Homage to Landies....
Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2016 10:43 am
Loved this piece in the Times yesterday celebrating / mourning the last Defender off the line....I know there are a few fans / owners on here, so thought you might like this eulogy.
Matthew Parris
Time seemed to stop: a frozen moment, wild, terrifying, yet with a kind of stillness. I seemed pinned in space. Below me our Land Rover was plunging into a deep earth ditch. Above me stretched the blue African sky into which I was launched, an involuntary spaceman. I’d been violently bucked from my favourite place, the roof-rack, and was describing a small parabola above a maize field in northern Cameroon before falling to earth some 20 feet from the car.
I was 24. Stanley, our vehicle, was 12. We had crashed. I heard Stanley hit the other side of the gully as I lay on the dry earth; heard the windows falling out; heard from the field that unmistakably African “A! A! A!” from a group of labouring women, which means “Good gracious, can you believe it? — Whatever next?” — or, in this case, “A white boy has just dropped from the sky”.
Was I dead? I raised my head to check. No blood, no wounds. Legs and arms still on. Trying to get up I realised both arms had dislocated at the shoulder in a futile bid to hold on to the roof-rack. Only bruised, my three comrades staggered over to rejoice at my survival. The women ululated. Windows were popped back into frames, shoulders re-located, and we carried on to the Congo, Rwanda, Tanganyika and Nairobi.
We sold Stanley in Nairobi, where I discovered a difference in how best to pitch an all-terrain vehicle to black — or white — African potential buyers. White buyers wanted to hear that our vehicle had led a cosseted life. Black buyers were impressed to hear it had been through hell and survived. I prefer the black African view.
That Series IIA marked the point by which the Land Rover had assumed for ever its iconic form: a sturdy rectangular platform on a brutal steel chassis making up the lower half of the car, two sheets of glass divided by a metal strip serving as the windscreen, and a largely aluminium cabin bolted on top like a box, square and flat. The whole, composed of apparently rudimentary parts, exudes a whiff of expert, de-frilled design. That post-war austerity image, functionality-over-form, became in itself a kind of form, looking forward to the end-century’s craze for “de-constructionism”. The brutalism was the appeal: the vehicular opposite of the chihuahua in the handbag. If your car had a car, it would be a Land Rover.
Yesterday, the last model rolled off the production line in Solihull. A growing web of regulation has finally ensnared the old stager. Entirely predictably it was beginning to fail EU safety standards — and hadn’t met US standards for almost two decades. Jaguar Land Rover say they are replacing it, but my Land Rover co-religionists and I — we who take “Land Rover” to mean the marque that’s been in continuous production since 1948 — know that this week, the Land Rover, if not Land Rover, died. The decision fills me with melancholy but it is the right one. I shall try not to say “iconic” again though there is no better word for the vehicle’s status, but in the end, as the Morris Minor, the VW Beetle, the Trabant and the Citröen 2CV had also finally to accept, fame is not enough: sentimentality will only take a sales-pitch so far.
There’s irony in that. It’s the unsentimentality of the Land Rover that we’re sentimental about. The marque’s utilitarian aura had become its selling-point — yet most buyers’ use for the car doesn’t justify the purchase. The Land Rover was probably doomed from the day the first Toyota Land Cruiser hit the market: cheaper, less brutalist and even more reliable, the Japanese 4x4s were all most owners needed.
Still, though, the legend lived on. The claim that three quarters of the Land Rovers ever made are still on the road was always credible, whether or not true. Certainly a Land Rover’s capacity not quite to die is unrivalled. When the dashboard of my 1959 Land Rover caught fire in Derbyshire I drove on, simply ripping out some wires. In a cloudburst in Saumur we used the crank to start it. At 14,000 feet in the Bolivian Andes and trying to reach the Chilean border, the skills I’d acquired for making the electrics work with bits of old wire earned us admiration — and a ride — from the coca-dazed South American Indian owner of an old red Land Rover that in Britain you’d hardly bother to drag out of a ditch.
This vehicle has always mixed myth with reality. We like to think of the Land Rover as a supremely British original. In fact it’s an automotive tribute act to the American Willys Jeep that earned its spurs and its fame during the Second World War. Land Rover fanatics will kill me for saying this, but I think the more Stakhanovite Jeep takes the gold. We insist the Land Rover was always “tougher” than the poncier and more comfortable SUVs that now crowd the market — but for sheer resilience I’d say Toyota take the gold.
The prize that I’d gladly award the Land Rover is for an un-British quality: classlessness. As a young Tory candidate in Derbyshire in 1979 I found mine ideal for canvassing. On council estates a Range Rover could raise hackles; up gravel drives a Ford Cortina could raise eyebrows.
Of course I didn’t need a Land Rover, but the car elided need and want in a seductive way. It looks like a car of need: I have it because I must drive across fields, drag things, drive down rough tracks or off on a hunting safari. For some people, some of those needs may be real, for many they won’t — but for these many a Land Rover offered reassurance that despite our lives’ appearances we really were somehow rugged, daring, exciting. Those are good things, and a Land Rover reminds us of them, making for us a little boast.
The sparse and visible engineering speak to economic man, a modern equivalent of a caveman’s campfire, the “needs-must” in us all: the — yes — defender. It’s all about necessity, and the atavistic satisfaction that brings. As Peak District off-roaders prove every weekend, life offers no higher satisfaction than getting absolutely stuck, and then getting out of it.
Motoring as a pleasure is dying, a victim not only of jams and traffic lights and motorways that all feel the same, but also of our modern liberation. Owning a car used to be a lifeline to personal independence, but we’re no longer trapped at home. Motor cars as personalities, rescuers, friends, will soon be forgotten. And (oh the horror of the cliché that looms) as that last Land Rover rolled from the production line in Solihull this week, a little bit of me died.
