The record
The Société Nationale de Sauvetage en Mer — Les Sauveteurs en Mer — is France's volunteer sea-rescue service, with lifeboat stations around the whole coast. Alongside their boats the stations keep tractors and 4x4s for launching and recovery and for reaching casualties along the shore, and in the 1990s and 2000s a number of stations ran military-pattern Defender 110 soft tops, some of them former Armée de Terre vehicles kept in their olive drab with the SNSM diamond added.
The 2003 photograph shows one such vehicle, 6146 VG 80 (a Somme registration, on the Picardy coast), passing through a seaside town: olive Defender 110 soft top with a full canvas tilt and an external tubular roll cage over it, a bull bar with mesh across the grille and headlamps, a blue beacon and a loudspeaker on a bar above the windscreen, the SNSM diamond on the rear body sides, a round sticker on the rear corners, black steel wheels and a white French plate. Per the queue notes the model is listed under both the marine rescue group and the French military selector. The registry model reproduces that vehicle; the beacon is the only lamp it carries.
