was awarded the George Cross; the highest civil award this country can bestow.

The citation for Constable (later Detective Sergeant) Gledhill’s George Cross was published in The London Gazette (dated 19 May 1967), as follows:

Constable Gledhill was driving a Wolseley 6/110 police vehicle with wireless operator Constable McFall, when a message was received stating that the occupants of a motor car had been seen acting suspiciously at Creek Side, Deptford. As the officers reached the area they were looking for, a car (also a Wolseley 6/110) containing ﬁve men drove past them.

The officers immediately gave chase to the suspect vehicle which was being driven recklessly through the streets of South London, travelling on the wrong side of the road and against the one-way traffic system. In such conditions Constable Gledhill exercised considerable skill in following, at high speed, and in keeping up with, the vehicle.

During the chase, which covered a distance of 5 miles at speeds of up to 80mph, an attempt was made to ambush the police vehicle and no fewer than 15 shots were fired at it by the occupants of the suspect car, using a sawn-off shotgun and revolvers. Pellets from the shotgun struck the windscreen of the police car on three occasions.

Finally, at a road junction, the escaping car crashed into a lorry. The ﬁve men immediately left their vehicle and a group of three ran into the yard of a transport contractor.

The officers followed the group of three and as the police car reached the yard gates the men ran towards it; one of them was holding a pistol. He then proceeded to hold it to Constable Gledhill’s head. He ordered the officers to get out of the car or be shot. Both officers left the car and the man with the pistol got into the driving seat with the obvious intention of using it to make a getaway.

Constable Gledhill, then backing away across the roadway, was targeted again as the man reversed away from the gates towards him, pointing the pistol at him as he did so.

However, when he stopped to engage first gear he momentarily turned his head away and Gledhill immediately grabbed hold of his gun hand. As the vehicle moved off, Gledhill managed to hold on to the car window with his left hand.

While this was happening, Constable McFall had run along the roadway to a group of men in order to get a lorry driven across it in the hope of blocking the hijacked police car, when he heard Constable Gledhill shout.

He ran back to the police car and saw him holding on to its window. He then saw the vehicle gather speed, dragging Gledhill along the road. At this point the front offside tyre burst, the car veered across the road, crashed into parked vehicles and Gledhill was thrown under one of them. McFall opened the front passenger door and as the driver was still holding the pistol, began hitting him about the legs and body with his truncheon.

Gledhill had then regained his feet and as he approached the driver’s door it was ﬂung open, knocking him to the ground.

The man got out of the car and backed away from the officers. He warned them not to move and at the same time ﬁred a shot. The Constables then heard the gun click and both rushed at the man, and as McFall struck at him with his truncheon Gledhill grabbed the man’s right hand and took the gun from him. There was a violent struggle and the gunman fell to the ground, trying desperately to reach the inside of his jacket.

At this stage other officers arrived. The man was subdued and another gun, an automatic pistol, was found in the pocket of his overalls.

Both Gledhill and McFall received injuries and had to receive hospital treatment. They had faced a sustained ﬁrearm attack and from the early stages knew the risks they ran of being killed or seriously injured.

For his conduct, Constable McFall was awarded the George Medal.

During an interview in late 2010, Gledhill was asked how accurate the citation was, to which he replied, ‘It’s actually a pretty good description of what happened’. On being asked why he and PC McFall got called to the scene, he answered, ‘It was the school holidays and a school caretaker’s son happened to look out of a window and saw ﬁve men putting on masks and dungarees and getting into a car. He told his dad and his dad called the police.’

Gledhill was asked what kind of car the robbers had. ‘Actually, they had a car just like ours – another Wolseley – but in a two-tone blue colour. The only difference was, theirs was manual’. This actually makes the chase even more impressive, an automatic Wolseley, on cross-ply tyres, chasing a manual version, at speeds of up to 80mph, in the wet!

Of the chase he said, ‘Once or twice I thought I would lose it. Not long after the start of the chase it started to go and I said, “I’m going to lose it”. Terry, my wireless operator, replied, “You won’t, you won’t, you won’t.” And I didn’t!’

Tony explained what Wolseleys were like as police cars: ‘I used to really like them. They were not too bad at all. When I ﬁrst passed my police driving course at Hendon, in 1963, I was based at Lee Green Police Station driving Wolseley 6/90s. They were much heavier. The 6/110s were nicer to drive, although around South London you could rarely get any speed up (but you could really get your foot down on the Sidcup Bypass!). I enjoyed getting up a good speed in them.’

