The Jeep played a major part in resolving the war in the Allies’ favour, and when peace was declared in 1945 there was no shortage of takers for the vehicles that had inevitably been left behind in Europe, now surplus to military requirements. These all-terrain vehicles were particularly popular with farmers – and gentleman-farmer Maurice Wilks was no exception.
In the overgrown graveyard of St Mary’s Church at Llanfair-yn-y-Cwmwd, on the Isle of Anglesey, North Wales, is the weathered gravestone of Maurice Wilks, which reads: ‘A much-loved, gentle, modest man whose sudden death robbed the Rover company of a chairman and Britain of the brilliant pioneer who was responsible for the world’s first gas turbine driven car.’
Like the man himself, the inscription is modest, for it fails to mention the invention for which he is best known – the Land Rover.
Wilks died in 1963, aged just 59. In his all-too-short life he also helped to develop Frank Whittle’s original jet engine, but he will forever be remembered for creating the motor car that took the world by storm. Nobody back in the 1940s, 50s and 60s could have predicted how the utilitarian little 4×4 would one day become the car of the stars. When Wilks died, even his family underestimated the importance of the Land Rover. They thought he’d be best remembered for his contribution to Rover’s ill-fated gas turbine car, which is why that got mentioned on his gravestone and the Land Rover didn’t.
Maurice, engineering director at the Rover car company, owned a rugged 250-acre coastal estate at Newborough, on the island of Anglesey, which was made more accessible thanks to his own ex-US Army Jeep. The truth was, he thoroughly enjoyed the experience of 4×4 off-road driving. Old home movies still in the possession of the Wilks family show him driving it at every opportunity. Whenever he was able to escape the hustle and bustle of the Rover factory for the wilderness of Anglesey, the man and his machine were seldom parted.
One day, his brother Spencer, Rover’s managing director, asked him what he would do when the battered warhorse eventually wore out. ‘Buy another one, I suppose – there isn’t anything else,’ was his fateful reply.
Legend has it that the Wilks brothers were relaxing on the beach at the time – at Red Wharf Bay in Anglesey, to be precise – and Maurice began drawing a picture of his ideal 4×4 in the sand. Unsurprisingly, it looked very much like his Jeep. It wasn’t long before the rough sketch became reality, though, for the brothers reckoned there was a definite niche for a civilian version of the Jeep, and they decided to build it at Solihull.
Again, circumstances played their part. With steel strictly rationed, Rover decided to create the new vehicle’s bodywork from Birmabright aluminium alloy panels. The steel box-section chassis was born of necessity, with strips of steel cast-offs hand-welded together to create a ladder frame. As well as being cheaper to install than a heavy press or expensive sheet steel, it also achieved the level of toughness appropriate for an off-road utility vehicle. Astonishingly, the same basic ladder-frame chassis was used throughout the production of the Series Land Rovers, as well as the Defenders, right up until the manufacture of the last cars in January 2016. The ladder-frame chassis was also the backbone of the first- and second-generation Range Rovers (1970–2002), Discovery 1 and 2 (1989–2003) and the various military specials and forward controls produced at Solihull.
The new 4×4 planned by the Wilks brothers also had great export potential. In 1947, British schoolchildren still toiled in classrooms in which a map of the world took pride of place on the wall, one that showed more than half of the land mass coloured pink – denoting countries that were either British colonies or former colonies (by then part of the British Commonwealth). The sun had not yet set on the British Empire and there were plenty of colonial outposts in the developing world where Rover’s projected new all-terrain vehicle would prove an invaluable mode of transport. So although the first Land Rover was designed with the British farmer in mind, its versatility meant that it would be a brilliant workhorse anywhere on the planet where the going was likely to get tough. (And it still is. For example, in the remote Cameron Highlands of Malaysia, extremely battered Land Rover Series Is are even today the main mode of transport in the tea plantations, including some very early 80-inch models, which would be worth a fortune as ‘garage finds’ in the UK!)
The introduction of the Land Rover marked a fresh start at the company’s new Solihull premises, and the enthusiasm of the management for the vehicle was such that it even axed its plans for its projected ‘mini’ car, the M1 (which had reached prototype stage by 1946), in favour of the newcomer.
The first Land Rover prototype was built in the summer of 1947. Its chassis came from a Willys Jeep, as did the axles, wheels and leaf-spring shackles. It is believed that other components, such as the springs, shock absorbers, bearings, brakes and brake drums, were also of Jeep origin, along with the transfer box and several transmission parts, including propshafts, universal joints and handbrake. The engine was an under-powered 1389cc unit from a Rover saloon. The car differed from the Jeep in that it had a more cramped driving position, because Rover wanted to provide the largest possible payload area in the back and so moved the driver’s seat forwards three inches to achieve it. Comfort was extremely rudimentary: just a plain cushion in the middle of the metal seat box, which also covered the fuel tank. With the export market in mind, the vehicle had a tractor-like, centrally-mounted steering wheel to save building separate left- and right-hand-drive models. Thus it became known as the Centre-Steer.
Today, the Centre-Steer prototype is the Holy Grail to many Land Rover enthusiasts. That’s because apparently no trace of it exists; although some very respected Land Rover experts are convinced it does. In fact, some believe several Centre-Steers are secreted away somewhere.
The official line is that this very first 1947 Land Rover was abandoned to rot in a shed somewhere in the Rover works at Solihull and was eventually thrown away during a spring-clean. It had certainly disappeared completely a few years later. Some say its remains were shovelled ignominiously into a skip and went for scrap. Others believe an employee with a better sense of history than his bosses succeeded in spiriting away the remains for preservation.
Either way, the Centre-Steer, cobbled together mainly out of Jeep parts, is actually a bit of a red herring when it comes to the genesis of the Land Rover that would eventually go into production. Rover’s engineers quickly realised that the Centre-Steer wasn’t a viable proposition and opted instead for the conventional wisdom of separate right- and left-hand-drive vehicles. Although the development engineers borrowed some ideas from the Jeep – notably the 80-inch wheelbase – the parts for the new vehicle were all designed and built by Rover. Work continued through 1947 and in February 1948 they began to build the first pilot prototypes. It had been decided that the new vehicle – by now christened the Land-Rover (note the hyphen between ‘Land’ and ‘Rover’, which wasn’t lost until a decade later) – would be launched at the Geneva Motor Show in early March, but it soon became clear that the prototypes wouldn’t be completed in time, so it was decided that it would launch at the Amsterdam Motor Show instead.
Thus it was, in the Dutch capital, on 30 April 1948, that the Land Rover legend was born. Two prototypes – left- and right-hand-drive variants – were on public display. One was a standard model, the other equipped by PTO (power take-off)-driven welding equipment, to demonstrate the versatility of the strange-looking little vehicle.
The initial 80-inch wheelbase Land Rovers that were sold to the general public remained very agricultural in every respect. Heaters were non-existent, as were passenger seats, door tops and roofs, but that hardly mattered because cabs and hard tops were yet to be introduced and Solihull’s new arrival was intended to be very much open plan, with the driver exposed to the elements. Nothing unusual there; contemporary tractors, combine harvesters and other farm machinery of that era didn’t have modern comfortable cabs either.
Nobody minded the Spartan comforts anyway once they had encountered the new vehicle’s amazing capabilities. They didn’t even bat an eyelid when the original purchase price of £450 was jacked up to £540 in October 1948. The first year’s production was 3048, but this more than doubled to 8000 the following year, doubling again to 16,000 in 1950. What had been seen as a stop-gap exercise, cobbled together from Rover car components and other bits copied