I bought a brace of jeeps last week, at. a
-Ministry of Supply auction, for £250. The glimpse of state-ownership at work was not inspiring. Here was a vast dump of U.S. Army equipment—millions of cigarettes, tons and tons of chocolate, every conceivable sort of thing including the several acres of assorted vehicles now released for sale. The Treasury, I take it, bought all this stuff. I wonder when they bought it, and if it was really necessary to leave so much useful property lying about in the open quite so long? The Ministry of Supply have now started to sell it (a process which, an official told me, is expected to take two years). The dump lies in the heart of an agricultural district and there was a large attendance of farmers, whose interests the Minister of Agriculture, at a sale arranged by one of his colleagues, might be expected to have at heart, for if a farmer needs a cheap lorry it is all to the good that he should have one. The vehicles were certainly cheap but the only guide to their conditipn, which varied widely, was the catalogue. This merely said "Lot III: i Dodge truck 6 x 6." You could go and have a look at Lot III; read the speedometer, which might or might not give you the mileage done, depending on whether or not it was broken ; see whether the battery had been removed by the Americans (they almost all had, for some unknown reason) and whether the rotor arm had been stolen, which was often the case ; and then go and bid for Lot tit. If you got it you were not allowed to tow it away until five days later, by which time—judging by what I saw going on—you would be very lucky indeed if the spare wheel, the tools and-other detachable parts were still on board. The main result of this state of affairs was that most of the vehicles went to dealers ; they will cannibalise the vehicles, scrap the duds and unload the rest on to the public at a huge profit. I for my part was lucky. Ignorant of the regulation which forbids you to remove your purchases until five days later, I turned up the same evening, with a lorry and found a sytnpathetic official who was prepared to make an exception. The "security police," who are supposed to protect the dump against pilferers, slightly damaged one of my jeeps while help- ing to load it on to the lorry. They were very contrite, and when I got home I found in the back of it a rubber cushion, a spade, a battery and a spare -wheel which I did not remember to have been there before.
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