By the time of the incident Tony was based at Lewisham Police Station.

‘We had two Wolseleys at our station and there were three shifts. The cars were always used alternately unless there was a breakdown.’ On being asked if he drove the Wolseleys all the time, he answered, ‘No, as a policeman in those days you might ﬁnd yourself on the beat for six or nine weeks, or as a police van driver on van duty, or driving the area cars (the Wolseleys).’

He was asked whether he was involved in the maintenance of them. ‘No, but we were lucky as the Traffic Division workshops were on site at Lewisham so we didn’t have to take them anywhere. The area car I was driving on the day was my favourite. Its call sign was “Papa 1” (registered CYK 360C).’

Tony was asked the question that is always asked of people who have done incredibly brave acts in the face of death or serious injury, ‘What made you do it?’ His answer? ‘I have no idea.’

Burned-out Senator story

There’s nothing an area car driver likes more than to borrow a Traffic car if theirs is in the workshops for some reason. And there’s nothing a traffic cop hates more than having to lend one of ‘their’ cars out to a lowly area car driver, especially if they return it dirty or with no fuel in it.

Within my office, despite our best efforts to deny our area car colleagues the loan of our cars, we were told in no uncertain terms by the white shirts that the cars were in fact a force resource and not our own personal transport. So it was one wet wintry evening that the phone rang. It was the area car crew from Havant nick with the question that I didn’t really want to answer: Could they borrow a car for the night shift as theirs was off the road? We ran a 50/50 fleet of BMW 525i saloons and Mk2 Vauxhall Senator 3.0i 24-valve cars at the time and I told them to take the oldest car on the fleet; a K-reg Senator. After giving them the usual lecture about fuel and washing it down before returning it, I went home.

The next morning as I sat in the kitchen eating my breakfast, I switched on the local radio station to listen to the news. It was the main headline, ‘Police car explodes into flames in Havant after crashing into a gas main but thankfully with no injuries!’ A wry smile came over my face but it was immediately wiped off when a local resident was interviewed and stated that it was ‘one of them motorway cars’.

It transpired that the area car crew were on a shout, in the wet, and as they negotiated a right-hand bend they lost it, over-corrected it, entered the forecourt of a local house and collided with a cast-iron box about two feet square that contained the mains gas pipe to the house. The Senator landed on top of the box and as the escaping gas met the exhaust manifold … boom, up it went. That same local resident went on to say that the 20-foot-high flame coming through the bonnet resembled one of those Bunsen burners we used at school! Needless to say, we didn’t get the Senator back and the area car crew never asked us for another one!

CHAPTER SIX
PANDA CARS

‘Panda Car; noun (plural, panda cars), a police patrol car; originally white with black stripes on the doors.’

Oxford Concise Dictionary

It’s not every day you discover that one of Britain’s best-loved institutions is wrong! But then it is somewhat of a surprise that the term is in the Oxford Dictionary at all. What is annoying but not a complete surprise is that their definition is wrong, because it states that the cars were white with black stripes on the doors. Over the years, the public’s perception of what constitutes a ‘panda car’ has become blurred, so maybe now is the time to put to bed a few misconceptions, blow away a couple of myths and establish once and for all that not all police cars are in fact pandas.

So, let’s go back to the Oxford definition. Where did the name ‘panda’ originate? And why has the term continued to be used into the twenty-first century when the last real panda cars became extinct way back in the early 1980s?

Mid-1960s Britain was facing a bit of a police recruiting crisis; there simply weren’t enough officers to go around (nothing new there, then!), particularly on the big new housing estates that were being built all over post-war Britain. It must be remembered that most policemen during this period walked the beat or rode a bicycle and police cars were few and far between. Sure, every force had a Traffic Division, whose responsibilities consisted of attending road traffic accidents, escorting abnormal loads and, in one or two counties, policing the new motorways. Traffic didn’t attend such routine calls as domestic disputes, pub fights or kids kicking footballs against people’s windows.

