Cops and Robbers: The Story of the British Police Car. Ant Anstead
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!
The Noddy Bike
The Unit Beat Policing, or UBP, scheme changed policing in the UK as well as providing a whole new livery and type of police car to talk about in this book! However, the very beginnings of the concept of mobile policing using a cheap economical vehicle so that a wider area could be covered was the quite wonderfully named ‘Noddy Bike’ scheme. From the early 1960s bobbies in selected areas were given Velocette LE motorcycles in an effort to achieve greater mobility. The name came about because those constables riding them were exempt from saluting senior officers, this being a potentially lethal practice while riding a bike at 40mph! They were allowed, instead, to merely nod their head, a massive change in protocol which, if we had the time and space, could be argued to be the beginning of the end of the old police services’ quasi-military structure … The LE (which amazingly enough apparently stood for ‘little engine’) was introduced in 1948 and was a strong, tough little bike with a smooth and very quiet running transverse, water-cooled, side-valve, flat-twin, 4-stroke engine of, initially, 149cc, although later versions used a 250cc unit. It wasn’t a bike for bikers but rather a machine for transport, and it added as much civilisation and comfort to the motorcycling experience as it was possible to do in that era, originally being fitted with a hand-operated starting lever, for instance, although this design was later dropped in favour of a kick-start. It started the police on a road towards mechanised movement for beat bobbies, but was used mainly in rural areas and by no means exclusively to move between beats in the way the UBP was developed. It’s important to say it wasn’t the start of panda cars, although people often speak of them as such on the web, but it’s equally fair to say that they were a signpost on the road towards the panda car, and no discussion of this policing theory and practice is complete without at least a nod to the Noddy bike.
What is it that stirs emotions in people when they refer to Traffic cars and the officers who drive them? Do they hold some mystical powers, or is it just because, no matter what the era, the cars used are top-of-the-range motors with the performance to outgun just about everything else on the road? Whatever it is, there is a definite fascination about all things traffic – both amongst the police and the general public – from the cars used to the type of work involved. Fast cars and car chases captivate us; it’s certainly part of the job I loved doing – just look how popular those fly-on-the-wall TV documentaries are, such as Traffic Cops and Police Interceptors.
Before we look at the cars, though, here’s a quick history lesson on the origins of the Traffic Division itself. In 1930, the government introduced the first Road Traffic Act, but it was Section 57(4) that was of particular interest to the police. It decreed that advances towards any expenses incurred by the police in the provision and maintenance of vehicles or equipment could be made out of the Road Fund (Vehicle Excise Duty). The Home Office proposed that annual grants would be paid in advance to cover vehicles running 12,000 miles a year: £60 per annum for solo motor bicycles; £80 for combination motorcycles; and £120 for motor cars. Up until this time each force would have purchased the occasional car as and when their own funds allowed in order to help combat the ‘growing menace of the motor car’, the numbers of which were expanding at an alarming rate. The Act now gave the police the necessary funds to buy a number of vehicles whose sole purpose was the enforcement of road traffic regulations, thus forming the very first Traffic Divisions. And so a new chapter in the history of British policing was born.
Many forces opted to use motorcycle combinations to begin with, but most of these were soon abandoned in favour of cars, which were seen as much more practical. For the first few years most forces only tinkered with the idea of using vehicles, until after the end of World War II. From then on the idea really became a necessity, as the growth in motorised transport started to have a big effect on the country. Police forces soon started to realise that they required the services of specially trained officers driving high-powered cars capable of getting them to a traffic accident or other serious incident as quickly and safely as possible. Officers were specially selected and sent on intensive advanced driving courses at Hendon for the Met and other regional driving schools like Preston and Maidstone.
Since those early days the role of the Traffic Division (today referred to as the Roads Policing Unit) has grown beyond all recognition and the diversity of cars and equipment used during the last 70 years or so would fill a decent-sized book in its own right. The role basically includes attending and dealing with all fatal and serious accidents, motorway policing, abnormal load escorts, VIP escorts, ambulance escorts, hazardous chemical transportation enforcement, overweight vehicles, HGV enforcement (including foreign goods vehicles), roadworks supervision, enforcement of road traffic laws and driver education, armed response and to generally be the flagship face of the force.