Land Rover: The Story of the Car that Conquered the World. Ben Fogle

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СКАЧАТЬ In many ways, the Land Rover became the mechanical evolution of the great heroic era of exploration. It provided access to places that had once been inaccessible. It allowed modern-day explorers to push geographic boundaries and penetrate deep into some of the Earth’s greatest and hitherto unexplored wildernesses.

      British, strong, lantern-jawed, rugged, reliable and determined, the qualities of the Land Rover were not lost on professional explorers. Where once the adventurer had relied on packhorses and mules to carry their loads, this vehicle stepped in as their new mechanical workhorse. A Land Rover could go anywhere that a horse had gone, without fear of fatigue. It could carry heavier loads, too.

      One of the first explorers to use the Land Rover was Colonel Leblanc, who drove from Britain to Ethiopia in 1949. The Rover company were impressed at his audacity, and soon he became a travelling salesman for the company. In this role Leblanc helped to sell new models of Land Rovers and Rover cars by leading them in small convoys into faraway remote regions, demonstrating their endurance abilities to the watching world.

      However it was Laurens Van der Post who helped to establish the Land Rover as the perfect expedition vehicle. Van der Post was commissioned by the BBC to make a six-part documentary in search of the Bushmen in the Kalahari. The Lost World of the Kalahari was a huge hit and Land Rover suddenly realised the power of the brand in helping and endorsing overland expeditions around the world. The vehicles acted like mobile advertising billboards.

      One of the most celebrated Land Rover adventurers was an adventuress named Barbara Toy. In 1955, the Australian adventuress drove an 80-inch Land Rover called Pollyanna around the globe. Her book, Pollyanna, documenting the journey became a bestseller, further cementing the Land Rover as the explorer’s car.

      But it is the 1955–6 Far East expedition undertaken by Oxford and Cambridge Universities that caused Land Rover to become the iconic symbol of discovery and adventure. The expedition was on an unprecedented scale and had numerous sponsors, including the Royal Geographic Society. It involved an overland journey across Europe and Asia from London to Singapore. It was the first time such an expedition had been attempted. Two 86-inch Series I station wagons had been loaned to a team of students from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. The Land Rovers were painted in the light and dark blues of the respective universities.

      It was a gruelling journey that included the daunting prospect of the dense impenetrable jungles of Southeast Asia. The former commissioner of the BBC, a then unknown David Attenborough, commissioned a film about the expedition.

      The film included the crossing of the virgin desert between Damascus and Baghdad and the traverse of the Ledo Road between India and Burma that was later closed. The vehicles forded rivers and streams and often had to build their own bridges to cross the deeper bodies of water. They drove the narrow, dizzying roads of Nepal and risked both bandits and headhunters in their quest to drive to Singapore. The team were forced to hack new paths through northern Thailand’s virgin forest.

      The vehicles provided Land Rover with invaluable data on their tolerance and resilience in tough conditions, but above all, the iconic images and the later film provided advertising that money couldn’t buy of the Land Rover as the go-anywhere vehicle.

      The Oxford and Cambridge Expedition arrived in Singapore on 6 March 1956, six months after leaving Hyde Park the previous year. It was a huge success. The vehicles had negotiated 18,000 miles of roads, tracks and jungle. One of the Land Rovers is still on display at the Heritage Centre in Gaydon today.

      The success of the expedition was soon followed by a second Oxford and Cambridge overland journey across South America in search of the geographical centre of Brazil.

      Not to be outdone by the educated elite, working-class Londoner Eric Edis set out in 1957 to circumnavigate the entire world in a Land Rover. Without sponsorship, he led a team of sixteen in three Land Rovers on a two-year journey. Only one of the Land Rovers survived the gruelling expedition, but once again the Land Rover had proved its credentials while also acting as a mobile billboard, reaching people and places other brands could only dream of achieving.

      One of my favourite expeditions, visually, was the Joint Services Expedition in which four Forward Control 101s crossed northern Africa and the Sahara Desert – travelling 7500 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. They completed the gruelling journey in 100 days, and it was the superb performance of the vehicles on this expedition that led to the Land Rover being taken up by the British military.

      These were the days of the great explorers – adventurers who pushed not just geographical boundaries, but took on what to others may have seemed eccentric and even impossible. When I was 14 I met one such man, a character who arguably changed the course of my life.

      I was at boarding school in Dorset and one Saturday morning we were entertained by an explorer who looked like a throwback to the Victorian era. He was clad in safari jacket, pith helmet and jungle boots, and he completed his look with a python draped around his neck.

      Colonel Blashford Snell, better known as Blashers, had come to our school to talk about his various expeditions around the world. He was notorious for having crossed the Gobi Desert, been shot at in Libya, carried a grand piano into the Amazon, and taken part in searches for the elusive yeti and the fabled two-snouted dog of Bolivia. He was a man of eccentricity and I was immediately drawn to him by his charm and charisma.

      It would be a further 20 years until I finally got to meet my hero again, at a reception with Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace – but that sounds like bragging, so I shall move on. Of all the expeditions around the world, Blashers is arguably most famous for taking a Land Rover where this vehicle had never been before. For a car that had transformed the world with its ‘go everywhere and anywhere’ accessibility, this was really saying something. Of course, this book would not be complete without the story of Blashers’ legendary expedition, so I just had to go and visit him and hear the story in his own words.

      I have always loved Dorset. It is probably because it holds so many childhood memories. This was the county of my formative years and it still has a soothing, calming effect on me. Once again I found myself rumbling through the tall hedgerows that tower over the narrow snaking country lanes.

      This is Land Rover country. I must have passed twenty Defenders as I made my way up the A31 from Poole to Blandford Forum. I was on my way to the Colonel’s house but along the way I was making a detour to visit Rosie, a Land Rover enthusiast I had come across on social media. We had arranged to meet at her house deep in the Dorset countryside to talk all things Land Rover, and particularly the part that this marque plays in her life.

      Rosie and her partner Jon are obsessed with coffee. They were fed up with the rise of the high-street coffee chains and they wanted to return to the art of artisanal coffee making – to put the love back into coffee without the capitalist approach. They couldn’t afford a shop and, besides, they liked the idea of providing coffee to consumers who cared about their produce, so they planned to serve it at farmers’ markets and food festivals. What they needed, though, was a mobile coffee wagon.

      Jon suggested a Land Rover, so they began their search for a suitable vehicle to transform into a mobile barista. They soon found a Series III on Gumtree for £2000. They put in an offer and a few days later the owner arrived with his entire family and the Land Rover on a trailer.

      ‘They were all crying their eyes out,’ marvels Rosie. ‘It was like a bereavement for them to say goodbye to the car. It had been lovingly fitted with bench seats and you could tell this had been a much-loved family car. We didn’t have the heart to tell them what we planned to do with it,’ she added, sounding embarrassed.

      Rosie and Jon had named their coffee company Grounded – СКАЧАТЬ