LEYLAND HIPPO
There is no way it is going to win any truck beauty contest prizes, but it does have something, a ‘je ne sais quoi’ which can be incredibly endearing.
The boxy shape is about as utilitarian as a designer could make it, if, that is, a designer was ever involved. Give a small child a brief to draw a big truck which isn’t allowed to have a bonnet (no need to explain the engineering reasons in putting the engine under the floor in the cab) and this would surely look very like the 6 x 4 Leyland Hippo.
As a big piece of auto-engineering, it stands as tall as a Thornycroft Antar, the cab roof reaching to nearly ten feet off the ground while the hoops with canvas add another 15in to that, a total of 131in just a whisker off eleven feet.
Although the Ministry of Supply already had a Hippo in Mark 1 form back in 1939, it bore little resemblance to the much more upmarket Mark 2 which we are discussing here. That one had been adapted from the commercial design WSW 17, and around 330 had been supplied to the Royal Army
