More Landrovers

I’ve always stopped if I’ve wanted to engage four wheel drive in a Land Rover, but doing it while moving would be no worse than changing from low to high ratio on the transfer gearbox on the move, without using the clutch, and I’ve done that a few times. The reason for that is another story.

From time to time, the Evansganj Mission Hospital runs eye camps in some of the remoter villages. A visiting eye specialist doctor and a local optometrist, together with the Evansganj missionary doctor and some other Evansganj mission staff pile into a couple of Land Rovers, put all the equipment they need onto a big trailer behind one of the Land Rovers, and head off into the jungle.

A little aside: jungle doesn’t mean what you perhaps think it means. It’s a Hindi word – जंगल or jangal – meaning simply wilderness, not necessarily tropical rainforest. That said, the jungle around Evansganj is mostly thickly forested; but except during the monsoon, pretty dry.

On one occasion, I was invited to accompany the team to an eye camp in Parapani, a village thirty miles beyond Navadih. They were particularly keen that I should take some photographs, some for publicity material to help raise money for further eye camps, and some for training material for medical students. The latter involved taking photographs of eye operations in progress – very interesting, but not easy to get good pictures.

We didn’t leave Evansganj until an hour before sunset, after all the staff had had a day working in the hospital. It was dark before we got to Navadih, and the road beyond that point is really rough. Not to worry, Gopal is a really experienced driver.

The other Land Rover, with the big trailer, had left hours earlier. They didn’t want to drive that combination in the dark.

Ten miles beyond Navadih, Gopal pressed the clutch to change down a gear to descend into a ravine we had to cross – and the clutch pedal went to the floor without doing anything. He pushed the lever out of gear, turned off the engine, and braked to a halt.

“What’s the matter?” asked Dr Shah.

“Clutch failed. I’ll top up the fluid.” Gopal replied.

Gopal had hydraulic fluid in the toolbox. We got another three miles before the clutch failed again, and we ran out of clutch fluid long before we got to Parapani.

“We’re stuck,” Gopal said. “I’ll walk to Parapani, and bring the other Land Rover back to pick everyone up and take you all to Parapani, then tow this one back to Evansganj for repair.”

Well, I know Land Rovers pretty well. I’d driven a Land Rover without a clutch before – okay, a Series I with a mechanically operated clutch, not a Series II with a hydraulic one, but the gearbox is much the same, and the clutch becomes irrelevant when it’s permanently engaged.

“Don’t worry, Gopal, you can drive it without a clutch. I’ll explain how.”

But I ended up driving it myself.

With a low ratio, you can start the vehicle in gear – the starter motor doesn’t have a problem turning the engine and moving the whole vehicle, in first gear of low ratio. The difficult bit is changing gear, especially getting up from low ratio to high ratio. With no clutch, you have to push it out of gear, then very carefully match the engine revs for the new gear, and then push it into gear. Tricky, but doable.

I drove it back to Evansganj the same way, after the eye camp.

It needed a new clutch master cylinder – not an easy thing to get in India. I went all the way to Bombay (as Mumbai was then called) to try to get one. We could order one from England, but it would take ages to arrive and get through all the bureaucracy.

I’d had a good look at how it all worked before leaving for Bombay. I realized that with a fairly simple adaptor plate, a brake master cylinder out of a Mahindra could do the job equally well. I’d seen an engineering workshop in Evansganj that seemed to have the equipment needed to make the adaptor plate, although what they actually called themselves was a sewing machine repair workshop. When I got back, I went down there to see if they’d do it for me.

I didn’t arrive there until about six in the evening. We spent a good hour discussing the problem, drawing little diagrams on scraps of paper with a stub of pencil. I left the Land Rover’s dead master cylinder and a nice new Mahindra one with them, and they said they’d see what they could do.

I was staying at Uncle John’s. Chhoti left for work the following morning just after dawn. Not long afterwards a boy turned up at Uncle John’s house asking for me, saying there was a parcel for me at the hospital.

It was the two master cylinders, the Mahindra one bolted onto a beautifully made adaptor plate. It fitted perfectly, and I had the vehicle back on the road in no time.

I went down to the workshop to thank them, and see how much I owed them.

