Two Men’s Alvis

The water was placid, but it was November so the temperature was glacial, and how deep was it? Water has a disconcerting habit of not really giving away secrets like its depth. Other than this being a lake there was no real clue as to the location of the bottom. Well – nothing for it but to plunge in then – everyone knows it’s the best way, no striding purposefully in and feeling the cold come up to meet you, just do it. Originally there was to be three of us to take the plunge but somehow it had ended up just being me, the others electing to remain on the banking, rather than think that through to its logical conclusion, a sudden desire to get it over with arose.

Right then, select first gear, drive gently but firmly over the banking and next second the windscreen was under the murky water, eventually, and to my intense relief the downward trajectory ceased and the windscreen rose up clear of the water…………. we were floating, all eight tons of Alvis Stalwart, bobbing serenely on the lake surface.

The Stalwart was finally doing what we had bought her for, going smoothly from terra firma to H2O and, hopefully, back again just as easily. Eight cylinders and 6.5 litres of Rolls Royce petrol perfection were burbling away happily to themselves behind me under the load bed. The two large Dowty jet drives were engaged, revs increased to 3,000 on the hand throttle and we were off in a stately and seamanlike manner. I openly confess to chortling away in a slightly demented fashion. Dreams can come true. Here I was at the helm, well two tiller levers to be precise, of an amphibious truck, or High Mobility Load Carrier, to give the Stalwart its Army title. Each individual jet drive could be ahead, astern or neutral, note the nautical terms coming in already. No reversing now, we went astern or full ahead. I’m old enough to remember that wonderful radio series The Navy Lark so there was definitely a bit of ‘Left hand down a bit Mr Pertwee’ going on, hopefully just in my head but quite possibly out loud.

The Stalwart has many unique noises. There is the hammer tapping on an anvil noise of the air compressor once it has finished compressing air, a mellifluous vertical exhaust stack and the major player, the mighty supercharged roar of two huge multi bladed cooling fans dragging vast amounts of atmosphere through the hull, past the engine and transmission then forcing it up through the rear mounted radiators and back into the surroundings. My fellow AAT trustee, Greg Wrapson, recalled hearing a Stalwart leaving his village, and describing it as, and I quote, ‘an infernal racket’, unquote. It fell to me to educate him, at length, about the aural glories of the Stalwart cooling system.  I am confident he would now say something much kinder to describe the Stalwarts progress, if only to avoid another lecture from me.

My two compatriots who had cravenly decided to let me go solo into the water were now gesticulating from the bank to come and fetch them. Fat chance. This experience was to be enjoyed solo for the next few minutes. What I hadn’t deduced from their gesticulations was my omission of not engaging the bilge pump, which they knew from the lack of water spewing from its external outlet. As we had no idea as to how watertight the hull was it had been agreed the bilge pump would be used as soon as afloat, but, in the childlike excitement of actually floating this magnificent machine it had slipped my mind. Ignorance is bliss….. isn’t it?

Eventually I returned to dry land, not the way I had entered, but up a sedate ramp built for the purpose. It is possible to have the wheels and the jets running together so it is a smooth transference of propulsion on ramps, less so on a steeper climb out. The bilge pump was duly engaged and a satisfyingly small amount of water was pumped over the side, it would appear we had bought a well-found craft. It is also worth mentioning the central steering position. Strange as it sounds this central position is so natural and even that it is actually returning to one side of a vehicle later that seems strange.

My friend of fifty years, the late Neil Millington (TF21 owner, Alvis afficionado and AAT Trustee) was the instigator of what became our little fleet of ex-Army trucks. We met in the early seventies through our mutual hobby of off-road driving at the Pennine Land Rover Club whilst another mutual interest in WW2 brought us, eventually, to ex-Army off road vehicles.

Initially we bought a mighty Leyland Martian, a 6×6 Artillery Tractor (for the uninitiated; 6×6 means 6 wheels, all of them capable of being driven, 6×4 six wheels, four driven, 4×2, which of course is the vast majority of cars, four wheels two of them driven and any other combination. The number of wheels is always stated first, driven wheels second), the same Rolls Royce petrol engine, and a crew cab for no less than 12 people. We had great times using that beast for all sorts of military gatherings, off road events and recoveries. This inevitably led to ‘needing’ another truck, (shades of boys Dinky toys here) as all these purchases were rooted in ownership of those models. This just had to be an amphibious truck.  We had mellowed a little by number three, purchasing that venerable Army workhorse the 4×4 Bedford RL.

The DUKW of WW2 era has to be the most famous, and most useful, of all amphibious load carriers, its name alone showed it to be preternaturally fortuitous. Pronounced ‘duck’ it seems so obviously suited to an amphibious truck, it had to have been chosen by wise men and women. The mundane reality is this, it was nothing more than the makers, General Motors, standard product coding letters; D was the model year, U referred to the body style – utility (amphibious) – K for all wheel drive and W for dual rear wheels, DUKW.

