Historic (ish) Photos
Thanks to Tony Hoare for letting me put a few of his photos of The Duke on my blog. Also thanks to Ron Fulton at BDAC for his help.
These were taken around 2004 during The Duke’s stay at the Boscombe Down Aviation Collection. Apparently most of the land vehicles have left BDAC now.
Attempts to contact BDAC succeeded this evening and they confirmed that QinetiQ claimed ownership and sold The Duke which had sat in the BDAC collection for several years. Apparently they have both financial and recycling targets to meet.
BDAC were relieved of the vehicle in late 2008 but do not have the missing parts. So who can I blame for their loss? Perhaps I could contact QinetiQ, but I doubt it’d be cost effective for them to sell individual parts on eBay! That leaves only two possibilities: either Witham removed the parts before placing The Duke in the tender, or a member of BDAC, Witham or QinetiQ staff had them away on the sly.
In his natural habitat at Boscombe Down
Looks more or less the same at the front - now I’ve replaced the lenses on the lights! Strangely, I think indicators and side lights are swapped over in this photo!
Rear projection. NATO tow hitch still in place and clearly its got fog lamps not reversing lights!
The interior: More or less as it looks now, but the dashboard and centre-console-lighting-switch are missing.
Very cool field telephone. Doubtful this would have made it through the demobbing and sale process, as most radio equipment is removed. Might be able to pick one up at Sodbury though…
Tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll be putting the new door tops on and starting work on the dashboard. There will no doubt be more blogging when I’m done.
Interesting to see that one door top is missing in the photos and the other looks in a very bad state. Shows that they wore out over a long period of time.
Here are a couple of links I found to forums where Tony (I presume) posted when The Duke was at BDAC…
http://www.hmvf.co.uk/forumvb/