Military With Bob Morrison
Bob uncovers a restored 1991 Winter Defender
“Prior to the Iron Curtain falling, it was the Series III models which Britain’s specialist winter warfare formations used”
BY MY reckoning I have penned military features for some 222 issues of LRM but, as far as I can remember, I do not seem to have concentrated much on the early 1990s Winterised Defender model used by the British Army and Royal Marines.
A few months after I transferred allegiance to this magazine, in early 1999, I was fortunate to be around when Land Rover signed off the successor to the Winter Defender, nicknamed the Winter Wader Wolf, and it was this new model that I mostly pointed my cameras at from this point on.
Prior to the Iron Curtain falling and the Cold War drawing to a close on the cusp of the 1990s, it was primarily the Series III Land Rover models that Britain’s specialist winter warfare formations used as their basic light and medium utility vehicles. The two key formations tasked with reinforcing NATO’S remote and vulnerable Northern Flank in times of crisis were 3 Commando Brigade, an amphibious force comprised primarily of Royal Marines with Commandtrained Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers plus Royal Netherlands Marine Corps units attached, and the multinational ACE (Allied Command Europe) Mobile Force, to which the British Army contributed specially trained units.
As the Royal Marines had a dual role, comprising both Arctic defence and outof-area amphibious operations, they had a specific need for Land Rovers that could be delivered by landing craft through up to five feet (1500 mm) of breaking surf, so the bulk of their fleet was Winterised and Waterproofed. ACE Mobile Force [Land] or AMF [L] units, on the other hand were not expected to arrive over the beach in the vanguard, so were not configured to be capable of deep wading, but as Northern Norway was one of the areas they were tasked to defend they did need kit to be Winterised.
When the coil-sprung One Ten and Ninety models were being procured in the mid-1980s to replace the bulk of the early Series III and the last of the Series IIA Land Rovers in British military service, it was discovered that their modern design made them much harder to waterproof than their more rudimentary predecessors. When I visited ATTURM, the Royal Marines’ Amphibious Trials & Training Unit, at their Instow facility in 1988 the specialist team of military and civilian design engineers based there were devising solutions to the problems and by 1990 they had cracked it.
That year, around the time that Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait and Britain joined the Coalition to subsequently kick them out, in what many now refer to as the first Gulf War, an order was placed by UK MOD for a specialist batch of around 600 militarised Winterised Defender 90 and Defender 110 Land Rovers. Of that number, which mostly had **KJ** registration plates, those earmarked for service with the Commandos were subsequently sent to the REME 27 District Workshops at Warminster where they were retro-fitted with a semipermanent waterproofing kit. I will cover this batch in a future issue.
The restored vehicle featured this month, registration number 72KJ88, is one of the unmodified batch, designated Truck Utility Medium, FFR, Winterised, Hard Top, 12/24V 4X4 Land Rover 110 Diesel, and records show it entered service on
Macrh 28, 1991. According to its (Unclassified) MERLIN Management Information data it was cast on May 1, 2001 and disposed of on September 12 that year. By now the Wolf model Winter Wader Wolf successor had replaced most, though by no means all, of the now ten-year-old Winterised Defender fleet.
The current owner of 72KJ88 is Nick Hamilton, of the East Midlands-based Callsign Alpha living history group, who used to own the late Series III, 61KB39, which we featured in our April 2013 issue. Nick says: “That one had been barn stored for about ten years. I restored it back to full operational use and it was eventually purchased by the Ashworth Barracks Museum of the Victoria Cross Trust as a display vehicle.”
Asked about his current show Land Rover, Nick says: “It’s a straightforward Winterised, as opposed to a Winter Wader, which means that the vehicle has the benefit of twin radiators in the rear and under the seat box; there’s an Arctic heater in the sump, so you can warm the oil up; it’s got heated front and rear screens and the standalone Webasto heater can either be run with the engine on or off”.
When I visited Nick, and his son Robert, to photograph their Callsign Alpha Land Rovers at a former military storage facility not too far from their Mansfield homes, it was just before the start of the 2017 show season and the backs of their vehicles were full of display props and personal kit which had been in storage over the winter. It was therefore not really feasible to photograph the floor heaters which run fore and aft on the cargo bed under the front edges of the rear seats, neither was it possible to photograph Nick’s array of working radios which were buried underneath half a tonne of carefully-packed kit awaiting the first show on the circuit.
Radios not being an area I am particularly familiar with, I asked Nick to explain a little about the comms system: “It has twin 12 Volt batteries for the vehicle and then for the FFR (Fitted For Radio) side there’s a huge 90 amp, 24 Volt generator. At the moment both systems are fully operational. The radios all work in the vehicle and we use it at shows with Callsign Alpha; an essential service that we provide as a source of raising money for the Royal British Legion, something we’ve been doing since around 2010”.
We are able to tell from the records that Nick’s Defender spent the bulk of its service life with the Royal Engineers, first being issued on October 28, 1991, to the Independent Field Troop RE serving with ACE Mobile Force [Land], before on May 25, 1995, being transferred to 69 (Gurkha) Field Squadron of 36 Engineer Regiment RE. It appears the Gurkha Engineers kept it until April 2000, before returning it to storage with TFSU (Theatre Fleet Support Unit). The final MERLIN entry for 72KJ88 shows it going to British Car Auctions in August the following year for sale that September.
In the early 90s I spent a fair bit of time working with AMF [L] on a number of
“We are able to tell from the records that Nick’s Defender spent the bulk of service life with the Royal Engineers”
exercises in Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Turkey and the UK while researching a pictorial book for Concord Publications on the topic but, although I photographed quite a few Land Rovers, I have yet to spot Nick’s Defender in any of my shots. I have little doubt however that it will have been to these countries, and no doubt to Norway as well, as the small unit it belonged to played a key part in the UK contribution to that unique multinational formation.
The Gurkha Engineers of 69 Squadron, which was put under command of UKbased 36 Regiment RE in 1993 and moved to new barracks in Maidstone in 1994, deployed first to Bosnia on Op Resolute in March 1996 and then to Kosovo on Op Agricola in 1999. Although we have no firm proof, it is a fair bet that Nick’s well-travelled Winterised Defender can add these two operational deployments to the list of countries that it served in.
Should any former Royal Engineer who served with these two specialist units have any photos, or memories, of this Land Rover please contact us and we will pass on details to Nick.