06/02/2017 Inside Out South West

Tonight on Inside Out - Gone in 60 minutes, why Land Rovers

are being stolen to order in the south-west.

They are unfortunately very stealable.

With a box of spammers and an hour, you can have one in bits completely.

Also on the programme - on His Majesty's Secret Service,

Guy Hamilton directed some of the best Bond movies ever,

but tonight, we reveal his own spying escapades in wartime

Hello, I'm Jemma Woodman and welcome to Inside Out South West.

No rural scene in the south-west would be complete without a mud

splattered Land Rover but surprisingly,

they are one of the most stolen cars in England.

Sunday morning for these Land Rover enthusiasts is a messy affair.

It is a dirty homage to a cherished off-road car.

They are an iconic British vehicle, a workhorse for the army

and for farmers and also a whole generation of families

Some of these Land Rovers are worth north of ?50,000.

Lovingly built and tinkered with over decades.

To their owners, these vehicles are much more than just a car.

The problem is, to organised gangs of car thieves,

the Land Rover has become a top target.

We have a couple of Facebook pages to give people

information about the club. Always somebody coming

on there, "Please help me, my Land Rover has been stolen."

So, I mean I would say it is probably once a week.

So who is stealing the Land Rovers up and down the country?

Why are they doing it and where are they all going to?

I had one stolen, 18 months, two years ago, just off the drive

in the middle of the night. Someone broke into it,

it disappeared and I never saw it again.

This one now lives in my garage under lock and key.

And everything else I've got is well secured.

They are unfortunately very stealable.

Stealable, because the last Land Rover Defender rolled off

the Solihull production line in January 2016.

Since then, this car has become one of the most stolen

The NFU Mutual Insurance company saw a surge in theft claims

When you buy a Land Rover, you're not buying a car,

It is the heart and soul that people put into these vehicles.

It is not just a car that people drive, it is a car that

Sometimes it has been passed down the family.

And the impact for these people when they have had it stolen,

it is like losing your dog, it is not nice.

This Land Rover was the pride and joy of the Leicestershire Police

until the thieves took it apart overnight.

It was parked outside a local police station.

All of these stolen Land Rovers have to be going somewhere,

so what exactly is happening to them?

Police say high-end vehicles like these Range Rovers

are being stolen to order and shipped abroad,

Older, more vintage models are equally as desirable

to the thieves because Land Rovers were designed to be simple to fix

out in the field so they can easily be stripped down into parts.

Parts which are now more valuable because they are

Because they have stopped making them and the spare parts

However, with a box of spanners and an hour, you can have

There is no code stamped on most of the parts so they appear on eBay

and there is a market unfortunately for stolen bits.

Jon Rush is a Land Rover mechanic who was hit

by the thieves last year. As someone who knows

Land Rovers inside out, I have set him a little challenge.

How easy is it for the criminals to strip a Land Rover?

We have come up with a little experiment, we are calling

The plan is to unbolt parts of the Land Rover until we end up

with this big pile of bits and as little Land Rover

Jon firmly believes his beloved Land Rover was stolen to order

Now, he is going to show us just how easy it is to take

With the clock ticking and multiple cameras running,

we will check back in with Jon in a while.

Henry Mowforth is a mechanic for slightly larger vehicles.

His Land Rover was special - it was his wedding car.

We used it to get from the church to the reception, me,

So I used it all the time because that was my first vehicle.

It is sort of soul destroying really.

You have spent all that time with it and now it is just gone.

Our next victim thinks thieves may have planted a tracking device

on his Land Rover when it was parked at his local railway station,

When he drove home, they electronically followed him

and nicked his Land Rover off the drive.

It is in the middle of nowhere, so there may well have been

a tracker put on the car, so they came back whenever

Nathan Ricketts is a detective on the National Car Squad

and he knows all the latest tricks and tactics the car

Have you ever come across cases where the organised car thieves

are putting tracking devices on commuters' cars at railway

stations, where they follow them home to steal the vehicle?

In my experience, I have come across an organised crime group,

they were particularly selecting the luxury high-end cars.

They would see them in a car park or parked up at railway

stations and supermarkets and they would drive into them,

basically pretended they had an accident and leave a note

on the windscreen to say, I am really sorry, I have

clipped your car and caused a bit of damage, my friend runs a paint

shop, he will repair it for you and get the claim

on my insurance. So you think, OK, brilliant,

someone is willing to confess up to their responsibilities.

