The 32 seater Land Rover
The 32-seater Land-Rover was used at Woburn Abbey in the early 1960s to take visitors on tours of the deer park. A wildlife magazine publisher promoted the Woburn Abbey Safari Service, both as an attraction in its own right but also as a sales opportunity for his glossy colour photo magazines. This was before Chipperfields established the drive-through Safari Park, with more exotic creatures such as lions and elephants.
The vehicle was based on a Land Rover IIa Forward Control flatbed truck.
16 people could be carried on the flatbed in two rows of outward-facing back-to-back wooden seats.
They had a canvas top to shield them from the sun and/or rain, and the seats were reached by a pull-out ladder at the back of
the flatbed.
The capacity of the vehicle was doubled by a further row of seats on each edge of the flatbed, with passengers putting their feet on fold-down footrests mounted on outriggers. When lowered, these extended the width of the vehicle to some 7½ feet — strictly against Construction & Use Regulations, but as it was only being driven in that way on the private lands of the Abbey, this didn’t matter.
The 32 seater FC.
Each tour of the park looked at the varieties of deer that had been established there by successive Dukes of Bedford, although it was inevitably the cuddly kamikaze rabbits that ran across in front of the truck at the last minute that excited the most interest, and woe betide the poor driver who threatened one with his front wheels (which were, of course, almost behind him!)
It wasn’t the only problem being an ‘experienced driver-guide’ — the FC is almost certainly more stable than it felt from the drivers seat,
but there was always the thought that if it did roll you were going to kill at least 8 people on the outriggers on the
downstream side. There was always a tendency for the driver to lean into the bend motorcycle-style in an instinctive attempt to keep the vehicle on an even keel.
When he was also talking about deer into a gooseneck microphone and doing an on-the-move range change from high to low ratio with the other hand, it became quite
exciting.
The back-to-back seating layout had a major disadvantage in that you could guarantee that only 16 people at a time could see anything interesting, and by the time you’d turned the vehicle round for the other side to have a look, the exotic deer or whatever had wandered away. For this reason, and the comparative ease of getting a larger load of passengers on and off, most drivers favoured the converted Admiralty bus. Based on a Bedford RL chassis, it was given 4WD from a military truck and all the windows were taken out to aid photography. It performed very well off road, but the long wheelbase meant that it was actually possible to go up a gear and down again between the front and rear axles negotiating a tricky spot.
7 species of deer, and a handful of bad-tempered bison, couldn’t compete with elephants and lions, and the service didn’t survive beyond the introduction of the Safari Park. I understand the vehicle was subsequently fitted with a box body, and used as a support vehicle for a circumnavigation of Britain’s coastline. Rumour says that it destroyed its gearbox on a Welsh beach, and was abandoned there.
The 32 seater FC.
If anyone knows the current whereabouts of AXC573B, we’d love to know.
GRAEME ALDOUS.
