Land Rover E-Book

James Taylor

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The Land Rover has become an icon across the world, famed for its classic design, its practicality and its longevity. In this revised edition of his acclaimed book, first issued as Land Rover - 60 Years of the 4 x 4 Workhouse, James Taylor charts sixty-five years of Land Rover development in comprehensive detail, bringing the story right up to date with the latest Defender variants. Contents include: Prototypes and development vehicles; Standard production models; The special editions; Land Rovers built outside the UK; Special conversions; Military variants; The Land Rovers that never were. The first book to look at the story of the Land Rover's gradual evolution. Comprehensively researched, extensively illustrated and accessibly presented, this will be an indispensable read for all those who have an interest in the legend that is Land Rover. Superbly illustrated with 476 colour photographs. James Taylor's major specialization is the Rover company and its descendants, and he is widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent historian of the Land Rover.

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published asLand Rover – 60 Years ofthe 4 × 4 Workhorse in 2007 by The Crowood Press Ltd, Ramsbury, Marlborough, Wiltshire, SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

New edition 2013

This e-book edition first published in 2013

© James Taylor 2007 and 2013

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 978 1 84797 528 7

Frontispiece: the Land Rover’s rugged practicality was emphasized in this 1958 press picture of a Series II 88 – actually the fifth prototype.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

1 Genesis – The Why and How of the First Land Rovers

2 The Great Original – The 80-inch Models

3 Building on Success – The Series I 86 and 107 Models

4 Two More Inches – The Series I 88 and 109 Models

5 New Style – The Series II Models

6 The Golden Sixties – The Series IIA Models

7 The Experimental Sixties – Civilian

8 The Experimental Sixties – Military

9 Forward Controls – Re-Packaging the Land Rover

10 Boom and Bust – The Series III Models

11 Sideshows – Series III Specials and Overseas Variants

12 Lightweights and 101s – The British Military Specials

13 Changing to Coils – Secrets of the Seventies

14 Land Rover’s New Land Rover – One Ten, Ninety and One Two Seven

15 Friends and Family – Alongside the One Tens

16 The Defender – The Second-Generation Coil-Sprung Models

17 Defender Abroad – Specials in the Wider World

18 Beyond the Defender – How to Replace an Icon

Index

The Land Rover has always been a versatile platform for special conversions. This six-wheel model was built in South Africa for a telecommunications company in the 1980s.

Introduction

These days it is fashionable to refer to the utility Land Rovers that have been in production since 1948 as Defenders. They aren’t, of course: the Defender name wasn’t used before 1990 and was then applied to a specific range of variants. But to avoid confusion, let me say here that this book is about the Defender and its direct ancestors. It does not cover relatives such as the Range Rover, Discovery, Freelander or Range Rover Sport.

Over the 65 years that the utility Land Rovers have been in production, they have evolved enormously. Yet today’s Defender is still built on a separate box-section chassis and still has a body largely made up of Birmabright alloy panels. It is still hugely versatile and practical; it is still sold in almost every country in the world; and it is still universally recognized for what it is. It has become an automotive icon, and replacing it – which Land Rover must eventually do – will cause its manufacturers an enormous problem. As this book goes to press, they have announced their plans for a replacement model in 2015, but there seems little doubt it will be a rather different vehicle from the much-loved original.

On a personal level, I have always found the development story of the Land Rover completely fascinating, and researching it has provided me with the larger part of a full-time career for something like a quarter of a century. This is far from being my first book on the subject, and I have written about the marque for many magazines in several different countries, too. But however much I write, there is always more to discover. So although this book is as comprehensive as I can reasonably make it at present, I’m sure there will be more to write about in a few years’ time. If my publishers grant me the luxury of a third edition – this is already the second – I will include whatever new material I have come across when the time comes.

It’s customary to use the introduction of a book to thank everybody who helped in its preparation. I would willingly do that, but there simply isn’t room here to list all the people who have provided me with snippets of information over the years. There have been hundreds of them from all over the world: owners, enthusiasts, historians, engineers and designers alike. So wherever possible in the text, I’ve credited the research done by other people or the sources of my information. Here’s a big and sincere thank you to every one of those people. I can, however, readily list those individuals or organizations who helped by providing photographs used in the pages that follow. So special thanks go to: Paul Attwell; The Automobile Association Library; Deborah Baines; Jack Baines; Brian and Philip Bashall; Pete Bedwell; Thomas Bridge; British Motor Industry Heritage Trust; Mike Broadhead; Brooklyn Engineering; Bundesarchiv Deutschland; Patrick Brown; Michael Burn; Bert Buurmann/Nederlands Fotoarchief; Roger Conway; John Craddock; Roger Crathorne; Richard de Roos; The Dunsfold Collection; Oscar Echeverria; Mrs L. Gardiner; Richard Giller; Kevin Girling; Mike Gould; Mike Griffin; Helmuth Guss; Alan Hammond; Roger Harding; Roberto Hirth; Peter Hobson; Richard Hughes; Robin Lafosse; Land Rover Brasil; Land Rover Centre, Hudders field (Mark Griffiths); Land Rover France; Land Rover Ltd; Land Rover South Africa; Ashley C. Lucas; Bruce McWilliams; Metalurgica de Santa Ana; The Metropolitan Police; Geof Miller; Minerva TT Register; Ministry of Defence; Terry Moore; Otokar; Renaud Pierret; Tony Poole; The RAC Library; Tim and Christopher Race; Registry of Ex-Military Land Rovers; Rover Company; Alex Sinclair; Glenn Smith; Stephen Stansfield; Andrew Stuart-Cook; Pat rick Sutcliffe; Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority; J.D. Stockwell; Swedish Land Rover Club; Chief Superintendent Joe Symon; Tickford, Ltd (Cliff Petts); Jochen von Arnim; Ken Watkin; and Geoff White.

New information about the Land Rover story becomes available all of the time, and if any readers can add to what is in this book, I’d be delighted if they would get in touch with me through the publishers. Important new information about the early days has already become available, and I am pleased to include it in this new printing. I also plan to put any amendments that would interest readers onto my website as they become available, so please do visit www.roverphile.co.uk to see what others have contributed.

