PANDA PATROL

By the early Sixties, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the bobby to cover his beat because there simply weren’t enough police officers to go around. Fearing a public outcry from officers no longer being seen on the streets, Unit Beat Policing was introduced.

With the use of a car, a single officer could cover a far greater area. The idea was not for them to drive around continuously, but to arrive at an area, patrol it on foot, before returning to the car and driving on to the next patch. Handheld phones and a two-piece radio in the car would prove vital to keeping the officers in touch with their station.

Around this time (1964), Chief Constable of the Lancashire County Constabulary, Colonel Eric St Johnson, noted that American police cars were immediately identifiable as such, thanks to their black bodies and white doors. Deciding that Britain needed something similarly recognisable, he took a pair of Ford Zephyr 4 MkIIIs into his workshop and sprayed them light blue and white. The panda livery was born.

The first official panda cars were introduced two years later when Lancashire bought a batch of 175 Ford Anglias. Soon after, almost every force in the land adopted Unit Beat Policing, with officers driving around in easily-spotted blue and white panda cars.

Incidentally, the term ‘panda’ caught on because the cars were seen first by the public in newspapers and on television sets as being black and white – blue therefore appearing as black.

Joseph Gabrielli, the owner of the Anglia pictured here, says: ‘ The police did decide to use the term “panda” to their benefit. They explained that it stood for “Patrol And Neighbourhood Development Area car”.’

‘ The British police has a phenomenal history and I’ve always been a fan of police cars. When you drive around in a car like this or park up in public areas, passers-by have such warmth towards these cars – even if they might not have been born when they were new. Maybe it’s because it echoes an era of better times – the nostalgia of policing when it was more of a community thing.’

Joseph bought his Anglia Super in 2016 in a less than ideal state: ‘It was bad. It had been modified with a Pinto engine and painted in Dulux kitchen paint. It took a long while to get it to a point where I could just start to prime it.’

Joseph chose to persevere, though, because he had a plan to produce an Anglia that was faithful to the original spec of a typical 1967 panda car.