The record
The Royal Navy has cleared bombs, mines and other ordnance from British beaches, harbours and inshore waters since the Second World War, and from the 1970s the work has been organised around regional clearance-diving units. The Northern Diving Group, based at HMNB Clyde (Faslane) on the Gareloch, covers Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north of England; sister groups covered the south-west (Plymouth) and the south-east (Portsmouth). The units respond to roughly a hundred callouts a year between them, dealing with everything from wartime sea mines and torpedoes to grenades and improvised devices reported by the Coastguard, fishermen or the public. In 2022 the diving groups were reorganised into the Diving & Threat Exploitation Group.
For road moves the teams have long relied on Land Rovers: a 110 station wagon or hardtop can carry a diving and EOD team, its stores and a roof-racked inflatable boat down a slipway or straight onto sand, which is exactly what these callouts demand. Photographs taken on a Cumbrian beach on 12 August 2010 show a Northern Diving Group Defender 110 station wagon in white with a yellow flash, ROYAL NAVY lettering, an explosives hazard placard on the rear side panel and blue emergency lamps, with a Gemini-type inflatable strapped to a full-length roof rack, working an item found by the local Coastguard. The vehicles are described as having previously been finished in the Navy's dark blue.
A well-documented example of the type in its later livery is RV52 FOM, a 2002 Defender 110 hardtop photographed at Plymouth in April 2008. It carries an illuminated BOMB DISPOSAL sign between blue beacons, blue-and-yellow chequered ('Battenburg') side markings over white, a full-length roof gantry, a mesh-guarded windscreen, a winch and a front skid plate. Land Rovers in this role have since largely been displaced across the UK forces by Ford Ranger and Toyota Hilux pickups and by purpose-built EOD vans, but the Defender remained the standard Royal Navy EOD 4x4 for the whole Defender production run.