Most stations would have had access to a van to transport prisoners, and there might have been an unmarked car that could be used by a supervisory officer of at least Sergeant in rank, to check up on the foot patrols at various ‘points’ throughout the day. As a member of the public requiring police attendance you could wait quite a long time for an officer to plod his way across his beat to get to you, and it has to be said that the beat bobby could be virtually invisible to the public, especially at night. The modern-day notion that in the ‘good old days’ there were 6-foot 5-inch coppers everywhere you looked, clipping young scrumpers around the ears, is little more than an urban legend, a myth that has been told over and over again and even appeared in Just William and other fiction. If your beat was just one mile square it would take you all day to patrol every street just once, therefore these legends of law enforcement were certainly not seen on every street corner, outside every school or lurking behind the walls of every orchard.

And therein lay the problem. There just weren’t enough coppers to go around. And society in general was moving faster as cars became more accessible to the general public and reliable, too. The solution to this dilemma was brilliant, Unit Beat Policing, or UBP, changed the face of policing in Britain. In 1964 the Chief Constable of the Lancashire County Constabulary, Colonel Eric St Johnson, who was a frequent visitor to the USA, had noticed that in many cities their patrol cars were black with white doors and had the word ‘police’ on them, surmounted by the town’s coat of arms. This made them stand out from the usual plain cars used by the public so that they were easily identifiable as police cars. He brought the idea home and had a couple of Mk3 Ford Zephyr 4s, which until now had been unmarked crime cars, dragged into the police workshops where they were resprayed into the blue and white colour scheme. Colonel St Johnson liked the idea that light blue be the chosen colour because he was a Cambridge University man! He worked with William ‘Palf’ Palfrey, the Chief Superintendent of Accrington, a division within the Lancashire County Constabulary that developed theories on how policing would change post war to cope with the needs of changing work patterns, mobility and mechanisation. Experiments with detailed versions of the basic idea were carried out in both Kirkby and Accrington; the Accrington idea being foot patrols backed up by teams of mobile detectives rather than bobbies moving between ‘beats’.

Lancashire has long been recognised as an innovative force, and the concept of using blue and white cars developed very quickly during the Zephyrs’ trial period in Kirkby – and of the two towns this was considered the very much more successful system.

Because the cars were readily identifiable as police cars, the force could use them to cover a greater area far better and quicker than a bobby on foot patrol. The cars were an instant success and there were calls to expand the idea. At the same time officers were being issued with new hand-held Pye pocket phones, a two-piece personal radio which meant they could now keep in touch with the station. The logic wasn’t that cars became the patrolling medium; the theory of Unit Beat Policing was that the bobby on the beat drove to an area, did a foot patrol, then drove to another area and did another foot patrol or waited to speak to members of the public by his car. Of course, as radio response became ever more immediate, this blurred – but that’s another story. The Government were very much keeping track of these experiments and eventually carried out further trials. The idea was even debated in Parliament under reforming Home Secretary Roy Jenkins at one point; if you are of a mind, you can read this on the Hansard Parliament website. Have a pot of strong coffee to hand.

Lancashire led the way, and in the wake of their success the Government issued a recommendation that forces follow their lead. Ironically, one of the last forces to adopt the system was the Met, who waited until 1970 and then, rather amazingly, introduced Morris Minors as pandas rather than more up-to-date cars, because Morris Minors were a known reliable car that was available and cheap, even if the basic design was from 1948 and the car was getting close to ceasing production – which it did in 1971. As explained elsewhere in the book, the Met had to buy cars that were built in Britain. Some forces, especially those with very different population densities and topography, never adopted the panda car system although they may have used the livery on their cars to a greater or lesser extent. These included the Stirling and Clackmannanshire Police, the Grampian Police and others.

In 1966 Lancashire ordered the first official panda cars. They opted to buy a huge number of Ford Anglia 105Es, 175 in fact, to be used as part of this new ‘Unit Beat Policing’ scheme. On 1 May 1966, local dignitaries and the press were invited to attend Lancashire’s HQ at Hutton for the official launch of the scheme before a mass drive-off of all 175 brand-new blue and white Ford Anglias. The Anglia was chosen because it was cheap to buy, at just £500, and easy to maintain. It didn’t need to be a performance car, as part of the scheme was for the officer to drive to part of his beat, park up in an area where the public could see him, put his helmet on and either walk that part of his beat for a while or wait for the public to approach him by his car. The car didn’t need two-tone horns, just the distinctive blue and white paint to make it stand out.