James Taylor Oxfordshire September 2012

Off-road ability second to none has always been an essential element in the Land Rover’s make-up. This 2007-model Defender 90 Station Wagon was pictured during a ride-and-drive demonstration for the media.

CHAPTER ONE

GENESIS – The Why and How of the First Land Rovers

At the turn of the twenty-first century Land Rover advertising boasted that a Land Rover was the only motor vehicle more than half the world’s population had ever seen. This was no exaggeration: the Land Rover had indeed been a massive worldwide success, and remains so. To paraphrase another slogan from a different kind of advertising, it had got to the parts other vehicles cannot reach – and other hugely successful products from the same stable had followed it. First came the Range Rover, then the Discovery, next the Freelander and most recently the Range Rover Sport. But all of this is very far from what the Rover Company’s technical chief, Maurice Wilks, had in mind when he drew his plans for the very first Land Rover with his fingertips in the sand at Red Wharf Bay, some time around Easter 1947.

To understand what was going on then, we have to look at the situation Rover found itself in during the first quarter of 1947. Like other British car manufacturers, Rover had suspended car manufacture during the Second World War and had devoted its efforts to building machines needed for the war – in Rover’s case, mainly aircraft components. Unlike some other companies, though, Rover found itself without a new car ready to put into production when hostilities came to an end in 1945. It hastily updated some of the cars it had last built in 1940 and started turning them out of the gates of its new factory at Solihull in the West Midlands.

While these cars had certainly been among those most admired by the professional classes in Britain at the end of the 1930s, they were by now old designs. Both mechanical technology and styling had moved on, and it was clear that Rover needed to move on, too.

But there was an even more urgent reason for developing new products. Shortly after the end of the war, the British government had announced that the country’s manufacturers must give priority to overseas orders. The idea, sensible enough in the circumstances, was that selling manufactured goods abroad would bring money into a Britain that desperately needed money after nearly bankrupting itself during the war. Rover had never made any serious efforts to sell cars outside the UK before and, although the company set to with a will, it quickly discovered that outdated products developed for the peculiar needs of the British market were not strong sellers elsewhere.

The situation looked bleak – and it was made bleaker by the Ministry of Supply’s assertion that it would ration steel, which was in short supply as the country emerged from war, favouring those users who performed best in overseas trade. If Rover couldn’t build a car that would sell well overseas, it might find its supplies rationed to such an extent that it would no longer be able to continue making cars at all.

Rover restarted car production after the Second World War with mildly revised versions of its pre-war models. This 1947 Sports Saloon was typical.

Of course, there were several new projects on the boil. Maurice Wilks and his older brother Spencer, Rover’s Chairman, had guessed that small and economical cars would be in demand during the difficult period that would inevitably follow the war. That had been the case after the First World War and there was no reason to think the same would not happen again. So Rover’s designers had been set to work to draw up a new car called the M-type. That M stood for ‘miniature’, and the car was really a heavily Roverized adaptation of the pre-war Italian Fiat 500. It would certainly have been quite a remarkable machine, but by the first quarter of 1947 it had become apparent that small and economical cars were not what the world wanted as it struggled to get back to normality.

Work was going on to replace the revived pre-war Rovers, too. Maurice Wilks struggled at first to create something that might fit the bill, but was then hugely impressed by the Raymond Loewy-designed 1946 Studebaker Champion, and instructed his designers to borrow ideas from it, settling for a stop-gap model while the new car came together. The stop-gap, which looked much like the pre-war Rovers but had more modern running-gear, arrived in February 1948. Like the cars it replaced, however, the P3 model was never going to set the world on fire. Rover still needed a product that would have appeal in overseas markets, and by the end of 1946 – a year after the war’s end – the problem was a pressing one.

That winter proved to be one of the hardest on record in Britain, and snow and ice made it difficult to use the long drive at Maurice Wilks’ home of Blackdown Manor near Leamington Spa. Wilks borrowed a wartime Jeep from his near neighbour, Colonel Nash, to use between house and road. March then brought severe gales, which brought down trees across the drive. So Wilks visited the local military surplus dump and bought himself a Lloyd Infantry Carrier, a small tracked vehicle that wasn’t daunted by mud or snow and had the power to haul the fallen trees out of the way.

Meanwhile, the borrowed Jeep had left a deep impression. Wilks liked it so much that some time around late May or early June 1947, he took it over in a swap involving his tracked carrier. But it had already inspired him to toy with the idea of Rover building a similar vehicle, using existing production components. The Rover version wouldn’t be primarily for military use, of course, but would be aimed at farmers and others who worked on the land, and would suit light industrial uses as well. Willys had in fact turned their wartime military model into just such a maid-of-all-work over in the USA, and Wilks was more than likely aware of the fact. A utility vehicle like that might be exactly what Rover needed to earn overseas sales and keep themselves going until better times returned.

Over the Easter of 1947 (Easter Day that year fell on 6 April), Maurice Wilks and family were on Anglesey, where they had recently bought a holiday cottage. Spencer Wilks already kept his boat there, and brought it around to Red Wharf Bay to visit his brother. Witnesses remember Spencer rowing ashore and the two men sitting down together as Maurice explained how a Rover 4×4 might be laid out, drawing his ideas in the sand. By the time that Easter holiday was over, the two brothers were sure they were onto a winner. When he returned to Solihull, Maurice instructed five Section Leaders in the Rover Drawing Office to get on with turning his idea into reality.

Maurice Wilks, the ‘father’ of the Land Rover, pictured in 1956.

Designing the Land Rover

The Rover Drawing Office was the company’s engineering design section, all drawing boards and sliding rulers in those days. It was divided into sections dealing with the different major elements of car design, and it was five leaders of those sections who received Maurice Wilks’s brief for the new vehicle: their names were Gordon Bashford, Joe Drinkwater, Tom Barton, Frank Shaw and Sam Ostler.