So you go and take it there and they do a great job

of scratch on the bumper or the little dent but they also

clone a third key and put a tracking device into the vehicle.

Car crime is now a high-tech business.

This garage is full of top-end Range Rovers.

The manufacturers fit all of these cars with at least one tracker

for the benefit of the owners, but the car gangs have

They are now using one of these - a magic wand that can sniff out

the tracker can disable it. I will just turn it up.

So they will know there is something in the vehicle.

A tracker? A tracker.

Now, when people steal a car, they will block the signal

so they will block any signal coming out of the car, take it somewhere

safe, take it to a side road or in a unit somewhere

when they feel safe, they will switch this unit

on and try to find a tracking device and as soon as they find it,

Being one step ahead of the thieves is the only way to catch them

and the latest gadget does just that.

A tiny, highly intelligent tracker that cannot be sniffed

What is the product you have come up with?

That is the point, I would love to be to tell you and show

you the device but we don't do that. It could be anything on the car.

It is not one particular unit, it is well hidden,

It could be in the headlights, it could be anywhere.

I won't show you any specifications for it so the thieves won't get

Neil's intelligent tracker is getting results.

It can run for months and send a signal from inside

a shipping container. Here police are recovering

Land Rovers at Southampton docks, just about to be shipped abroad.

And here they are again, dozens more being recovered,

They don't just steal the whole car, they will take bits.

There are shots on the internet of a Lincolnshire Police Land

Rover taken to bits. Why do they take them to bits?

If you take the whole car and try to sell it or move it,

that is still that vehicle and it can still be identified.

If you take it apart, it reduces the fact it is a vehicle.

It can look like scrap, or a few car parts, it reduces

what it is and of course it is a stolen vehicle.

With stolen Land Rover parts vanishing so quickly,

police need to catch the criminals in the act.

That is exactly what happened to these three Land Rover thieves.

A call from a neighbour led to a quick police

reaction and last October, this trio were handed prison

sentences totalling six and a half years in all.

Back in Jon's barn, how is his attempt to strip a Land Rover

Now you see it... Now you don't.

We are done! Land Rover stripped in 60 minutes.

Are you surprised? I am quite surprised, yes.

I don't think I would want to do it as a business, though!

Thank you for letting us make you work very hard.

Now, put it back together. Thank you.

He helped create one of cinema's most iconic characters but the life

of Guy Hamilton in Devon was every bit as exciting as that

David Stafford has the story of the secret wartime history

of one of Britain's most celebrated film-makers.

It's a beautiful June afternoon in Dartmouth.

Perfect for a little boat trip around the estuary.

But 70-odd years ago, the blokes boarding boats

They were Royal Navy sailors, hand-picked for some of the most

dangerous wartime cloak and dagger missions the Allies ever conducted.

Dartmouth was the home to a very special Royal Naval outfit -

And one of the crew would go on to be very famous indeed.

And the second-in-command on many of those Royal Navy missions

was a man who went by the name of Hamilton - Guy Hamilton.

Hamilton would become one of Britain's most

celebrated film directors - directing four Bond films including

Goldfinger and the Man with the Golden Gun.

You have to walk the line between absolute nonsense

and seriousness and the way to cope with it is a little bit of humour,

Sadly Guy Hamilton died while we were researching this

film and few people knew about his wartime exploits that

were easily as exciting as anything that James Bond got up to.

And like any good James Bond film, there was even what in less

enlightened times they used to call a Bond bird or in Guy Hamilton's

case, two of them who well remember the adventures of Guy.

Hamilton behind enemy lines in occupied France.

Now 97 years old, Anne Ropers lives in the French town of Plouha

on the Brittany coast. Anne remembers Guy Hamilton well.

She has a photo of him from June 1944.

But what was Guy Hamilton doing in June, 1944,

in France, in a cornfield, having a picnic?

The Royal Navy 15th Flotilla was made up of modified,

high-speed motor gun boats and motor torpedo boats and operated

One of its tasks was to drop off supplies to the Resistance in France

and pick up downed airmen from the beaches of Brittany.

One of the safe houses used by the French resistance to hide

Allied airmen before they were rescued from the coast

The escape route was known as the Shelburne Line.

The Shelburne Line was one of a series of escape routes that

crisscrossed France and relied for their continued existence

But on the 15th June 1944, the entire Brittany operation almost

fell apart, nearly exposing the Shelburne Line to the Nazis.

It was a moonless night and a young Guy Hamilton was rowing his surf

boat with a crew of two into a Brittany beach.