So where did the term ‘panda car’ come from? None of us has ever seen a blue and white furry bear (well, I hope not for your sake) so it is likely that the name stems from the fact that press interest in this new policing initiative was huge and there were photos of the cars printed in the papers, which of course made them look black and white. The name was either penned by a journalist or more likely was coined by a Lancashire Police mechanic who, whilst reading one of said papers, passed comment that they now looked like pandas! Whichever one it was, the name has now become part of the English language and is a term still used today by police and public alike who are too young to have even been born when the first Anglias rolled out across Lancashire’s sprawling housing estates.

It has also been suggested that the name originated from the term ‘Pursuit and Arrest’, but this isn’t true because the cars were never intended for pursuit purposes. Just to add to the confusion, a couple of years after Lancashire launched the scheme the Home Office conducted an experiment along similar lines with a number of forces being required to paint some of their cars, both unit beat cars and traffic patrol cars, in black with white doors. Forces like Durham, West Riding, Salford City and Plymouth City Police painted cars like the Ford Zephyr, Hillman Hunter, Austin Westminster, Morris 1800S, Mk2 Jaguars and Mini vans in the distinctive colour scheme. They looked great and enhanced the visual impact of the cars, just as Colonel St Johnson had seen in the USA several years earlier. Somewhere along the way things may have blended together and become a bit confused, but whatever the case, the panda car name has stood the test of time even if the original concept hasn’t.

Just about every force in the UK took the system on board, and from 1967 onwards blue and white panda cars were seen everywhere, making the thin blue line a little more pliable. But by 1979 the panda car’s days were numbered, because the police service was being forced to make drastic budget cuts (again, it appears nothing changes …) by the new Conservative government. The fleet manager of the Hampshire Constabulary looked out of his office window at a yard full of blue and white Minis and Mk2 Ford Escorts and concluded that to order the cars in either Bermuda blue for Leyland products or Nordic blue from Ford cost him extra. To then paint the doors white and have to re-paint them blue again prior to selling them off at auction cost £80 per car. He dropped the blue cars, ordered them in white and at the stroke of a pen the idea was lost forever. Fleet managers talk to each other on a regular basis and it wasn’t long before other forces followed suit, although one or two forces like Cheshire and North Wales Police persevered for several years and still had a number of Mk2 Vauxhall Astras and Austin Maestro vans in the familiar colours into the mid-1980s.

Enough of the history, let’s talk cars! So, if Lancashire used the Anglia, did everyone else use the same car? No, thank goodness.

There was a huge variety in the models used, in the make-up of the colour scheme and in the equipment used in or on the cars. But the type of car remained the same; they were basic run-of-the-mill, bottom-of-the-range, small-engine vehicles that were cheap to buy and cheap to run.

The ubiquitous Morris Minor saloon will be forever remembered as the archetypal panda car – I’ve even used it on the cover of this book – but not every force used them; far from it in fact. The Metropolitan Police, who were one of the last forces to adopt the unit beat scheme, were avid users of the Moggy but also ran fleets of Anglias, Austin 1100s and later the Austin Allegro and the Talbot Sunbeam.

Other forces included Devon, Derbyshire, Bristol City, Sheffield City, Glamorgan, Dyfed-Powys, Cheshire and Edinburgh City, but no doubt the Minor found favour with several others, too. The marque was perfectly suited to this type of work – it was easy to drive, reliable, cheap and (back in the day) looked the part. It wasn’t just saloons that were used either. Believe it or not, the Traveller was used by the Devon Constabulary, Edinburgh City, Leicestershire and Rutland, Wolverhampton Borough and the Ministry of Defence Police. The Minor vans, often referred to as 7cwt vans, had already been used for a number of years as Dog Section vehicles and in plain wrappers as SOCO (Scene of Crime Officer) and Photographic Department units. But now some forces started to paint them in blue and white to utilise as panda cars; however, the Wiltshire Constabulary painted theirs in tan and mustard – apparently they thought that this scheme might blend in rather nicely in the countryside where these cars were used as rural beat units. What were they thinking? The colours made a mockery of the fact that the cars were to stand out from the crowd, not blend in with the hedgerows! Wiltshire stuck with their unusual colour scheme and in later years used it on the Austin A35 van and even the Mk1 Ford Escort. But the Morris Minor has stood the test of time as there are about 20 former police Morris Minor 1000s still in existence with enthusiasts – more than any other type of police car in history. I have even raced against one owned by Chris Rea. He and I had a great battle at Snetterton while I was in the seat of an Austin A35.