Gordon Bashford’s job was to design the new chassis frame, and he remembered many years later that one of his first tasks was to visit a military surplus dump somewhere in the Cotswolds and to buy four Jeeps so that the Rover design team could take them apart and discover what made them tick. Bashford decided to use box-section side members rather than the Jeep’s channel-section members, which were notoriously prone to cracking. The box section would give vital extra strength, and Rover was already wedded to the idea of using the same principle for its forthcoming 1948 cars.

Work on the engine fell to Joe Drinkwater. He had to adapt Rover’s brand-new 4-cylinder engine, largely designed before the war by Chief Engine Designer Jack Swaine, to suit its new role in the proposed utility 4×4. In charge of transmissions was Tom Barton, a no-nonsense ex-railway engineer, and it was his job to draw up a two-speed transfer gearbox to bolt onto the existing Rover car gearbox and give the new vehicle crawler ratios for driving across rough terrain. On this he worked closely with Frank Shaw, head of the Transmissions team, who was also assigned to the 4×4 project. The fifth designer on Maurice Wilks’s new team was Sam Ostler, whose job was to come up with the bodywork for the new vehicle.

Maurice Wilks

Maurice Wilks was a gifted engineer who was very highly regarded in the British motor industry. Those who knew him remember a man of boyish enthusiasms, and yet he was also ‘a quiet, shy, studious man … [who] … shunned publicity and preferred to remain in the background’, as the Rover News company newspaper observed on his death.

He was constantly coming up with new inventions, both within and outside the automotive field, and patented many of them. His nephew Spen King, who also became a hugely important figure in the history of the Rover Company, described him as an ‘instinctive’ engineer, and this perhaps explains why Maurice Wilks had so little regard for keeping records. He liked nothing better than to try an idea out in the metal; it could be turned into a formal engineering drawing afterwards if it worked.

Maurice Fernand Cary Wilks, born in 1904, was one of three brothers. Educated at Malvern College, he gained his initial experience of the motor industry with General Motors in the USA, where he worked between 1926 and 1928. On his return to Britain, he became a planning engineer with the Hillman Motor Car Company in Coventry. His older brother Spencer was already there as Joint Managing Director with John Black, who would later become the authoritarian driving force behind Standard-Triumph.

In 1928, however, the Hillman company was bought out by the Rootes brothers, whose reorganization of the company prompted many staff to leave. Several key people found their way to Rover, including Spencer Wilks, who was appointed as the company’s General Manager in September 1929 and became Managing Director four years later. Maurice Wilks joined him shortly afterwards on the engineering side of the company; he was then twenty-five years old.

Maurice initially went to work on the Scarab, a rear-engined light car that was very much part of the old Rover management team’s thinking. However, as the Depression had its effect on the motor industry, it became clear that the Scarab was not the way forward, and the project was abandoned.

At this stage Rover’s business position was unstable. It was trying to compete in several different sectors of the market, and as a result was making a wide variety of very different cars. Spencer Wilks believed this was a mistake, and together with his brother, who had become Rover’s Chief Engineer in 1931, set about planning a rationalized range of cars, sharing common components wherever possible. These cars were carefully designed to suit Britain’s professional classes, a segment of the market that the Wilks brothers understood very well. Their introduction in 1934 was the beginning of a complete turnaround in the Rover Company’s fortunes.

Spen King remembered that Maurice Wilks’s enthusiasms in the 1930s also embraced flying. As a boy, King was taken for a hugely memorable spin in Uncle Maurice’s light plane.

In due course Wilks married Barbara Martin-Hurst, and they had three sons. Barbara’s brother, William, was already making a name for himself within industry and many years later he would join Rover as its Production Director, later rising to the position of Managing Director.

When war came and the Rover Company’s car-making activities were suspended, Maurice Wilks headed the team of engineers from Rover who were asked to prepare Frank Whittle’s jet engine for quantity production. They began work in 1941, at Waterloo Mill in Clitheroe, but the task was not an easy one. Part of Rover’s remit was to make ‘any changes to the design that would facilitate the manufacturing process’, as David S. Brooks explains in his book Vikings atWaterloo, and ‘this remit was to subsequently bring them into conflict with Frank Whittle’.

Wilks and his team realized that there were inefficiencies in the Whittle design, and gained permission from the Ministry of Aircraft Production to redesign the engine. This worked so well that it became the basis of the eventual production engine, but Whittle objected to others meddling with his designs, and the Ministry of Aircraft Production tactfully re-allocated the jet engine development work to Rolls-Royce in 1942.

Spen King remembered an incident from this period: Maurice Wilks discovered that Frank Whittle shared his enthusiasm for the sport of fencing, and challenged him to a match. The fact that Wilks comprehensively beat him probably did not contribute to good relations between the two men! Though no longer involved with the jet engine project, Maurice Wilks would later put his experience to good use when he set up a team at Rover to develop gas turbine engines for road cars. Although the cars never progressed beyond experimental prototypes, the basic gas turbine work did lead to series production at Rover of small gas turbines as stationary power plants during the 1950s and 1960s.

Back in the Midlands, Wilks began to think about the cars that Rover would need after the war was over. It was probably his earlier experience with General Motors that persuaded him to look at what the Americans were doing, not least because they had continued to design and build new cars until 1942 and were consequently some years ahead of the European industry. Adapting the latest American ideas to British conditions proved very difficult at first, but after he had seen the 1946 Studebakers, with their revolutionary ‘three-box’ styling by Raymond Loewy, he realized that this was the way to go. The 1949 Rover 75 (the famous P4 model) was the result.

At this period Maurice Wilks was living at Blackdown Manor, near Leamington Spa, an imposing property set in large grounds. Not long after the war ended, he also bought two small farms in Anglesey, planning to use the cottage on one of them for family holidays. There was already a family connection with Anglesey, because Spencer Wilks kept his boat there and Maurice was also keen on sailing. It was on one of the Wilks family’s visits to Anglesey that the famous ‘drawing in the sand’ episode occurred. By the summer of 1947 Maurice was turning his enthusiasm for a Rover 4×4 runabout into metal at the company’s Solihull factory, and less than a year later the Land Rover went on sale; Wilks was just forty-four years old.

