Darren Trower who, with his wife and two sons, lives and breathes tractor pulling in a variety of classes. He is the current owner of ‘The Viking’, which has been in his possession for the last ten years. But when he mentioned it had a former life and was originally called ‘The White Horse’, it was a light bulb moment that kick started our sleuthing activities, because this same tractor was once owned by Anglo Swedish Equipment – later Volvo BM. THE VOICE set out to discover more!
After making some initial enquiries, we discovered that there were several employees who had been involved with the White Horse project and two, in particular, who had been heavily involved in its development into a championship tractor, namely (now retired) engineers, Roy Bright and Brian White.
THE VOICE arranged to visit both these gentlemen to get some background and memories. The following is an amalgam of their personal accounts.
So the story goes, it was back in the early 1980s when a Senior Vice President of Volvo Construction Equipment in Sweden, by the name of Gosta Goransson, happened to be on a visit to the UK with his family and witnessed a tractor pulling competition taking place at the Royal Show ground at Stoneleigh, Warwickshire. Seemingly, Gosta was impressed with the event and saw some potential marketing mileage in promoting the Volvo brand in Great Britain with such a machine. He didn’t have to look too far for some willing support in the form of the Great Yeldham Depot Manager, Des Perry who, along with Brian and Roy, was about to sign up to long hours of their own to develop the tractor that came to be called Vit Häst.
With a second hand T800 tractor appearing on the dockside at Felixstowe not long after Gosta’s visit, the legend was born. All work being done to the machine was carried out at weekends and outside of business hours and some eighteen months ensued whereby the tractor was taken apart and put back together again in its new guise. There was a disagreement as to what its colour should be, with some wanting it to be painted in Volvo yellow (the same colour as the construction equipment), but somehow the team managed to get their own way and had it liveried in white and blue (Anglo Swedish colours). In between all of this, the company relocated to its brand new headquarters at Duxford, so much of the development work carried on there.
CONTINUED OVERLEAF a
In farming guise – this is how a normal T800 looked back in the 80s
In the workshops at Great Yeldham (in Volvo yellow)
THE VOICE MAGAZINE No38 2020 25
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