The record
When Land Rover replaced the Series III with the coil-sprung One Ten in 1983, police forces followed the same path they had trodden since the Series I: the long-wheelbase station wagon made an ideal rural patrol, motorway incident and foul-weather vehicle, and Land Rover offered police-specification builds directly from the factory. Upland forces in particular - covering moor, fell and exposed high-level motorway - kept 4x4 Land Rovers on strength alongside their conventional traffic cars.
C931 MHH is one such vehicle: a Land Rover One Ten station wagon registered in 1985/86 on a Carlisle-issue plate and operated by Cumbria Constabulary, whose crest it carries on the doors within the force's white livery with an orange-and-blue chequered waist band, POLICE roof box with an oversized blue rotating beacon, twin roof spotlights and window grilles. A widely reproduced press photograph - the reference for this record - shows it halted on a coned-off carriageway of the M6 in the fells, the kind of high-ground motorway duty (the M6 over Shap is England's highest motorway ground) for which Cumbria kept 4x4s available when its Ford traffic fleet could not cope.
The individual vehicle's later history is not recorded; the type it represents - the white police One Ten/110 station wagon - remained a fixture of British upland policing through the Defender era, and preserved examples of similar 1980s police Land Rovers survive in collections such as the West Midlands Police Museum.