The huge success of the Land Rover was just one of the reasons why Rover rewarded Wilks’s major contribution to the company by appointing him as a Director in 1950. He retained his position in charge of engineering, however, and did so again when his title was changed to Technical Director in 1953. Becoming Joint Managing Director with his brother Spencer in 1956, he appointed his deputy Robert Boyle to the position of Chief Engineer, but never lost his hands-on engineering approach. He remained Joint Managing Director until 1960, though from 1957 he shared the position with George Farmer after Spencer Wilks had been appointed Rover’s Chairman.

In 1961 Maurice Wilks became sole Managing Director of the Rover Company, and in 1962 he was appointed Chairman. The company was then at its height as a force in the motor industry, and was just on the brink of introducing the revolutionary Rover 2000 (known internally as the P6), which would become its strongest-selling car model soon after launch in October 1963. Sadly, Maurice Wilks did not live to see that happen: he died of heart disease at his Anglesey holiday home on 8 September 1963. He was just fifty-nine years old.

There were certain key requirements in Maurice Wilks’s brief to these five men. One of them was speed: Rover needed the new vehicle in production within a year in order to stand a chance of meeting the Ministry of Supply’s overseas sales requirements. Another, as Tom Barton told motoring author Graham Robson, was that it should have power take-offs ‘everywhere’ so that it could be used as a stationary power source for the belt-driven farm machinery of the time.

Very few design drawings for the original Land Rover survive. This page from chassis designer Gordon Bashford’s notebook dates from late 1947 and shows him making calculations for the steering.

There was, too, a need to get the vehicle into production with the absolute minimum of new tooling. While financial prudence certainly came into the equation, there were more pressing reasons behind this. Firstly, the tooling would have to be made outside the Rover Company, and Rover would have to join a queue of customers, which would cost them valuable time. Secondly, Maurice Wilks and the Rover Directors envisaged this new model as yet another stopgap solution. It would help get Rover through the bad times, and could then be dropped when trading conditions returned to normal and the company could get on with its proper business of making quality saloon cars for the professional classes. So there was no point in laying out a lot of money on machine tools and dies that would not be needed within a few years. All this helped to dictate the design of the body, which was so simple that it could be made from sheet metal by hand on wooden formers.

To oversee the new 4×4 project, and to drive it through to production, Maurice Wilks promoted Arthur Goddard to the position of Engineer-in-Charge. While the Rover draughtsmen got on with the job of drawing up components for the new vehicle over the summer of 1947, Wilks seems to have got on with some ‘knife-and-fork’ engineering of his own to try out his ideas. Certainly, Arthur Goddard remembered that what happened next was not part of the development process that he ran.

Arthur Goddard was the Engineer-in-Charge of the original Land Rover project.

The first stage was to fit a Rover engine and transmission into a Jeep – probably one of those four that Gordon Bashford had been sent to buy. Painstaking research by Kevin Shearman shows that this vehicle was initially referred to as Project J (the J presumably stood for Jeep), but it appears that no paper records of the engineering changes were kept. Nobody remembers exactly which Rover engine was transplanted into the Jeep, but it must have been a four-cylinder type because the Jeep’s engine bay was not long enough to accommodate one of the six-cylinder types. As the Jeep’s original engine put out 60bhp, and the proposed post-war Rover 12hp engine had the same output, a prototype of this engine would have been a logical choice for such a trial.

Tom Barton, or ‘Mr Land Rover’, pictured in 1998.

Tom Barton

Tom Barton was one of the five section leaders asked by Maurice Wilks to draw up the new Land Rover in 1947. His name was to become inextricably linked with the marque. A legend in his own lifetime, he was a little man with a big personality and huge energy, plus the tenacity of a bull terrier. The Land Rover took on all those characteristics, and there is no doubt that the ‘can-do’ element in its make-up closely reflected Barton’s own attitude. Known for many years as ‘Mr Land Rover’, he was a Land Rover man until his retirement in 1980, and even then he stayed on as a consultant for a further four years.

Born in 1915, Tom Barton served his apprenticeship at the old LMS Railway carriage and wagon works in Wolverton. He then decided to specialize as a draughtsman and designer, and moved to another railway engineering company, Metropolitan Cammell in Birmingham. In 1940 he joined the Rover Company and quickly became involved in the company’s work on the top-secret Whittle jet aircraft engine. He went with the engineering team when it was evacuated to Clitheroe in 1941, but returned to the Midlands after Rover handed the jet engine work over to Rolls-Royce in 1943. By 1945 he was a section leader in the Rover Drawing Office, designing the steering components for the very first Rovers fitted with left-hand drive.

Barton’s job on the Land Rover project was to design the new transmission, using Rover car components wherever possible and designing-in the power take-offs, which Maurice Wilks believed were essential to the vehicle’s success. Perhaps his earlier training in the railway business came in handy, encouraging him to make things strong and simple. When the other four section leaders went back to their normal jobs, Barton remained with the Land Rover, reporting to John Cullen, who had been put in charge of the project. In 1951 he was given the title of Chief Chassis Designer, Land Rover, and then became Chief Development Engineer when Cullen left the company in 1954.

When Maurice Wilks divided the Rover engineering teams into two halves, Dick Oxley was put in charge of cars and Barton took over the Land Rover side of the business. But this arrangement lasted only a couple of years, and in 1958 Colonel Jack Pogmore was put in over him as Chief Engineer, Land Rovers. When Pogmore retired in 1963, Barton was finally made Land Rover Chief Engineer. Now in his forties, he had more than a decade and a half of experience with the product behind him – more than anybody else with any seniority in the company.

The next two decades were Barton’s Golden Years: once he had reached the top, his experience with the product made him an unstoppable force. Most of the Rover senior management were probably content to let him get on with the job because he understood the essence of the product so much better than they did. Not only was he in charge of Land Rover design and development, but he also turned himself into the marque’s roving ambassador, spending weeks and sometimes months at a time on overseas trips to promote his ‘baby’. He became known and respected by Government and military fleet buyers all over the world, and yet he still managed to keep in close touch with his staff and to inspire great loyalty in them.