Unusually, the Lothian and Peebles Constabulary’s Minors were in the darker Trafalgar Blue and White livery rather than the lighter Bermuda Blue used by most other forces. This was specified by the then Chief Constable, Willie Merilees, who wanted them to stand out from the lighter blue of the otherwise similar Edinburgh City cars.

Morris Minor 1000 ‘panda’ racing car

Guitarist and singer Chris Rea is well known for being a petrol head and, partly because of his Italian ancestral heritage, having a real passion for Ferrari – so much so that he made a film about his F1 hero, Wolfgang ‘Taffy’ von Trips, and commissioned a replica of his famous 1961 Ferrari 156 ‘sharknose’ F1 racing car. However, Rea has also raced in various series over the years, often but not exclusively in a selection of Lotus racers. He also worked occasionally as pit crew, anonymously, for the Jordan team in the early to mid-90s just to be involved (massive respect for that), and has owned a number of interesting road cars. However, as his song lyrics sometimes attest, he’s a man with a dry sense of humour and one of his current racers demonstrates that perfectly: a racing 1959 Morris Minor ‘panda’.

The car on the grid at Goodwood with other Historic Racing Drivers Club (HRDC) racers. The police sign was removed before the race actually commenced.

The car uses a BMC A-series engine as it did originally, but seriously modified and producing near three times its original output, as the 1.75-inch twin SUs and large oil-cooler attest.

Rea bought the car to enter historic racing, having raced as a guest in a couple of HRDC events, and decided he wanted to enter a Minor rather than one of the all-conquering A35s or A40s that dominate the smaller-engine class. HRDC organiser Julius Thurgood found this example rusting away in North Wales, removed it from that particular road to ruin and entrusted it to Alfa Romeo preparation experts Chris Snowdon Racing in November 2014 to be turned into a racing car. The project took the equivalent of one month’s full-time work and, because it was so rusty, ten days of welding alone. Rea apparently briefly considered restoring it as a road car once he realised its police history but decided instead to follow the original plan and nod to the car’s past by finishing it in a panda livery and entering it under the number 999. ‘Pc Rea 6149’ is painted on the doors in reference to Rea’s 2005 song ‘Somewhere Between Highway 61 & 49’.

Now I can hear every reader screaming, it can’t be an ex-panda car if it’s a 1959 as it would have been seven years old, at least, when the livery was introduced! And you’re right, a little liberty has been taken here, but the car is a genuine ex-police car which now provides fun for competitors and spectators alike at events such as the Goodwood Members’ Meeting, so I say good on him. It also shows just how iconic that panda car livery is, at least to a certain generation, plus it was kinda fun seeing Chris’s police car chase me on the track in my rear-view mirror …

The Mini, without question one of Britain’s greatest ever cars, was also very popular with the police in all its variants. Whether it was an Austin 850 saloon, a van, a Clubman estate, a Countryman estate, Leyland or Morris version, or even the Mini Moke, just about every model was used by a force somewhere in the UK. Bedfordshire and Luton Constabulary used large numbers of Minis before the locally produced Vauxhall Viva HB arrived, as did Durham, who chose to paint theirs black and white. Greater Manchester, Norfolk, Merthyr Tydfil, North Wales and Merseyside Police all had Minis, with their minuscule 850cc engine. From 1967 to 1979 the Hampshire Constabulary had no fewer than 900 Minis in service – a record for one make of car that still hasn’t been equalled. The Mini Moke, incidentally, was used by the Devon Constabulary and by the Dyfed-Powys Police, which must have provoked some strange looks from the public as the TV series The Prisoner was on at about the same time and starred the same car in a distinctly more sinister role.

Driving police Mini panda cars could be a very dangerous experience for the unwary copper. Nothing to do with the vehicle’s handling or its performance, but everything to do with the driver’s colleagues. Police officers are amongst the worst wind-up merchants on the planet (together with the military and nurses!) and are constantly thinking up new ways of getting one over on their colleagues. The Mini gave them the ideal tool; it became imperative that at the start of your tour of duty, having got the keys to the Mini panda car, the very first thing you did on opening the doors was to check under the seats. You had to lift the hinged front seats very carefully to check if there was a glass phial stink bomb placed beneath the seat frame. If you failed to check it and merely jumped in the car and sat on it, you were guaranteed a very smelly eight hours!

