DAVE PHILLIPS

ONE of my favourite features in LRM is Richard Hall’s Norfolk Garage. It’s the monthly diary of a traditional Land Rover mechanic working on uncomplicated classic vehicles and it’s always both entertaining and informative. I never read it without learning something new about my favourite vehicles and how they work.

But even Richard gets things wrong. In last month’s Norfolk Garage he said: “Series axles are all descended from the original 1948 Series I, and right up to the end of Series production they were assembled with British Standard Fine (BSF) fasteners, a thread type now long-obsolete and largely forgotten”.

Forgotten everywhere except in angling, that is. Even today, 3/8” BSF is the standard thread used by the fishing tackle industry for bank-sticks, landing nets, bite alarms and all the other bankside kit that requires assembling and disassembling. It’s a reminder of the days when the Birmingham area (more specifically, Redditch) was the centre of the UK’S fishing tackle industry, mainly because that’s where the world’s finest fish hooks were made (as a by-product of the sewing needles industry).

The idiosyncratic use of an otherwise obsolete thread in a very specialised field is obviously an anachronism, but there’s no harm in that. The dictionary definition of ‘anachronism’ is ‘something that belongs or seems to belong to another time’, which applies so much to the West Midlands – once the workshop of the world. Brum’s metalmaking tradition dates back to before the advent of the internal combustion engine, but reached its zenith in the 20th century with a host of advanced and world-beating cars and motorbikes. It’s also where Land Rovers were invented and built, of course. We used to call them “Solihull’s Finest” – and meant what we said.

The decline of those industries has occurred in my lifetime. The decline of the West Midlands as the place to build Land Rovers is much more recent. The Solihull factory was once Land Rover’s Mecca, but since 2007 UK production is shared with Halewood, on Merseyside, and now new Defender (and Discovery) is being built in Slovakia, which I find rather depressing.

We are living at the tail end of what can only be described as the golden era of motoring. It was an era that began just after World War II, when car ownership came within the grasp of the ordinary family. Coincidentally, it was when Land Rover started production. Back then, cars were simple to maintain and the roads were empty – a wonderful combination for the new motorists. Dad would spend Saturday tinkering under the bonnet, then take the family out for a Sunday afternoon drive to enjoy the fun of the open road. Happy days indeed.

It couldn’t last, not least because car ownership continued to grow exponentially, outpacing new road schemes. The misery of traffic congestion took the joy out of driving for most, although not for us Land Rover enthusiasts. We loved the fact that our cars of choice were rather slow and basic and simply shunned the main roads; many of us turned to driving greenlanes to enjoy the countryside in peace.

Meanwhile, the British automotive industry virtually disappeared due to a combination of factors, too long to list here but with government intervention (that is interference) looming large. Thankfully Land Rovers lived on, but the simple models most of us loved are now out of production – again, partly due to legislation – but not wholly. After all, no government ever decreed that every Land Rover must be filled with ever-morecomplex expensive electronics. These are the vehicles that a traditionalist like Richard Hall refuses to work on in his Norfolk Garage.

In the same issue of LRM, Richard pointed out that as recently as the 1980s you would find BSF and Whitworth (BSW), Unified National Fine and Coarse (UNF and UNC), British Association (BA) and metric threaded fasteners, all on the same Series III. There’s something reassuringly eccentric about that for traditionalists.

Make the most of enjoying traditional Land Rovers and indeed internal combustion engines, because their days are numbered. The biggest danger isn’t electric propulsion, which is inevitable, but an anti-4x4 movement that is growing in strength. It began in Germany, where Green party activists want SUVS banned from cities – a cause that has been embraced by Greenpeace, which recently blocked a shipment of SUVS in Bremerhaven, as a publicity stunt. A week later, an estimated 20,000 anti-suv protestors stormed Frankfurt Motor Show as Chancellor Angela Merkel toured the stands.

These days, protest movements tend to take on a momentum of their own. It could be only a matter of time before it spreads beyond Germany’s borders and SUV owners are persecuted. With bloated luxury Range Rovers in the Land Rover family, we could be particularly vulnerable.

This is indeed the end of a golden era. Let’s get out there while we still can.

“We are living at the tail end of the golden era of motoring. It began just after WWII, when car ownership came within grasp of the ordinary family ”