Barton believed that the Land Rover was basically a sound design and that change for change’s sake was pointless; that is largely why the 1960s and 1970s saw no great strides forward in the products. It doesn’t matter whether Barton was the first person to argue that retaining leaf springs gave a ride that would make the driver back off before he broke the vehicle, but that anecdote summarizes his view very well. He was implacably opposed to coil-spring suspension for many years and had the gravest doubts about the Range Rover in its early years for that reason. But when prototypes in the mid-1970s demonstrated that coil springs worked extremely well on a Land Rover too (seeChapter 13), he conceded the point, and the first generation of coil-sprung models was developed on his watch.

Barton was awarded the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977 for his services to the British economy in developing and promoting a world-beating product. He retired with the title of Director of Product Engineering for Land Rover Ltd, and in June 1981 he was awarded an OBE, of which he was immensely and justifiably proud. He continued to support enthusiast events until his death in October 2002 at the age of eighty-seven.

Having proved that this hybrid worked satisfactorily, Wilks next had a new body built on a Jeep chassis, again using a Rover engine and gearbox. As there was some urgency about the project, it is probable that the Project J vehicle was dismantled and used as the basis of this second vehicle, but no documentary proof of this has so far been discovered.

The earliest known picture of the legendary Centre-Steer prototype is this one, taken in the Jig Shop at Solihull on 30 September 1947.

This second vehicle was the legendary Centre-Steer prototype. Probably mindful of the extra work that had been needed when the very first left-hand drive Rovers were drawn up in late 1945, Wilks decided to put his vehicle’s steering wheel in the middle, where it would suit countries with either left-hand or right-hand drive. Retaining the Ross steering box of the Jeep chassis, he made it work by fitting a chain-drive between the end of the steering column and the steering-box input. However, that was one piece of design that didn’t prove satisfactory. Arthur Goddard told the author in 2010 that ‘there was just nowhere to put your feet … as soon as we sort of saw it and got in it, it was quite clear that if you wanted to do it you needed to produce more room in the middle.’ Tom Barton was equally dismissive, some years earlier: ‘As soon as we took it on the road, we knew that wasn’t going to work. When you had the hood up, the driver behind couldn’t see your hand signals!’

The One and Only Centre-Steer

All surviving photographs of the legendary Centre-Steer prototype are in black-and-white, but we know it was painted grey, a typical prototype colour, from the recollections of George Middleton, who saw it while doing some building restoration work at Maurice Wilks’s Blackdown Manor home.

There have been several theories about how many Centre-Steers were actually built. The idea that there could have been as many as seven or eight is patently absurd: there simply wouldn’t have been the time to build them. The notion that there were two, however, is harder to dismiss. It probably arose because the last known Centre-Steer pictures, taken in January 1948, show a number of minor differences from the first ones taken in October 1947. The differences are in fact perfectly consistent with the sort of changes that would have been made to a development prototype over a period of four months. Tom Barton, however, was prone to tell people that there were two prototypes and this tended to fuel the theory.

Not long before his death in 2002, the author pressed Tom on the subject. He still insisted there had been two, but conceded that the second may not have been built up as a complete vehicle. That would be perfectly consistent with our knowledge that Project J was the first prototype and was not built up as a complete Land Rover; the Centre-Steer would then have been the second one, so making two in all.

As for what happened to that single prototype, Maurice Wilks’s son Stephen told Land Rover historian John Smith that he remembered his father showing him a heap of body parts in a corner of the Solihull factory, and saying that they were the remains of the very first Land Rover. This, too, makes sense. There would have been no need for Rover to retain a redundant prototype (the Centre-Steer was redundant after January 1948, when the first of the revised production models was built) and it would most probably have been cannibalized for parts and reduced to scrap.

Some brave enthusiasts have built replicas of the legendary Centre-Steer. One appeared in incomplete form with a Jeep engine at various events during Land Rover’s fiftieth anniversary year in 1998. Another was completed to a very high standard during 2005. Kevin Shearman’s re-creation of the Project J hybrid prototype led to some very thoughtful conclusions about how the Rover engineers must have created both this and the Centre-Steer prototype. Kevin recorded his findings in a series of articles for Legend, the magazine of the Land Rover Series I Club, in 2006.

Pictured in mid-October 1947 within the Solihull factory complex, the Centre-Steer prototype had been fitted with a dummy capstan winch that was later removed.

Only one photograph of the Centre-Steer under construction in the Rover Jig Shop has been discovered. This appears to have been taken on 30 September 1947. As Kevin Shearman has pointed out, the vehicle’s exhaust emerges on the left-hand side, which strongly suggests that the engine was a post-war 12hp prototype and not the pre-war 12hp (or even 10hp) that some commentators have suggested. The pre-war engine had its exhaust manifold on the opposite side, and an exhaust system linked to it would have come out on the right of the vehicle. However, the new Rover engine then under development for the post-war cars did have its exhaust manifold on the left-hand side, and so it is very likely that the Centre-Steer’s engine was one of these.

The Centre-Steer prototype was finished some time around mid-October 1947 (the date comes from various photographs taken of it) but by that stage the Rover management was already convinced that their new 4×4 was the way forward. At the Board meeting on Wednesday 4 September, Spencer Wilks had formally proposed that the ‘new utility vehicle along the lines of the Willys-Overland Post-War Jeep’ should go into production; the Board agreed, and things went full-speed ahead from then on.

It is interesting that the Board specifically referred to the ‘Post-War Jeep’ rather than the wartime Jeep on which the prototypes had been based. The post-war Jeep was of course the CJ-2A model, a civilianized vehicle introduced late in 1945 and intended for use by farmers. Like the Land Rover, this could be equipped with power take-offs to drive farm machinery, and it is quite clear that Rover must have been well aware of its existence. Also interesting is that the new utility vehicle already had a name by the time of that Board meeting: in the minutes it is recorded as ‘Landrover’.