Hamilton was taking ashore two French resistance agents, returning

They set off from there, Kingswear in Dartmouth,

over to France, rowed the French spies ashore, dropped them off,

When Hamilton and his crew got back out to the pick-up

They had no option other than to row back to shore.

Over half a century later and the incident was still fresh

And now my worries were to get rid of the surf boat

and try and get as far away from the beach as possible.

And with good reason - the area was crawling with Germans.

Plymouth's Honorary French Consul Alain Sibril grew up in Brittany.

Alain, whose family was involved with the Resistance during the war

and whose grandfather was burned alive by the Nazis, knows a lot

Now this was shortly after D-Day on the Normandy beaches just

about 200-300 miles up that coast, so this place was extremely,

You can imagine this was a terrible place to be stuck.

Hamilton knew that he had to find a safe hiding place

They scrambled up the beach cliffs and wandered

through the deserted countryside, but there was no one around.

There was a big apple tree and there was a wire hanging

across and it was very odd, it was a primitive mine.

I thought, "I'm glad I did not lean on the wire".

Hamilton had ridden his luck, but to stay alive he needed

After two days on the run, Hamilton finally found help

from a young resistance woman, Marguerite Pierre.

Now 92, Marguerite helped lead Hamilton to Anne Ropers' safe house.

After nearly a week on the run Hamilton and his two crew arrived

Guy Hamilton was very, very aware of the dangers.

He was very conscious that should something happen to him

the whole operation would have been in jeopardy.

Hamilton was aware that the top brass in London would also

want to know if it was safe to continue to use Bonaparte Beach

as a rescue point for future operations and of course he also

wanted to let his shipmates know that he was safe.

To send word back to London, Hamilton needed

Swiping a bicycle he pedalled off to see the two French Canadian

agents that London had installed to manage the Shelburne

Captain Lucien Dumais and Sergeant Claude Labrosse

were unimpressed by Hamilton's arrival, but were eventually

And this is the message that Hamilton managed to get Labrosse

"Hamilton co OK with an SEO group and will get them out shortly."

This message was sent from Marguerite

Marguerite's house was the communications hub

of the Shelburne Line escape route, it was here that they would wait

For the French Resistance, it was a constant game of cat

But with Royal Navy sailors to hide, the stakes were even higher.

Had the Germans discovered Guy Hamilton and his fellow sailors,

this would have been extremely dangerous, not only for them,

but also for the whole network of Resistance fighters.

The need for total secrecy was paramount, yet the entire

operation was nearly blown in a scene more reminiscent

of 'Allo Allo, than James Bond - a game of boules in a local bar.

They took me down the road to a cafe that had a bowling

Well that was all right except that it was populated

by Germans all in uniform, bowling, drinking away.

And the lads said can we have the bowling

And they said, yes, yes, and they poured him a drink.

The cafe was only 500 yards from the safe house,

so there was only one solution ? get stuck into the cider.

Hamilton's perfect French had saved him from being discovered

by the Germans, but he did not escape a roasting from

Before Hamilton had even arrived at the Ropers,

rumours had started to circulate about the British

Hamilton and his fellow sailors Rockwood and Dellow had

reached the final reel of their own James Bond movie

After nearly a month on the run in German occupied France,

finally the call came to make the run home.

The Maison d'Alphonse was a small farm house and the start

Under cover of darkness, Hamilton and his crew were led down

the treacherous cliffs with a clear message from the Resistance leaders

If there is any fighting to be done you are expected to join in,

use your fists, knives anything at all.

Along with Hamilton, and his two crew, four other allied

airmen were in the rescue party that night.

A few hours after leaving the beach, Guy Hamilton and his crew

were back here in Dartmouth, thanks to the extraordinary skill

and courage of Resistance operatives like Marguerite and Anne.

Just ten days after he had escaped, the Shelburne Line was uncovered

by the Nazis, the Maison d'Alphonse was torched.

But the Shelburne Line had been a success.

The escape route saved the lives of 135 airmen,

two sailors and one future director of James Bond films.

Sincil Bank that item, and Robles has finally passed away but we were

very grateful she shared her amazing story with us. Thank you. Next week,

pastors and pedicures, the man who keeps cattle in trim. I do like it,

it makes them look nice. I was going to get buffed myself but on second

thoughts, that is on Monday at 7:30pm. I will see you then.

Hello, I'm Riz Lateef with your 90-second update.

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