Army Fire Service HCB-Angus FC

The Army Fire Service — the military brigade that covered depots, ranges and camps before the Defence Fire Service absorbed it — bought Land Rover Forward Controls as light appliances for the same reason the county brigades did: they reached the places on Salisbury Plain that a conventional pump could not. This one is a 1973 Series IIB Forward Control, with the 2.6-litre six-cylinder petrol engine, a two-speed transfer box with selectable four-wheel drive, and a power take-off for the fire pump.

HCB-Angus of Totton built the body: a crew compartment behind the cab, open equipment lockers, a Godiva pump at the rear rated at 350 gallons a minute at 10 bar, and ladders on the roof. It served in the Salisbury area, and when the army was finished with it, it went to the Channel Tunnel construction site as a first-response appliance — a works fire engine for one of the largest civil engineering jobs of the century.

It was restored around twenty years before the sale listing that documents it, and had by then stood outside for ten, to the detriment of its bulkhead.