IT’S now five years since we cast ourselves adrift from the European Union. When we finally left in 2020 I suppose I ought to have been either excited or disappointed, but I was neither. Life goes on.
I expect I felt much the same way on the day we joined. I say “expect” because although I clearly remember what I was doing on January 1, 1973, becoming a European wasn’t top of my agenda. It was because that day happened to be my first day on the job as a newspaper reporter. Although I’d been signed up as an indentured trainee the previous summer, I had spent the rest of 1972 on block release at college. January 1 was my first day behind the desk as a “proper” reporter. Coincidentally, it was the last time I would work on January 1, because New Year’s Day became a Bank Holiday the following year.
The newspaper I first plied my trade with was the fishing publication Angling Times. The hot topic on the day we joined the Common Market (as it was known then) was sea anglers’ fears that foreign trawlers could now mop up all our fish stocks. In retrospect, their worries were justified, because that’s exactly what the foreign trawlers did do.
Of course, I had much bigger concerns. I was two days away from my 17th birthday when I would be legally allowed to ride my newly-purchased Honda CD175 motorbike, after an embarrassing year spent riding a moped.
Early in November 1971, when I was still 15 years old, I’d applied for my provisional driving licence, which would allow me to ride a motorbike up to 249.99 cc on L-plates once I reached my 16th birthday on January 3. My licence arrived a week later. But a week after that came the disastrous news that the government was changing the law. Concerned at the number of inexperienced 16-year-old motorcyclists killed or maimed being killed on our roads, they raised the age to 17 — to take effect from January 1. Two days before my 16th birthday! That was very unlucky for a teenager whose 16th birthday was January 3.
If only I had been born three days earlier. Instead, I was one of the very first UK 16-year-olds forced to suffer the indignity of riding a moped — in my case a 50cc Puch Maxi, which my dad kindly bought me as a reward for taking and passing my English and Maths O-Levels a year early, at 15. I’d somehow fluked a Grade 1 pass at English, which I used to my advantage in the spring of 1972 when I persuaded Angling Times editor, Mike Hughes, to take me on as a trainee reporter at the age of 16.
It also helped that I was a keen angler and a few years earlier I’d won an Angling Times competition to spend a day’s fishing with a famous angler, Fred J Taylor. Precocious brat that I was, I also mentioned that I knew two of the paper’s senior journalists, Chris Dawn and David Nash, who’d I’d met while fishing the Great Ouse Relief Channel with my schoolmate Neville Fickling, who’d just happened to break the British zander record twice in the space of a few months.
Although I’d missed out on my motorbike licence by two days, I’d been taken on as a journalist a full two years earlier than the usual starting age of 18. Perhaps I wasn’t so unlucky after all.
Best of all, I was making my own way in the world. At 16 I’d been bored of life as a schoolboy, which was why I was so keen to blag a job. I’d already decided that I wanted to be a journalist, so why wait another two years?
I worked briefly at the paper’s Peterborough offices (actually a wooden shed next to the parent company Emap’s giant printing press) before going to college at Harlow, in Essex. As the youngest student on the NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists), I was rather spoiled by my older classmates as well as the tutors. Besides teaching me journalism, law and public affairs, I honed those other essential journalistic skills: drinking and smoking. There was no turning back.
The time flew by very quickly and soon it was 1973. I was back from college, traded in my moped for a proper motorbike — that Honda CD175 — and was able to start driving lessons and save up for a car. Meanwhile, like all bike-mad teenagers from the flat Norfolk Fens, I couldn’t wait to head to the nearest steep hill — Knight’s Hill, on the edge of King’s Lynn — to see how fast it would go flat-out downhill, with me lying forward on the handlebars for streamlining.
The answer was 85 mph, according to the speedometer under my chin. That sort of stuff was important at 17. Who cared about Europe — or any other “grown-up” issues, come to that?
I do get irritated by ill-researched television programmes fronted by presenters who weren’t even born in the 1970s trotting out the cliche that it was a dreary, grey decade, best forgotten. They’ll tell you that back in 1973, inflation was in double figures and the whole country regularly ground to a halt because of industrial disputes. Back then, the future was supposed to look bleak for all sorts of reasons but, to a teenager, politics was just background noise. I can assure you that 1970s Britain was a very exciting place to be. If I could travel back in time, I’d be straight back there.
