The £2million move by Lancashire Constabulary to create 80 more community beat managers' posts this year has been hailed as another sign of how police philosophy in the past couple of years has come "full circle" back in favour of foot patrols.

But this picture taken on this day 36 years ago shows when the doctrine went full circle the other way -- as Lancashire switched hundreds of officers to mobile patrols and pioneered the introduction of 'Panda Cars' in Britain. It meant the end of policing on foot in all but town centre areas.

At one go, the force bought 175 Ford Anglias -- made at Halewood on Merseyside -- and then acting Chief Constable Bill Palfrey staged a media event at County Police headquarters at Hutton on May Day, 1967, by having them arranged in '999' formation.

The cars -- considered innovative at the time, with American-style tail fins and a 'reverse-slope' rear window -- were originally dubbed A-Cars, but became known as Pandas because of the white stripe on their bodywork which contrasted with their main lagoon blue colour.

Their introduction, Palfrey said, would save the force some 400 men. And it was the strains on manpower that were a big influence in the departure from old-style policing -- as at the time Lancashire Constabulary was some 500 officers under-strength.

And it was an experiment in new police methods begun in Accrington the previous year and run in tandem with a similar one started in 1965 at the Liverpool overspill town of Kirkby on Merseyside that helped to give birth to the Panda revolution.

The Accrington scheme involved dividing the town into a number of beats patrolled on foot by officers equipped with two-way radios -- another policing 'first' that Lancashire had pioneered in 1964 -- while working in co-operation with mobile patrols. The Kirkby experiment differed in that, rather being 'mixed,' the beats were fully mobilised.

Great results were claimed for the schemes. In Kirkby, crime was cut by a third. At Accrington, offences were slashed by almost 20 per cent inside a year and the scheme was quickly adopted by 16 other police authorities. And the added bonus for the under-manned force were eight per cent savings on manpower at Accrington and ten per cent at Kirkby.

Even so, less than three years after going all-out with Panda patrols, Palfrey, who had become one of the country's youngest chief constables in 1940 when he was appointed head of Accrington's then-independent police force, was having to defend the 'mobile' policy against moves to get policemen back on the beat.

"People who argue for a return to foot patrols are living in the past -- in a bygone age," he said at the opening in January, 1970, of a new control centre at Hutton that was capable of supervising 1,000 mobile units at any one time.

"A lot is talked about policemen riding around in cars. Should the criminal cease to use high-powered cars, then we could return to foot patrol."

But it was not villains giving up cars, but another development that forced the first big re-think of the Panda Cars policy -- that of the outbreaks of civil unrest which flared in 1981 as unemployment rose towards the three-million mark for the first time since the 1930s. Rioting began in Brixton in London in April and was followed by more in July in several other cities, with some of the worst at Toxteth in Liverpool.

It led to Lancashire Constabulary setting up a quick-response squad to nip future trouble in the bud and to a restoration of old-style community policing -- a move that was to take more than 160 officers out of Panda Cars. The Colne division in East Lancashire was one of the first to get the revived community constables.

"We need to have a system of policing which allows officers to build up and sustain a relationship with the community they serve in and this obviously means having more officers on patrol," said Chief Constable Albert Laugharne, who had become head of the force in 1978. And so it was that on January 1, 1982, that the foot patrols returned and the Panda Car policy went gradually into reverse.

Recently restored to prominence as the magic flying car in the hugely-popular Harry Potter "Chamber of Secrets" book and film, the Ford Anglia 105E model that was the bedrock of Lancashire's pioneering Panda fleet was manufactured from 1959 to 1967 and had a top speed of 74 mph.

The police vehicles were 'basic' Anglias, lacking the full-width chrome-plated radiator grille of the De Luxe model. The one with the registration number UTC 847D in 1966 was one of Lancashire's first Panda Cars, purchased when mobile patrols were still an experiment.

It re-emerged 34 years later as a 1:43 scale limited-edition collector's-item model toy, priced £9.99 and is now sold out.