The record
Alongside the RAF, the Royal Navy ran its own fleet of Land Rovers from the Series I era onward: ship-to-shore liaison cars, dockyard utilities, bomb disposal wagons and - at the Royal Naval Air Stations of the Fleet Air Arm - airfield fire and rescue trucks. Naval shore vehicles wore a distinctive gloss dark blue with white ROYAL NAVY or RN lettering, and the rescue trucks added beacons, searchlights, winches and prominent RESCUE signage so they could race ahead of the heavier appliances to a crashed or ditched aircraft, a lineage that later ran through blue-and-red Series III fire tenders to the shared RAF/RN TACR crash trucks.
SSK 357 is a preserved Series II 88in hard top presented in this Royal Naval rescue configuration: gloss dark navy with a white roof, an illuminated ROYAL NAVY RESCUE roof box, RN door lettering, amber beacon, twin wing-mounted searchlights, mesh lamp guards, twin spare wheels on the bonnet and a front-mounted winch rigged with rope. It is a familiar sight at south-coast heritage events, photographed at Portsmouth Armed Forces Day in June 2013 and displayed at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard beside HMS Victory - the setting of the reference photograph for this record.
The truck's original naval unit and service history have not been traced in public sources, and its civilian-format registration suggests a post-service re-registration; it is documented here as a preserved representative of the RN airfield rescue Land Rovers rather than as a vehicle with a verified individual service record.
