4×4 Magazine UK – May 2022
English | 88 pages | pdf | 53.08 MB
There are a lot of people who deserve to be thanked
Elsewhere in this, our 40th anniversary issue, I’ve talked a bit about the history of 4×4. I tried not to get too personal there, because my own place in the magazine’s development has been little more than a footnote, but here I’m going to indulge myself. There are a lot of people who deserve my thanks and I’m only going to scratch the surface here, but while it’s a time for looking forward, it’s also a time for looking back and refl ecting.
I first worked on 4×4 in 1993, when it was known as Off Road and 4 Wheel Drive. On my way to the interview, I was following a Trooper towing a trailer with no lights, and about three times my old Rover 216 almost ended up mounting it. A good anecdote, I thought, and if nothing else it didn’t seem to do any harm. I was met at reception by Emma Northam, who has gone on to be one of the best production editors in the business, and shown in to a meeting room where I met the editor, Graham Scott.
How did it go? Well, if someone had walked into that room carrying a crystal ball and announced that 27 years later, Graham would be my best man, I’m not sure which of us would have been more surprised. Graham was a great editor and a great mentor, and he became a great mate. He appreciated what I brought to the mag, he was tolerant of even my most crass mistakes and a year and a half later, when our offshoot title Land Rover World found itself in need of a new editor, it was Graham who persuaded me that although our teamwork had become close to telepathic by then and I was absolutely loving my job, I should grasp the opportunity. So I moved on and left OR&4WD behind, and on Land Rover World I was part of a new team. I’ll single out Matt Ross here; a quietly diligent but exceptionally driven journalist who eventually left the magazine to go overlanding in an 88” Series III he had rebuilt. Matt tends to write about politics these days – and he does so with wisdom and, in particular, a quality of prose that puts me in awe every time I read his words. Fast forward fi ve years to a bleak hillside in Fife where I was standing in torrential rain while attempting to take photos of the 2002 Scottish Hillrally. No cars had been past in ages and my fi ngers had gone numb. Eventually, I squelched my way over to an ATV parked in the distance to ask the crew if they knew what was going on.
As it turned out, one of them was a freelance photographer called Steve Taylor who was also a member of the Scottish Land Rover Club. When I told him I was shooting the rally for a new magazine called Total Off Road, his eyes lit up… and the following year, he moved down to England and joined the company. Over the next ten years, Steve and I went on countless forays to cover events and 4×4 launches, compile roadbooks and generally be creative while doing a lot of off-roading and having no end of laughs. Pictures from the huge archive of his work appear in almost every issue even now; that, and a sense of nostalgia for those happy days, are why I continue to include his name in the panel to the right, even though it’s a long time since he moved on.
Steve became a colleague and a friend and so too Tim Gibson, who emailed me out of the blue after the fi rst issue of TOR was published. He had done work experience with us on OR&4WD; now he was at uni and was wondering if I needed someone to write the odd feature.
If you were around at the time, Tim’s name will have been very familiar. Heproduced a massive amount of what went in to the magazine over the course of many years – and like all the others, he was a colleague and a mate in equal measure.
If you read our sister title The Landy, indeed, you’ll know that Tim still has a monthly column in it. And he writing is still as beautifully crafted as ever.
Which brings me kind of up to date. Here I am back at the magazine where I started out – still probably a bit prone to making crass mistakes but very, very grateful for the guidance and the support of so many people down the years. There’s a whole lot of the journey still to come – and for all those whose names I haven’t mentioned, rest assured I know how lucky I have been to have shared it with you.
Alan Kidd
Editor
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