The story of how the name came about is intriguing and bears retelling here. According to the late Richard Wilks, nephew of the Wilks brothers, Spencer Wilks owned a retreat on Islay, a little island in the Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. Spencer Wilks was there on holiday in the late summer of 1947 with various members of his family, and went out one day to walk up grouse on the moors with his son Thomas and nephew Richard. They had stopped for a lunch of beer and sandwiches, and Uncle Spencer mentioned that he had left instructions for the engineering department at Solihull to have a Rover engine and gearbox in a Jeep on his return from holiday. There was one small problem. They couldn’t think of what to call it.

Richard Wilks promptly suggested Roverlander. This incorporated the name of the company satisfactorily and gave some indication of the vehicle’s intended purpose. Uncle Spencer didn’t like it, though. He said it sounded too much like the name of the Jeep’s manufacturer, Willys Overland.

The solution came from young Thomas Wilks, who suggested, ‘Why not call it the Landrover?’ And that name stuck, although before production began it would become two hyphenated words as Land-Rover. (Note: The hyphen was progressively dropped after the formation of Land Rover Ltd in 1978, and in this book the unhyphenated form is used for consistency.)

Rover’s new 4-cylinder engine, initially designed for the P3 saloon cars, proved an ideal choice for the Land Rover.

The Land Rover’s Engine

The basic design of the Land Rover’s engine dated from just before the outbreak of the Second World War, although there were no production applications before the P3 60 saloons introduced in February 1948.

During the 1930s Rover’s rationalized range of cars used a large number of common components, but the need to offer both 4-cylinder and 6-cylinder types meant that two different lengths of chassis were required. Always keen to rationalize further and make production economies, Maurice Wilks suggested to Jack Swaine, his Chief Engine Designer, that replacing the straight-six engines with a new V6 design would deliver a shorter engine that could fit into the same space as the 4-cylinder. There would then be a need for only one length of chassis.

Overhead valves were then the latest trend in engine design, but incorporating these into such a design proved too complicated. Swaine simplified the valvetrain by using overhead inlet valves and side exhaust valves, the latter driven directly off a centrally mounted camshaft, while pushrods operated on the inlet valves. An important constraint on the design of the engine was the width of the existing cars’ bonnets, and so he also angled the cylinder head so that the rockers for the overhead inlet valves would be on top of the engine and would not increase its width. This resulted, largely by chance, in a remarkably efficient design of wedge-shaped combustion chamber.

The V6 never went into production, but Wilks asked Swaine to incorporate its combustion chamber design in a new in-line engine. The first prototypes of this engine, usually known as the IOE (Inlet-over-Exhaust) or F-head type, were running by the end of the decade. So when Rover needed a new engine to brighten up its car range after the war, the IOE engine was a natural choice. The basic design was also used for the engine of the abortive M-type saloon, but the versions that entered production were a 4-cylinder originally designed to attract an RAC horsepower rating of 12hp, and a 6-cylinder designed as a 16hp. It was the 12hp engine that went into the Land Rover, after appropriate modification by Joe Drinkwater.

Chassis

It took some time before Gordon Bashford settled on the design of the Land Rover’s chassis frame. The original idea of a box-section frame was not his, as Bashford was always careful to point out; it had been proposed just before the war by Adrian Lombard, a member of the Rover Drawing Office who was seconded to work on the Whittle jet. Lombard later transferred to Rolls-Royce, where he would rise to a very senior position in the aero-engine division.

Bashford had a first prototype Land Rover frame made with 4.5-inch deep side members, but it twisted too much in stress tests. A second frame with 6-inch deep side members of 12swg steel proved too rigid. However, his third attempt used 6-inch side members made of lighter 14swg steel. This worked and the design was adopted. If the dates in a catalogue of Rover company photographs can be trusted, the first pilot-production chassis had been completed by 24 February 1948. Sadly, like so many other crucial photographs from this period, the negative of that photograph has now been lost, and no prints have yet been found.

Rover planned initially to galvanize the frames to protect them against corrosion, but only the pilot-production chassis were so treated. Probably to save costs and simplify the manufacturing process, the production frames were simply given a protective coat of paint.

However, simply designing the frame was not the end of Bashford’s problems. Box-section frames required expensive press tools and jigs, and Maurice Wilks wanted the absolute minimum of new tooling to get the Land Rover into production. So Bashford consulted Chief Production Engineer Olaf Poppe, who devised a way of making the box-sections out of four flat pieces of steel. Any twist that occurred while welding one edge would, he reasoned, correct itself when the opposite edge was welded in turn. With the addition only of a simple jig (nicknamed the ‘Christmas tree’ because of its shape), Poppe’s method was adopted for production. It worked so well that all short-wheelbase Land Rover chassis were made in this way until the demise of the Series III models in 1985.

The Land Rover had an essentially simple structure, and depended for its strength on a rugged box-section chassis frame.

Body

The design of the Land Rover’s body was heavily dictated by manufacturing conditions in Britain in the immediate post-war years, and by the fact that Rover expected its new vehicle to be no more than a short-term expedient until normal trading conditions returned.

Rover didn’t want to invest capital in production tooling or wait for such tooling to be manufactured before starting series assembly of Land Rovers. The vehicle’s body was therefore designed so that it could be made by hand. This demanded flat panels with relatively simple shapes. A second issue was that, since steel was being rationed by the Ministry of Supply, Rover needed all the steel it could get to keep its car assembly lines going. So the Land Rover’s body was designed to be made of aluminium alloy. This was more expensive than steel, but it was also more readily available because British factories had been turning it out in large quantities during the war for use in aircraft manufacture. It was also easier to work by hand.

As it turned out, the light weight of the alloy body panels gave the Land Rover excellent stability on side-slopes because most of the vehicle’s weight was low down in the steel chassis. A second advantage was that the alloy resisted corrosion much better than steel, and this suited the life of a working vehicle very well. These were the main reasons why Land Rover body panels continued to be made of alloy for the next six decades.