Regardless of the name we were determined to stay British. The Alvis Stalwart had recently been phased out by the Army, as helicopters could now fill the forward supply role the Stalwart was originally intended for and a company called A.F. Budge at Retford had a yard stuffed full of them, it was also an Alvis which sealed the deal for Neil, and, by association, me.

We set off in my DAF artic and flat trailer one Saturday morning with pockets full of cash and a posse of interested helpers following behind. One of the yard lads listened to our requirements, particularly the need for it be a swimmer, many of them having been ‘de-amphibianised’, if such a word can possibly exist, and it was the swimming part that was the most vital talent. He pointed straight at the Mark 1 Stalwart we would soon buy and told us emphatically that it was the best of the bunch. He was right too, but we still spent two hours roaming this vast wonderland of ex-Army kit, like kids in a toy shop.

The Mk 1 is easily identified from the Mk 2, the latter has deeper windows and a winch mounted on the front hull plate. The money was handed over and our ‘stolly’ was soon strapped down and whistling back up the Great North Road to West Yorkshire.

Unlike the Martian, which had a seized clutch when we bought it, the Stalwart was just a genuine high quality road ready truck from the word go. This was lucky for two reasons. 1. It was a much harder beast to work on than the Martian due of course to its punt (as in the pole powered punt) hull and chassis, the extra complexity of the Dowty jet drives and the high quality/complexity of the torsion bar all independent suspension on its 6 wheels. 2, and most important, I was the one who had been ‘volunteered’ to do all the maintenance and I was still mentally scarred from the clutch renewal on the Martian.

Stalwart steering is effected by the front axle and half steering movement of the second axle. Its Achilles Heel was the self-locking ‘no spin’ centre differential. Each side had a 3-wheel set geared together and one differential fed power to both sides. This wasn’t a problem off road and loose surfaces but on tarmac it was a problematic. I could go into a lengthy tutorial about how diffs work and why your standard car is, in low grip conditions, only one wheel drive, not the two you assumed it to be, or indeed why your standard 4×4, in those same low grip circumstances is often only a 2-wheel drive.  Anyone who drives really could do with knowing it. Caution mechanical bit!

OK let’s do this. To go round a corner in a car all the wheels travel slightly different distances. Imagine a line of ten soldiers marching in line. To turn right the innermost man must mark time whilst the soldier to his extreme left must do double time and every one in between a slight variation of speed for the line to remain ruler straight. Your wheels too must all rotate at differing speeds and the differential, essentially a set of gears in the centre of the axle, allows one wheel to go faster than the other. That is all good until one of those wheels has less grip than the other, say on snow, ice or grass, and the differential will allow that wheel to go faster, so inducing wheel spin on a slippery surface. Just one wheel will spin, not two, hence my comment regarding a one-wheel drive car. If you had some way of ‘locking’ that differential in such conditions (a differential lock) then it would be possible to have twice as much traction by letting both wheels have half the power. But, and trust my fifty-year experience on this – if conditions are slippery enough it doesn’t matter how many wheels you have driving, if the tyres have no grip, then your vehicle is going nowhere, regardless of the number of wheels driving. The opposite is equally true. If you lock the differential on high grip surface then really, really bad and expensive are things are going to happen to your transmission, rapidly!

I digress. To counter this problem, and I assume mainly the latter, it is possible to fit a differential that senses wheelspins and locks automatically, assuring maximum traction with no driver input needed. This was the system Alvis chose. Most Stalwarts have a thick stripe of paint put on each wheel hub, all in line with the other. Should one of the drives break this line will start to plainly differ from its mates thereby bringing it easily to the driver’s attention, this was an early REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) modification and such simple expediencies should be applauded.

Mechanical alert over. Put simply, used on the road there was tendency for the transmission to ‘wind up’ and either become A. VERY twitchy to drive, or B. break something expensive. Thankfully with judicious use of transportation and mainly off-road work, for that is the reason we bought it, ours never had transmission problems until after it was sold on.

Swimming the Stalwart was joy. Akin to take off in a light plane when the plane transfers from a wheeled vehicle to being airborne, so the Stolly reverts from being a lorry to a water craft smoothly and effortlessly, though having more than a little experience with boats I wouldn’t have been as sanguine had we been entering moving water, or indeed tidal water. There are stories of disaffected squaddies attempting to ‘swim’ a Stolly across the channel, and Stalwarts were designed for, and have been used in the sea many times, but a channel crossing is another matter altogether. Particularly as the Alvis sits so low in the water that it is almost invisible to other craft.

