Cops and Robbers: The Story of the British Police Car. Ant Anstead
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