Some of the panels on the pilot-production Land Rovers were made of Duralumin, but for production the chosen material was Birmabright. This was the trade name of a sheet alloy made from aluminium and magnesium by Birmetals Ltd, which later had a subsidiary called Birmabright Ltd, at the firm’s factory at Claygate Lane in Quinton, Birmingham.

The first pilot-production Land Rover, and therefore the first to be built to what was essentially the production design, was R.01. Sold in the normal way, but then bought back and restored by Land Rover, it is known as ‘Huey’.

Building the Pilot-Production Land Rovers

The Land Rover’s development phase was heavily truncated in order to meet the very tight production deadline that Rover management had set, and so there were no prototypes in the traditional sense. Instead, once the production design had been approved on paper, a large pilot-production batch of vehicles was built. These were assembled by hand, and many of their components were hand-made, too. Once testing had proved these components satisfactory, the production dies and tooling were ordered. To oversee all the testing, John Cullen was appointed as Development Engineer, reporting to Arthur Goddard.

Rover set up a temporary production line in a corner of the assembly shop at Solihull early in 1948, in the building that today is known as the South Works. Construction of the first pilot-production vehicles got under way at the end of February or the beginning of March. This timing was not coincidental: before February the Rover production staff would have been flat-out preparing the assembly lines for the new 60 and 75 saloons that were launched that month to take over from the revived pre-war 12hp, 14hp and 16hp models. As cars were Rover’s core business, they naturally took priority.

The first Land Rover to be finished, chassis number R.01, was booked into the Despatch Department on 11 March, probably the date on which it had been completed. This vehicle remained in Rover Company hands for many years after being registered as HUE 166 on 17 January 1949, but was sold to a Warwickshire farmer in 1954. Many years later, Rover bought it back and had it refurbished in time for Land Rover’s twenty-first anniversary celebrations in 1969. ‘Huey’ is now in the collection of the Heritage Motor Museum at Gaydon.

The second Land Rover, R.02, followed on 15 March. The Rover board meeting minutes for 23 March triumphantly recorded that ‘the first prototypes of the Landrover are now on test, and the Directors made a personal inspection of one of these’. The third, fourth and fifth vehicles were not completed until 27 March, followed by two more on 28 March. The final vehicles were not completed until July, by which time the production models had already started to come off the new assembly line.

In the 1930s and 1940s Rover generally made do with no more than two or three prototypes of a new design, and it was still doing so in the late 1950s, when there were just two prototypes of its P5 3-litre saloon. Not until the era of the P6 (Rover 2000) did the company go for larger numbers of prototypes – and even then there were only fifteen! So forty-eight pilot-production Land Rovers in 1948 was a huge number.

To a degree, the number was probably determined by the progress of the test programme. The Land Rover was after all a completely new departure for Rover, and a lot of new features had to be tested in a very short time. The more experimental vehicles they had available, the faster and more efficiently they could get the testing done. No doubt the Directors also insisted that the new vehicle had to meet the very high standards of reliability and durability that were then associated with the Rover name, and so a very thorough test programme was called for. It is also arguable that the workforce who were to assemble this new vehicle and make many of its body parts by hand needed to be carefully trained by practising on a large number of vehicles that were destined for experimental use.

Even so, that figure of forty-eight needs explanation: why not fifty? In fact, the original plan was to build fifty vehicles, and Spencer Wilks told the Rover Board on 16 October 1947 that ‘a pre-production batch of fifty was already in progress, and the first prototype was at present on test’. This implies that there were to be fifty preproduction vehicles in addition to that first prototype (which was, of course, the Centre-Steer). It’s likely that only forty-eight were built because the production design had been settled before the whole batch had been completed. Certainly, assembly of production models for sale had begun long before the forty-eighth preproduction model was built, and in fact the need for saleable vehicles was so great that eight of the pre-production models were shipped abroad to meet orders for production Land Rovers! Five went to Tanganyika (on the ill-fated Ground Nuts Scheme), two to Argentina and one to Southern Rhodesia.

The pilot-production models differed from the Centre-Steer in a number of important respects. To begin with, they used the new box-section chassis drawn up by Gordon Bash ford. Secondly, some were made with right-hand steering and some with left-hand steering because the universal centre-steering position had been a failure. Sam Ostler’s body design was also very different, with more upright front wings that were easier to make by hand than the Centre-Steer’s grace fully curved panels. It also had flat panels wherever possible, with galvanized cappings to add reinforcement – these were again much simpler to make than the design tried out on the Centre-Steer. But there were still traces of the Land Rover’s Jeep ancestry for those who knew where to look: the only reason why the vehicle had an 80-inch wheelbase was that this had been the wheelbase dimension of its inspiration, the Jeep.

Announcing the Land Rover

Although assembly of the pilot-production batch was painfully slow at first, it was important to announce the Land Rover’s availability and attract some orders, even if in practice deliveries could not be made for some time yet. So it was that on 20 April The Times had the distinction of being first with the story of Rover’s new product, now hyphenated as the Land-Rover.

The press announcement was one thing, the public introduction quite another. As the Land Rover was intended primarily for export, Rover would have liked to display it at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1948, a major international attraction that was the first proper international motor show of the post-war period. However, the schedule was too tight, and so the Rover stand at Geneva displayed only the new 60 and 75 saloons. The next show on the calendar was to be held at Amsterdam between 30 April and 9 May, and Rover plumped for that one. Board minutes reveal that the show vehicles left Solihull on Wednesday 28 April en route for Amsterdam.

The Land Rover was first shown to the public at the Amsterdam Show in April 1948. The vehicle on the stand has been identified as L.05, and was equipped as a mobile welder.