But I did eventually grow up and appreciate Europe. And I certainly enjoyed exploring it by Land Rover. My love affair with the marque began in 1995 with the loan of a shiny new 300Tdi Discovery from Land Rover’s press fleet, which I promptly took on a month-long tour of the British Isles, including Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. And England, of course.
M259 KAC was the first Land Rover I ever got to write about. The day after I had to give it back I went shopping for a Land Rover of my own. I settled upon a Range Rover Classic V8. It had a three-speed automatic gearbox and a very thirsty 3.5-litre petrol engine that returned less than 15 mpg, but I loved it. I had become an enthusiast and there was no cure. Less than two years later I became a Land Rover journalist on Land Rover Owner International magazine and got plenty of excuses to drive my favourite vehicles in Europe.
How the memories come flooding back. I remember exploring the West of Ireland in a very early V8 Discovery and finding a green road across the astonishing limestone pavement known as The Burren in County Clare, just as the sun was starting to set over the wild Atlantic coast and the soaring 700ft Cliffs of Moher.
In 2001 I took delivery of a brand-new Td5 Defender 90 and decided to run it in by joining an overland humanitarian mission to Bosnia via France, Germany, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia before returning on a more northerly route that took in Luxembourg and Belgium, too. That put more than 2000 miles on the clock.
The European nation I visited most of all was Portugal — Britain’s best friend (we’ve been allies since 1386) and a nation that adores Land Rovers. They are everywhere. The Portuguese are also the biggest fans of the legendary Camel Trophy and staged recreations at every opportunity among the mountains and forests that cover much of this wonderful country.
Portugal’s near-neighbour, Spain, was also a favourite. I was there for the launch of the Range Rover Sport in 2003 and back again a year or so later on a recce in the mountains inland from the Costa Blanca. Land Rover legend Roger Crathorne took me to an off-road paradise just a few miles inland from the fleshpots of Benidorm, where we drove a pair of ex-G4 Defender 110s down a dried-up river bed where no vehicle had ever travelled before — or so we thought. About half a mile downstream from the nearest access point we came across the twisted remains of a long-dead Range Rover.
Local enquiries revealed it had been washed away in severe floods a few years earlier and had been lost without a trace, until we found it. A few months later, Roger and I mounted a rescue mission, with a hand-picked team, in which we succeeded in removing the wreck from the pristine environment. What an adventure that was!
Of course I will return to Europe. It may require a bit more paperwork and bureaucracy, but it’s worth the effort. I’ll only be following a family tradition, after all.
Back in 2019 my elder brother, Ray, after spending all of his adult life in and around Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, upped sticks and moved to Gozo, a small, sun-kissed island off the coast of Malta. Ray, who is 13 years older than me, decided that if he had to retire, he might as well do so somewhere warm. Since emigrating, he has bombarded my inbox with snaps of Land Rovers taken on his mobile phone.
One day he called me to tell me he had heard of a local man who owned a “1945 Land Rover”. It was, he was told, “the oldest Land Rover in the world”. He promised to investigate.
I was excited. For more than 20 years I’d heard rumours that one of the original centre-steer prototypes was supposed to have ended up in Gozo. A colleague, Mark Dixon, even considered mounting an expedition to Gozo a few years ago, on the strength of those rumours, in an attempt to find it.
Obviously, the Land Rover my brother heard about wasn’t a 1945 model — the centre-steer prototype wasn’t built until 1947 — but the local could have simply got the date wrong, I reasoned. Sadly, Ray was unable to find the man, or his mystery Land Rover. So a mystery it remains. But that’s not so bad: I’d argue that we all need a few unsolved mysteries in our lives.
These days, Land Rovers have replaced motorbikes as the subject of my automotive affections. Over the years I’ve been involved in car accidents in which, if I’d been on a bike instead of protected by a cocoon of steel, I’d either have been maimed or killed. No matter how good a rider or driver you are, you are at the mercy of other drivers. And some of them are ill-disguised psychopaths.
Exploring off the beaten track in my 1984 Land Rover, with fishing tackle in the back, is my idea of fun. Preferably with 1970s music playing.
The moral of this story? That being in or out of Europe doesn’t make much difference. What matters is that you take your chances — and remember that the very best decade is one you spent your teens in.
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