► Month four with the Land Rover Defender
► We visit the Severn Area Rescue Association
► This year’s winter was no match for the Defender
And there it was – a weather forecast which suggested it was going to snow the next day. This made me very excited. I packed the Defender the night before with shovel, tow rope, wellies, balaclava, flares, St Bernard and dried foods in preparation for a day saving the people of Rutland from snowy graves. What a hero my Defender and I would be as we hauled these frozen unfortunates out of ditches, or ploughed through seemingly impenetrable drifts to rescue shivering grannies from ice-bound cottages.
So with the uncontrollable excitement of a kid at Christmas, I leapt out of bed the next morning and threw open the curtains to see what the world had in store for me, and what I could do to help. Sunshine. Mild, gentle breezes. Blue skies.
Sometimes I feel I’m driving around, looking like the equivalent of a frogman going to the local swimming baths in full North Sea rig-inspecting clobber. Just my luck to be running a car built to smash through the conditions that test the very limit of human survivability in a winter that is the warmest and wimpiest on record. Perhaps that’s what has actually done for the Defender in the end – not EU crash protection, or emissions, or production line capacity, but a half-baked climate.
But of course, what makes the Defender one of the greatest cars ever built is, like some particularly strident fungus, its ability to adapt and thrive in any environment. It is why it has been the rescue vehicle of choice around the globe for innumerable decades. And despite its end, there is no end, for there are thousands of Landies still out there helping to save lives. Most cars as they get old become gilded relics, rolled out on sunny days and striped lawns for rich people to fight over ownership. Land Rovers just keep getting more battered, just keep saving the world.
Having failed to provide any meaningful rescue services myself, we chugged over to Bristol to see how the experts do it. There are eight Defenders in the Severn Area Rescue Association (SARA), a volunteer lifeboat organisation that not only provides rescue services on one of the most treacherous waterways anywhere in the world, but also on the cliffs, mountains, rivers and lakes that accompany the banks of the Severn.
There are two Defenders at their Beachley HQ, sited directly under the formidable structure of the original Severn Bridge, while the others are based at the five stations up and down the estuary, where nearly 200 personnel deal with 300 callouts a year.
It’s a brutal environment where fast thinking and intimate knowledge of the tides and mudflats are essential. Only an estuary in Nova Scotia has a tidal rise greater than the Severn, and when it comes inhere, it is remorseless. Not only does it fill up in barely two hours, but it comes at the unsuspecting from all directions: racing in from the sea but insidiously up through the sand too, turning solid ground into a porridge that sucks victims into it.
Mervyn Fleming, Commander SARA (Area West), wouldn’t run any other vehicles than Defenders to operate in these conditions.
‘We use the Land Rovers as workhorses, because they will carry five people and a small amount of equipment inside, and a fair amount on the roof rack, and can tow a boat, caravan or trailer too,’ he says. ‘They are just so adaptable: we put racking systems in them and they carry a very heavy load, with a winch and a high-velocity pump as well, stakes for driving into the ground and the roof rack for two stretchers, and a mud rescue platform.’
The Landies, one of which is a P reg, ex Western Power vehicle with 138,000 miles on the clock (it might have been round the clock a couple of times, half-jokes Mervyn) and the other, a sprightly new model from 2009, not only tow the boats, but pull victims clean out of the sludge using the winch. A long airbed, blown up with a compressed gas cylinder can be rolled out over the mud, allowing rescuers to get to those stranded.
As the water drains away, I eye up the foreshore for a spot of off-roading. Mervyn is having none of it. The mud looks solid enough, but it is three feet until you hit solid ground, and even the Defender’s off-road ability won’t get it through that. But he’s convinced they are still the best rescue vehicles in the world.
‘The thing is, they just keep going and going. There’s a body of opinion which says Japanese cars are better and somebody offered us one once. We said well, thanks very much, we can use it, but we’ll always need a Land Rover to get it out of trouble.
‘You’ve got to love it, look after it and maintain it. And along the motorway with a boat on the back, everything will overtake you. But it will get you there. And then when you get there, it can go along a towpath, and then it will do a three-point turn on the towpath to get the boat into the water. I’d question some of the more modern cars’ breadth of capability. And of course, it has one of those engines where you can take a bit off, clean it, and put it back on again.’
We help out launching one of the boats during a training exercise, and I do my best not to reverse their prize craft clean off the slipway. There are appreciative murmurs from Mervyn and his team at our slick new Defender and its grabbing tyres, sturdy roofrack, snorkel and underbody protection. I think they’ve already got it lined up for a few jobs and I wonder whether I might be going home on the train at this rate.
Like all lifeboat organisations, SARA is a charity that relies on donations, and as you watch that huge body of water rushing past at 12mph, with the thought that these volunteers will rush out into it at a moment’s notice, I can’t help but feel a bit inadequate in our luxuriously appointed Defender. I’m sure Land Rover wouldn’t mind me lending it for a bit, would they?
On the way back from Bristol (in Defender, not on South West Trains) I go cross country and due to heavy overnight rain encounter some flooded roads near home. The water rushing off the fields and across the lane was knee deep and some ramblers were turning everyone back. As I approached, they gave me a knowing look. They knew there would be none of that namby pamby nonsense for me.
Our Defender cruised through the sea of muddy water as if it didn’t exist and as I reached dry land, an old lady in a Peugeot 206 wound down her window.
‘Do you think I will get through?’ she asked.
I chuckled.
‘I’m sorry my dear, but I wouldn’t risk it in that particular vehicle,’ I sagely opined. ‘Best turn round and take the road up over Windmill Hill instead. That should be clear. Safe passage!’
‘Thank you, young man,’ she said. And so, off she trundled, safely heading home to her loving family, not screaming as her little car was swept upstream in a turbulent torrent of murderous water. Just another day in the life of a hero…
From the driving seat
+ Surprisingly stable motorway cruiser
– Pathetic winter has been no match for it
– ‘Handling’ at any speed is comically bad
– Van engine is noisy and thirsty
Logbook: Land Rover Defender 110 Station Wagon manual
Engine: 2198cc 16v, 118bhp @ 3500rpm, 262lb ft @ 2000rpm
Transmission: 6-speed manual, four-wheel drive
Stats: N/A 0-62mph, 90mph, 295g/km
Price: £43,495
As tested: £43,495
Miles this month: 824
Total miles: 2243
Our mpg: 23.6
Official mpg: 25.5
Fuel this month: £161.16
Extra costs: £0
Read more from the May 2016 issue of CAR magazine