For many years the identity of the pilot-production Land Rover that introduced the model to the world at Amsterdam remained a mystery. There were no records to help. Military vehicle historian Bart Vanderveen remembered visiting the show as a boy and seeing one vehicle on the Rover stand inside the exhibition hall and a LHD demonstrator outside that had trouble with a sticking clutch. Then some painstaking research by Richard de Roos, in time for the Land Rover’s fiftieth anniversary in 1998, uncovered a picture of the Amsterdam show stand. The vehicle on display was L.05, a LHD model kitted out as a mobile welder. The identity of the demonstrator with the sticking clutch has not been established for certain, but if Bart Vanderveen was right in remembering it as having left-hand drive, it must have been either L.03 or L.07, the only other left-hand-drive models that had been completed by 28 April 1948. It is, of course, possible that there were more than two vehicles at Amsterdam.

Developments and Variants

As the forty-eight pilot-build vehicles were assembled, so the design of the Land Rover changed in a number of details. No records of these changes have come to light, but they were first investigated by Tony Hutchings in his Land Rover: the Early Years (Tony Hutchings Publishing, 1982), which has been reprinted and updated twice since its original publication. A number of other researchers have also looked into the story of the pilot-production Land Rovers, notably John Smith, who published his findings in a series of articles in Land Rover World magazine. There simply isn’t room to reproduce the whole story here, but a summary will give the flavour of what was happening in those first six months of 1948.

As the vehicle was designed to attract export sales, twenty-two of the pilot-production models were built with left-hand drive. Some had permanent four-wheel drive with a freewheel to prevent transmission wind-up, while others had selectable four-wheel drive with a freewheel. Early models had the transmission controls on the bulkhead, later ones had them on the floor like the eventual production models, and some were built with bulkhead controls and then modified to use the floor-mounted type. Mirrors were wing-mounted on the first models but windscreen-mounted on the later ones, while the door stop rubber originally fitted to the door itself was mounted to the wing on later examples. The first vehicles also had front bumpers integral with the chassis-frame, but when this showed up the difficulty of repairs after an accident a bolt-on front bumper entered the specification. Some vehicles were converted from LHD to RHD, in most cases for unexplained reasons.

The original 1.6-litre engine is seen here in a very early Land Rover. The bellows arrangement behind the carburettor and the black box on the far side of the engine are elements of a speed control system used when the vehicle was equipped as a mobile welder.

The first forty pilot-production Land Rovers were painted in the same light green used in wartime aircraft cockpits and probably available in quantity at Solihull as a result of Rover’s involvement with air frames during the war. The last eight were in ‘No 2 Green’, a slightly darker colour that had been introduced in February 1948 for the new Rover 60 and 75 (P3) saloons. It would be this No 2 Green that would be used on the production models for the first year, until circumstances dictated a change.

Rover continued to promote its new vehicle at agricultural shows all round Britain over the next few months, even though full production had not yet begun. Three pilot-production models were on static display at the Bath and West Show, held in Cardiff between 26 and 29 May, and three more at the Royal Ulster Show in Belfast, held over the same dates. Two were probably dis played by the local Rover agent at the Highland Show in Inverness (22–25 June) and two more at the Royal York Show (6–9 July).

Orders had already begun to come in from abroad, and the company now knew that it had a success on its hands. As early as 28 April (before the official unveiling in Amsterdam), Spencer Wilks had reported to the Rover Board his satisfaction ‘that there was a considerable demand both at Home and Overseas for this vehicle’. By 21 July he was able to say that ‘it was becoming more and more apparent that there was a very extensive demand for the Land Rover both at Home and Abroad, and that the export orders and firm enquiries on hand at the moment amounted to approximately 8000 of these vehicles.’

For a product originally intended as another stopgap to keep the Rover assembly lines ticking over until the car market returned to normal, the Land Rover was already doing remarkably well.

CHAPTER TWO

THE GREAT ORIGINAL The 80-inch models

Exactly how long the Rover Directors imagined their stopgap product would last was never really clear. It was not something for which they could plan, in any case: the recovery of the car market on which they were pinning their hopes would depend on how quickly the British economy recovered from the post-war doldrums.

What is clear, though, is that the Land Rover’s success took them by surprise. Orders and enquiries came flooding in after the Amsterdam Show debut and as the pilot-production models were introduced to the public at various other shows in the spring and summer of 1948. Production began slowly in June, and before the end of July demand was so great that the Rover Board were talking about increasing production from the 100 Land Rovers a week they had originally planned to 500 vehicles a week. By the end of November E. Ransom Harrison, Rover’s Chairman, had prepared a statement for the December AGM that included the words: ‘the orders and enquiries we have already received, particularly from overseas, indicate that this vehicle will be something very much more than an additional source of production. It may yet equal – and even exceed – our car output in quantity.’

This statement was prophetic. Within a year of its introduction Land Rover sales had overtaken those of Rover cars, and by 1951 it was outselling the cars by two to one. Yet it took a long time for the reality of the situation to sink in at Solihull, which continued to think of itself as primarily a car manufacturer for most of the 1950s and probably right through the 1960s as well. The fact was that from about 1950 Rover cars were the sideline, and the Rover Company’s primary product was the Land Rover.

Meanwhile, of course, the design and specification of the Land Rover would evolve considerably. In due course, bigger and more powerful models would be developed, but the essence of the original 1948 design with its 80-inch wheelbase remained intact until the summer of 1953 – for a total of just over five years (six model-years) and close on 65,000 vehicles (the exact total is in dispute thanks to incomplete records). In that time there were countless minor changes, but the biggest one came in mid-1951 when the original 1.6-litre engine was replaced by a larger-bore 2-litre derivative, which offered slightly more power but a lot more low-down torque.

Export was the name of the game in the early years, and Rover had this picture taken in July 1949 to prove how well they were doing.

Customers

The very first Land Rover sales brochure had described the vehicle as ‘for the farmer, the countryman and general industrial use’. Farmers certainly did take to it, although mainly as a general-purpose runabout; demand for the optional power take-offs, which would allow it to take the place of a tractor or traction engine as a stationary power source, seems to have been rather limited. In country areas, especially remote ones in developing countries overseas, its ruggedness made it much more useful than a car and therefore won it many friends. And on the industrial side, it soon became a favourite as a light general-purpose vehicle for large construction projects. Perhaps the most notable among these was the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme in New South Wales,