My family and I were once heading down the length of Windermere in our Bombard inflatable when I, as Captain and chief lookout, spotted three unusually low shapes in the water further South. On getting closer, and to my complete amazement, there was a trio of Stalwarts in line astern, heading North to Ambleside. More jaw dropping still was knowing three of the crew on board, coincidence of the highest order and of course they now had an inflatable ‘safety’ boat in attendance. On announcing our new safety boat status to my ‘crew’ my wife did point out, rather harshly I thought, that my track record with boats doesn’t lend itself to the word safety being anywhere in the title, worse still was the sage like agreement of my two young daughters.

Off road the Stalwart needed an experienced and forceful driver if it was to be effective. The action of the single differential tended to slew the whole motor slightly sideways on slippery going, particularly if the throttle was opened wide, it needed rapid correction to prevent problems, particularly if ascending a hill. Having close coupled wheels, the Stalwart acted very much like a tank when topping a steep incline. The whole vehicle carried on climbing, lifting the front axle in the air until the point of balance was reached when the nose would come swooping back down, and again, whilst there was just the centre axle actually touching the ground it didn’t pay to have too much throttle in use or the slewing action would come into play.

No off-road vehicle is invincible, and the Stalwart is no exception, but it was nothing short of astounding as to what it would tackle, and usually conquer, though it does pay to have something at least as big and capable, in this case a Leyland Martian, in case it did go wrong. Whereas the leaf sprung Leyland was as much a test of the crew’s skeletal stamina as driver skill, the Stalwart was a magic carpet ride, its independent suspension soaking up punishment.

I was once a passenger in an Army Stalwart, circa 1983, being driven round the (then) Army School of Mechanical Transport at Leconfield whilst on an assignment for a 4×4 magazine. The instructor driver aimed at some 1’6” tall concrete sleepers whilst doing 40mph. Not wishing to appear a coward I said nothing but braced myself for the impending disaster. It never happened. There were three dull thuds, a slight rippling in the cab but nothing like the impact and damage that had been confidently expected. His smile at my discomfiture was well earned. Stalwart drivers were actually trained to regularly take their trucks over obstacles to release any possible transmission wind up, (as already explained). That they could do it at such speed was a testament to Alvis engineering, oh and the Goodyear tyres it was shod with too.

I was also put behind the wheel of an Alvis Saracen armoured personnel carrier on that assignment. To describe the drivers position as a torture chamber is unfair, to any self-respecting torture chamber. Not only did your feet disappear into two slots in the bodywork, there were two huge batteries adjacent to your face. The steering wheel is at the other side of the control column so only 2/3rds of its rim is available to the driver, and at arms stretch away too.  All this is then compounded by having your driver’s vision plate closed and told to drive to the commander’s instructions. The only saving grace to such travails was a the semi-automatic, pre selector gearbox which at least did away the need for a clutch. As a driving experience it was unmissable, if only to make all others seem better by comparison. My respect for their Army drivers was stratospheric after that, and these Saracens were still on active service in Northern Ireland at that time.

As previously said, much of the inspiration for our military collection were the models of our boyhood. It should come as no surprise that not three feet from where this is being written is a small (though strangely my wife would disagree with that description) die cast collection of various vehicles owned and enjoyed over the years. The Stalwart model was made by the French firm of Solido and is listed as a Berliet Alvis. Apparently Berliet marketed the Stalwart under their own name but not too successfully apparently with numbers in single figures, but enough to warrant a model.

Is it too much to confess that I really admire the quality engineering of Alvis cars, although the cars themselves don’t attract me in the same way. However, the Alvis range of military vehicles, both wheeled and tracked does it in spades for me and indeed a great many others. Unlike cars, military vehicles needn’t worry too much about looks, BUT it is well known that if something looks right, it usually is right. Alvis military motors always looked right, and were engineered right too. I have had many conversations with Alvis military users, both serving, and retired, who were unanimous in their praise for the Alvis range. As a lifelong Land Rover owner, it has always given me great pleasure to see those same vehicles on duty in the armed forces, it is my sincere hope that Alvis users get a similar feeling for their car’s namesakes too.

Brian Hartley

If you would like to see a truly educational early sixties video of the British Army testing various ideas and vehicles in a flowing river, then watch this via the magic of You Tube. When you watch the Centurion tank going through the river try and imagine what it was like for the driver, deep in the bowels of the machine some 25 feet under water. No doubt there was a rescue plan, but evacuating a tank is never an easy job, much less under water with just one vertical exit, I wouldn’t expect the driver to have been a volunteer either, he would have been ‘volunteered’ by someone higher up the chain of command. Parental warning. I lost three hours of life after watching this, just ‘browsing’ all the other interesting stuff alongside it, you have been warned!