Matthew Parris
Time seemed to stop: a frozen moment, wild, terrifying, yet with a kind of stillness. I seemed pinned in space. Below me our Land Rover was plunging into a deep earth ditch. Above me stretched the blue African sky into which I was launched, an involuntary spaceman. I’d been violently bucked from my favourite place, the roof-rack, and was describing a small parabola above a maize field in northern Cameroon before falling to earth some 20 feet from the car.
I was 24. Stanley, our vehicle, was 12. We had crashed. I heard Stanley hit the other side of the gully as I lay on the dry earth; heard the windows falling out; heard from the field that unmistakably African “A! A! A!” from a group of labouring women, which means “Good gracious, can you believe it? — Whatever next?” — or, in this case, “A white boy has just dropped from the sky”.
Was I dead? I raised my head to check. No blood, no wounds. Legs and arms still on. Trying to get up I realised both arms had dislocated at the shoulder in a futile bid to hold on to the roof-rack. Only bruised, my three comrades staggered over to rejoice at my survival. The women ululated. Windows were popped back into frames, shoulders re-located, and we carried on to the Congo, Rwanda, Tanganyika and Nairobi.
We sold Stanley in Nairobi, where I discovered a difference in how best to pitch an all-terrain vehicle to black — or white — African potential buyers. White buyers wanted to hear that our vehicle had led a cosseted life. Black buyers were impressed to hear it had been through hell and survived. I prefer the black African view.
That Series IIA marked the point by which the Land Rover had assumed for ever its iconic form: a sturdy rectangular platform on a brutal steel chassis making up the lower half of the car, two sheets of glass divided by a metal strip serving as the windscreen, and a largely aluminium cabin bolted on top like a box, square and flat. The whole, composed of apparently rudimentary parts, exudes a whiff of expert, de-frilled design. That post-war austerity image, functionality-over-form, became in itself a kind of form, looking forward to the end-century’s craze for “de-constructionism”. The brutalism was the appeal: the vehicular opposite of the chihuahua in the handbag. If your car had a car, it would be a Land Rover.
Yesterday, the last model rolled off the production line in Solihull. A growing web of regulation has finally ensnared the old stager. Entirely predictably it was beginning to fail EU safety standards — and hadn’t met US standards for almost two decades. Jaguar Land Rover say they are replacing it, but my Land Rover co-religionists and I — we who take “Land Rover” to mean the marque that’s been in continuous production since 1948 — know that this week, the Land Rover, if not Land Rover, died. The decision fills me with melancholy but it is the right one. I shall try not to say “iconic” again though there is no better word for the vehicle’s status, but in the end, as the Morris Minor, the VW Beetle, the Trabant and the Citröen 2CV had also finally to accept, fame is not enough: sentimentality will only take a sales-pitch so far.
There’s irony in that. It’s the unsentimentality of the Land Rover that we’re sentimental about. The marque’s utilitarian aura had become its selling-point — yet most buyers’ use for the car doesn’t justify the purchase. The Land Rover was probably doomed from the day the first Toyota Land Cruiser hit the market: cheaper, less brutalist and even more reliable, the Japanese 4x4s were all most owners needed.
Still, though, the legend lived on. The claim that three quarters of the Land Rovers ever made are still on the road was always credible, whether or not true. Certainly a Land Rover’s capacity not quite to die is unrivalled. When the dashboard of my 1959 Land Rover caught fire in Derbyshire I drove on, simply ripping out some wires. In a cloudburst in Saumur we used the crank to start it. At 14,000 feet in the Bolivian Andes and trying to reach the Chilean border, the skills I’d acquired for making the electrics work with bits of old wire earned us admiration — and a ride — from the coca-dazed South American Indian owner of an old red Land Rover that in Britain you’d hardly bother to drag out of a ditch.
This vehicle has always mixed myth with reality. We like to think of the Land Rover as a supremely British original. In fact it’s an automotive tribute act to the American Willys Jeep that earned its spurs and its fame during the Second World War. Land Rover fanatics will kill me for saying this, but I think the more Stakhanovite Jeep takes the gold. We insist the Land Rover was always “tougher” than the poncier and more comfortable SUVs that now crowd the market — but for sheer resilience I’d say Toyota take the gold.
The prize that I’d gladly award the Land Rover is for an un-British quality: classlessness. As a young Tory candidate in Derbyshire in 1979 I found mine ideal for canvassing. On council estates a Range Rover could raise hackles; up gravel drives a Ford Cortina could raise eyebrows.
Of course I didn’t need a Land Rover, but the car elided need and want in a seductive way. It looks like a car of need: I have it because I must drive across fields, drag things, drive down rough tracks or off on a hunting safari. For some people, some of those needs may be real, for many they won’t — but for these many a Land Rover offered reassurance that despite our lives’ appearances we really were somehow rugged, daring, exciting. Those are good things, and a Land Rover reminds us of them, making for us a little boast.
The sparse and visible engineering speak to economic man, a modern equivalent of a caveman’s campfire, the “needs-must” in us all: the — yes — defender. It’s all about necessity, and the atavistic satisfaction that brings. As Peak District off-roaders prove every weekend, life offers no higher satisfaction than getting absolutely stuck, and then getting out of it.
Motoring as a pleasure is dying, a victim not only of jams and traffic lights and motorways that all feel the same, but also of our modern liberation. Owning a car used to be a lifeline to personal independence, but we’re no longer trapped at home. Motor cars as personalities, rescuers, friends, will soon be forgotten. And (oh the horror of the cliché that looms) as that last Land Rover rolled from the production line in Solihull this week, a little bit of me died.