Two police officers were sent to a domestic dispute at a house and arrived in their Mini panda car. It was such a regular occurrence at this house that only one of them bothered to get out of the car whilst the driver stayed put. But on this particular day it all went horribly wrong. The door to the house flew open and the male occupant came straight out and plunged a large knife into the officer’s face before shutting the door again. The injured officer was bundled into the Mini by his colleague, who didn’t wait for an ambulance and decided to drive straight to hospital. With the knife embedded just below his eye, all the officer could see was the handle bobbing up and down as his panicked colleague drove the Mini panda car with blue light flashing and two-tone horns blaring the four miles across the city to casualty. He drove it as hard as he could with no holds barred, the wrong way down a one-way street, along a pavement, on two wheels around a roundabout with cars and pedestrians leaping out of its way. After emergency surgery the officer later revealed that he was more frightened by the drive in the Mini than he was about the stabbing itself!

The Hillman Imp proved almost as popular with the likes of Kent, Glasgow City, Somerset and Bath Constabulary, Norfolk Joint Police, Newcastle Police and the Dunbartonshire Police. The Somerset cars were somewhat different in that they ordered theirs in the standard Rootes blue, which was a little darker than the light blue that everyone else had adopted. Kent County Police didn’t bother painting the doors white on their early Hillman Imps, although they did eventually succumb to the full colour scheme. However, the prize for the ‘best-looking Imp in the panda class’ goes to the Dunbartonshire Police, who of course were not a million miles from where the Imp was manufactured in Linwood, Renfrewshire. Being canny Scots, they dreamt up a money saving idea to get themselves two pandas without the need for any special orders or additional paint jobs. The solution was to buy two cars – one white, the other one blue – then swap the doors, bonnet and boot lids over. Brilliant. But they did use some paint – bright yellow to be precise, on the roof. The roof colour was complemented by large ‘Wide Load’ signs placed front and rear. The cars were very high profile and gained the nicknames of Pinky and Perky; they were used to escort abnormal loads along the A82 Loch Lomondside Road from Dumbarton to Fort William during heavy construction work at Loch Awe and became tourist attractions in their own right. Although not strictly panda cars (they were actually Traffic cars), the livery alone makes their inclusion here a must. Incidentally, the diecast model manufacturer Corgi made a superb two-model set of Pinky and Perky, which you can occasionally pick up online.

Hillman Imp panda cars

In 1971 Northumberland Constabulary made a drastic error in buying a number of light-blue-coloured Hillman Imp saloon cars to be used in all areas as panda cars. Four burly giant police officers shoehorned into these tiny cars was always going to be a challenge, but the real challenge came whenever the police needed to make a stealthy approach to the scene of a crime. The Hillman Imp’s aluminium, rear-mounted engine (which had its design roots from a Coventry Climax Fire Pump engine) made a distinctive high-pitched whine. Thieves could place lookouts keeping toot, who could hear police cars approaching from afar and make good their escape. The only thing that officers could do to overcome this was to try to approach the scene of crime from an uphill direction, so that they could freewheel to the scene of crime to surprise offenders and catch them red-handed.

Birmingham City Police appear to have been the only force to have used the Austin A40 Farina for its panda car fleet, purchasing dozens of them in 1967 from the local Longbridge car plant. This was a move obviously designed to help with local community relations, as well as to clear some stock at Longbridge of what was by then an out-of-date car coming to the end of its life, thus it was probably available at a heavily discounted price. These cars were fitted with an illuminated roof box and a blue light together with two-tone horns. This was an unusual practice, although not unique. Some forces fitted their panda cars with emergency equipment to assist them in getting to an incident quicker, even though the drivers of such cars had only ever received basic driver training.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s a lot of our city and borough forces had amalgamated into the larger county forces, and at about the same time a variety of new panda cars came on stream, including the replacement for the Morris Minor: another Alec Issigonis masterpiece – the Austin 1100. The Met bought loads of them and they were just as popular with West Midlands, Gloucestershire and the new Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. The 1100 had plenty of interior space and its ride was very smooth thanks to its hydrolastic suspension, but it faced some serious opposition from Ford’s replacement for the Anglia 105E: the all-new Mk1 Ford Escort 1100.

