Welcome to the Anglia
Police Car part of the site. In this area of the
site, you will find some
Adverts, Articles, Models and Photo's associated
with the Ford Anglia as a Police Car.
During the late
1950's early 1960's it became apparent that the
"bobby on the beat" was becoming
overstretched. The general population explosion
meant that the area the local beat bobby had to
cover was steadily increasing. This lead to more
Police Forces looking at and starting to use
local motorised patrol cars and so the
1960’s became the period that “Unit
Policing” and “Panda Cars” were
introduced.
Alan D Johnson (in
his book - “British Police Cars of the
1950’s an 60’s) writes “A
decision was made to take economical cars like
the Ford Anglia and BMC Mini and give them a
distinctive white band on both the front doors
and the roof. As black was the first basic colour
used they looked like Panda bears. For this
reason we came up with the acronym “Patrol
And Neighbourhood
Deployment Area”
Cars, although when Ford offered a substantial
discount on their Anglia range we could only get
them in pale blue and white."
Unit Policing
began in the Kirby area of Liverpool in 1965
using five Ford Anglia cars from the Ford plant
at Halewood. Cheap to buy and economical to run,
they were also found to be reliable and easy to
manoeuvre, and so were considered ideal for
testing in the newly designed Unit Policing role.
From these tests
the Ford Anglia soon emerged as quite a capable
local patrol car and became popular with a number
of forces, who each ordered them in large
quantities. In fact the Ford Anglia proved so
popular as a “Panda Car” that Ford
actually had them painted and fully finished to
police specifications on their own production
lines at Halewood.
Shown below are
some of the Police Forces that used the Ford
Anglia.
|
