Читать книгу Cops and Robbers - Ant Anstead - Страница 37

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!