Introduced in 1968, the Mk1 Ford Escort 1100 was an instant success with the public and the police. It was cheap to buy and run, had decent performance and enough space inside. It proved itself to be extremely reliable and cost-effective and officers enjoyed driving them. Forces like Dorset, Merseyside, Hampshire, West Sussex, Lancashire, Suffolk, Wiltshire, Thames Valley, Stirling and Clackmannan Police all used this new Ford product, and most stuck with it when it was later replaced by the Mk2.

The case of the pink Ford Escorts

In 1978–79 Britain was hamstrung by the winter of discontent, so-named because of strikes in the public sector that took the unions head to head with Jim Callaghan’s by then fatally crippled Labour government, which in turn led to Mrs Thatcher’s first election victory. However, the strikes also affected the car industry, and one of the longest-running disputes was at the massive Ford factory in Dagenham. At this time Northumbria Constabulary was wedded to Ford Escorts because it made sense for their maintenance workshops to be set up to deal with only one type of vehicle. They also had been afforded a good deal in terms of the quantity of cars purchased each year. The problem arose when Ford, because of the long-running strike, could not furnish any white-coloured police cars, and in desperation the police, very reluctantly, accepted two pink-coloured panda cars from Ford. One of these cars was placed in Gosforth, a suburb of Newcastle upon Tyne, while the other one ended up at Prudhoe, near Gateshead. The end result was police officers drawing lots to avoid driving the pink panda, and lots of wolf whistles and jokes of dubious taste while they were on patrol if they lost. Perhaps this was a reflection of the attitudes of the period as well …?

Meanwhile, Vauxhall updated its lacklustre Viva HA model, which hadn’t been looked at by the police, and gave us the Viva HB, which was a direct rival to the Escort. Again, it was cheap to buy and run and appeared to fit the bill (pun intended! You’re welcome …) perfectly. It goes without saying that Bedfordshire Constabulary bought the Viva, as did the neighbouring Hertfordshire, together with Cheshire, Lancashire and the Ayr Burgh Police in Scotland, who did exactly the same as Dunbartonshire Police did with the Imps and bought vehicles in either white or blue then swapped all the opening bits over to obtain that panda car effect. Vauxhall knew they had a winner on their hands and produced a wonderful brochure selling the HB Viva’s panda car potential.

Without doubt the blue and white scheme worked. It grabbed the public’s attention – which was the whole idea, of course – and so a number of forces started to experiment by painting some other vehicles that were never intended to be panda cars in blue and white. Lancashire, for example, took several of its Mk1 Transit Section vans (station vans) and repainted them. The Met Police even utilised a couple of ageing Morris J Series vans in the early 1970s as mobile Careers and Recruitment Offices by painting them up as pandas simply to draw people towards them. Other forces started playing around with the scheme as well. Thames Valley Police had white Mk1 Escorts with dark-green doors, whilst Suffolk Police opted for light-blue doors on white-bodied Escorts. The Renfrew and Bute Constabulary couldn’t quite make up its mind when it took a white Hillman Imp, painted the doors dark blue and then put orange stripes along its sides! Birmingham City Police repainted one of their Austin A60 area cars from black to panda livery with a curious breaking up of the colour on the C-pillars. However, they were used as supervisory units by sergeants in charge of local sub-divisions, who would use these oversized panda cars to check up on the PCs in their standard panda cars and to meet them at certain ‘points’ on their beat. This was an old-fashioned idea left over from the days of foot patrols, when sergeants would meet their officers at a ‘point’ on their beat at a certain time to ensure that they were actually doing their job in their respective area. The sergeant would then sign and date the officer’s pocket notebook. Talk about policing the police!

As the 1970s progressed, other new cars entered the market. We saw the likes of the Vauxhall Chevette (my brother had a brown one) make the odd appearance in forces like Cheshire, Norfolk and Lincolnshire. Ford’s new Fiesta got used by Northumbria, Hertfordshire and West Yorkshire Police. The Vauxhall Viva HC model was also reasonably successful but not quite as much as its predecessor. By the late 1970s one car stood head and shoulders above the opposition; Ford’s new Mk2 Escort in 1.1 Popular trim made for a great panda car. It was light and easy to drive, with sound reliability – even if the driver’s seat tended to collapse under the weight of an overweight policeman! Huge numbers of them were used by the Met, Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Dorset, North Wales, Devon and Cornwall, Essex, Hertfordshire and the Lothian and Borders Police in Scotland, who incidentally still have one in their museum.