“Oh, nothing Miss. We only used a tiny bit of old scrap metal.”

“What about your time?”

“For the Mission Hospital? No charge.”

What more can you ask? They aren’t even Christians, they’re Sikhs.

Their lathe looks old and worn out, but they can do wonders with it. It’s a big lathe that they got ex-military surplus. It wasn’t even designed for precision work, but they’ve made their own jigs and steadies for it that let them work to very fine tolerances.

I don’t have a picture of the tiny girl who followed me for a long way in Bombay during that visit. Her motive wasn’t to have her picture taken, as it always was with the children in the villages.

I felt a tug at my kameej and looked behind me. She must have been about four. She looked up at me with big round eyes and said, “Das paise?”

Das paise means ten paise – one tenth of a rupee. Even at that time that was very little, but not absolutely nothing.

I didn’t want to give her das paise, because firstly I knew it would go to her big brother or someone like that, not to her, and secondly I’d end up being pestered by every beggar in Bombay. So I said, “Jao”, which means “go away”. She followed me, tugging at my kameej and saying, “Das paise?” – for about two miles. At that point I came across a chap selling oranges on the street – so I bought half a dozen, and gave her one. That didn’t go to her minder – she ate it there and then. You should have seen her face; it will stay with me forever.

One good thing about the early Land Rovers was the ease of maintenance. I could dismantle almost any part of mine down to the last nut and washer, and rebuild it in a few hours, using a very basic tool kit. There was nothing at all I couldn’t do in a couple of days, with no special tools that I couldn’t either buy cheaply or make myself quite easily. You need so much specialized equipment to work on modern ones that many jobs are simply not possible for a private individual.

The Land Rovers the Evansganj hospital had were old. Not as old as my own in England, but old. You could work on them. But in India, getting spares was a nightmare.

I reckon the hospital would be better off running Indian Mahindras, but you can’t tell them that. Land Rovers are British, they must be better. That attitude is far from universal in India, but it’s still quite common, and certainly strong in the Evansganj Christian community, despite Uncle John’s protestations.

To an extent, they’re right. The Mahindras are undoubtedly not as strong or as reliable as Land Rovers, but you can get the spares. They probably break down two or three times more frequently, but when they do, the spares are cheap and readily available.

I used to love those old Land Rovers. I’m not so keen on the more recent ones. Like other Chelsea tractors, they’re perfect for towing overweight caravans or fancy boats on motorways, but they’re not very good off road: too heavy, overpowered, and with too high a centre of mass (or centre of gravity as we used to say).

The latest Range Rovers don’t even have the ground clearance you need for typical off-road driving. That high centre of mass means they’re hopeless on steep sideways slopes, too (it also means they’re bad on the road, if you have to swerve at speed).

It was fun driving my old Land Rover cross country, but I regret it now. I didn’t feel guilty at the time, because I hadn’t thought about the issue at all. It was seeing the damage done by off-roaders in Iceland that made me think about it.

When we were driving on those green lanes in the 70s, we were doing so with the tolerance (possibly the ignorance) of the landowners. Theoretically we probably should have had their permission, which we never did. I think they’re pretty well all – very likely all – private roads, with no right of public vehicular access. (Who owns the land, when you’re talking about square miles of wilderness, is another interesting question that I don’t intend to go into here.)

At least I never did much damage to the tracks. I didn’t dig deep ruts or break through the cover of vegetation, because I didn’t suffer from wheelspin. Well, very rarely. That’s because the vehicle was much lighter and less powerful than modern 4x4s.

You don’t want lots of power for driving off road. It makes it much harder to avoid wheelspin, even with all your wheels driving. The combination of excessive weight with a tendency to suffer from wheelspin means that such vehicles dig themselves into the mud very easily, not only annoying the driver, but also damaging the track.

With skill and care, you can drive an overpowered 4x4 on mud and grass without wheelspin, but it’s not easy. Some of them have traction control systems that purport to prevent it, but in reality all they do is stop it quickly when it starts, which is better than nothing but still nowhere near as good as skilful driving and a sensible power to weight ratio. A skilful driver can see the road ahead and anticipate – an automatic system can only react to what’s already happened. And of course no amount of skilful driving can do anything about all that excess weight.

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