Land Rover: The Story of the Car that Conquered the World. Ben Fogle
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 – a combination of ground coffee and the fact that a Land Rover is rooted to the ground as a 4×4.
I stood at the little counter under the weak spring sunshine while Rosie worked the Italian machine. They had converted the Land Rover themselves and you could see the passion and love that had gone into this project. As I sipped on my cappuccino, Rosie proudly showed me the scrapbook full of photographs from the beginning of the restoration project.
‘Jon will be gutted not to be here,’ she admitted. He still had to work shifts in the pub, but according to Rosie it was he who was the Land Rover fanatic.
At markets and shows, the car, named Arthur, is always swamped with people wanting to take a photo of it. ‘It makes people smile,’ she laughs.
I asked Rosie what it’s like to drive her.
‘Well, she leaks, she’s slow and she’s really really cold,’ she admits. ‘But I love her.’
Rosie knew nothing about Land Rovers before they bought Arthur (although Jon was a self-confessed enthusiast), and by her own admission her family think she and Jon are crazy, but with this vehicle they have managed to combine their two passions: coffee and Land Rovers. And you can’t argue with that.
With my Land Rover-made coffee injecting a much-needed caffeine boost around my body, I said goodbye to Rosie and Arthur the Land Rover and continued on my way to find Blashers.
If you were to imagine what a Victorian explorer’s house looked like, the Colonel’s house was probably it, brimming with treasures, guns, art, textiles, bows and arrows and other stuff from his various global expeditions. In the hall was a huge Vickers machine gun that he had bought from a ‘local choir boy who is also an arms dealer’. The man himself chuckled, ‘everyone marvels at the gun but no one ever asks if it’s legal.’
The room was filled with photographs and paintings from around the world. There were muskets and guns mounted on the walls and all sorts of indigenous and tribal objects hanging from every nook and cranny.
‘It’s a museum of exploration,’ he explained.
We moved on to his expedition stores. The entrance contained a carefully indexed library of thousands of travel, adventure and exploration books, all catalogued by country. Next was the film room, bursting at the seams with VHS tapes, DVDs and hundreds of cylinders of old cinematic film which Blashers was in the process of transferring into digital format. One wall was dedicated to a series of little doors labelled: HOT ARID DRY, HOT TROPICAL WET, COLD DRY, COLD DAMP, and so on. I pulled one door open to find a cupboard brimming with khaki shirts and jackets. There were dozens of hats and pith helmets. It was like a props cupboard, except this had all been worn in anger.
Another wall was piled high with boxes full of rations, tents, canteens, plates, cutlery, lamps, stoves and torches. This was the room of a travelling hoarder. My eyes were overwhelmed. Bows and arrows and spears were propped up in every corner. Each one of them had a story. ‘This one nearly killed me,’ Blasher told me, holding up a knife. It was a living museum of Blashers’ extraordinary life.
We headed outside to an outbuilding – ‘expedition base,’ he explained. When I visited him he had only recently returned from a recce to Colombia and was soon to lead an expedition across Mongolia. Pretty impressive for an almost 80-year-old.
‘So how important have Land Rovers been in your life?’ I asked him.
‘Vital,’ Blashers answered. ‘I have driven them in Ethiopia and used them to clear mines in Libya, I have been shot at in Omagh in Northern Ireland and in Cyprus and used them to support expeditions to explore the Blue Nile.’
Land Rovers really have loomed large in Blashers’ life and they have saved his life on more than one occasion, too. As a sapper in the army, the Land Rover was a vital piece of kit. The cars provided access to the inaccessible. They were packhorses that never tired. ‘I remember the Land Rovers we used to drive had a big sign on the inside of the windscreen which read, “This vehicle cost £1400, please look after it.”’
He told me the story of one Land Rover that overheated as they drove through the desert. The open-topped Rover had become red hot, igniting a polyester sleeping bag stowed in a cage at the back. ‘We had to jettison all the spare fuel to save the vehicle from igniting,’ he smiled at the memory.
Blashers is also credited with setting up Operation Raleigh in 1984, which today still enables volunteers to travel to remote places around the world and help local communities. When Prince Charles was given a 110 by Land Rover, he kindly handed it on to Blashers as a donation to Operation Raleigh, for which he was patron.
The walls of Blashers’ home are papered with mosaics of expedition images, and among the hundreds