Some of the last cars to be adorned in the two-tone livery were the Austin Allegro and the Talbot Sunbeam. The Allegro was used extensively by the Met and in forces like West Midlands Police, who now ordered theirs in plain blue, but instead of painting the doors white they opted to place a large white sticker on the doors with the word ‘police’ on it. The Talbot Sunbeam wasn’t as popular as it could have been, due to its cheap build quality and poor reliability, but the Met Police and the likes of Cumbria and Sussex did use it. Meanwhile, the Avon and Somerset Police used the Hillman Avenger 1500HL in blue and white as a response unit rather than an outright panda car. We were beginning to see a blending of roles, not just in the Bristol area but in most other counties as well.

By 1979 financial constraints were hurting the public-sector purse strings and police fleet managers had to look at ways to save cash. Thus the panda car died. Well, the livery did, but not the concept itself, which lives on to this day in most forces. Police still use run-of-the-mill, cheap, small-engine cars to do the basic running-around policing we now call anything from sector policing to community policing. Along the way we have seen cars like the Vauxhall Astra in all its variants, the Ford Fiesta and Focus, the Peugeot 306, 309 and the 208, the Rover 220 and several others, no doubt. In twenty-first-century Britain it’s the Ford Fiesta and the Vauxhall Corsa that seem to be the current favourites. But thanks to the Home Office the entire concept has now been lost because of its insistence that all police vehicles carry the same livery nationwide, no matter what that vehicle’s role might be. You can read the full story elsewhere in this book, but basically in the late 1990s the Labour government introduced the blue and yellow Battenburg livery to all emergency service vehicles. It wasn’t well received and took some forces 20 years to comply. So now we have everything from a Ford Fiesta through to a BMW X5, from motorcycles to Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans all carrying the same graphics. In some ways the government’s argument echoed that of Colonel St Johnson all those years ago, in that they wanted the cars to stand out and to be easily recognisable by the public – including foreign tourists – as a police car. But nowadays it seems others are using it, too; for example, Highways Traffic Officers use black and yellow Battenburg, and every security company and dog warden known to man decorates his van with Battenburg, as do your local recovery garages, emergency doctors and many others.

The original concept was brilliant and, more importantly, it worked very well indeed and without doubt changed the face of British policing forever. The only thing that hasn’t changed is that Oxford Dictionary definition!

The Noddy Bike

The Unit Beat Policing, or UBP, scheme changed policing in the UK as well as providing a whole new livery and type of police car to talk about in this book! However, the very beginnings of the concept of mobile policing using a cheap economical vehicle so that a wider area could be covered was the quite wonderfully named ‘Noddy Bike’ scheme. From the early 1960s bobbies in selected areas were given Velocette LE motorcycles in an effort to achieve greater mobility. The name came about because those constables riding them were exempt from saluting senior officers, this being a potentially lethal practice while riding a bike at 40mph! They were allowed, instead, to merely nod their head, a massive change in protocol which, if we had the time and space, could be argued to be the beginning of the end of the old police services’ quasi-military structure … The LE (which amazingly enough apparently stood for ‘little engine’) was introduced in 1948 and was a strong, tough little bike with a smooth and very quiet running transverse, water-cooled, side-valve, flat-twin, 4-stroke engine of, initially, 149cc, although later versions used a 250cc unit. It wasn’t a bike for bikers but rather a machine for transport, and it added as much civilisation and comfort to the motorcycling experience as it was possible to do in that era, originally being fitted with a hand-operated starting lever, for instance, although this design was later dropped in favour of a kick-start. It started the police on a road towards mechanised movement for beat bobbies, but was used mainly in rural areas and by no means exclusively to move between beats in the way the UBP was developed. It’s important to say it wasn’t the start of panda cars, although people often speak of them as such on the web, but it’s equally fair to say that they were a signpost on the road towards the panda car, and no discussion of this policing theory and practice is complete without at least a nod to the Noddy bike.

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