Land Rover History

1947


    The year is 1947 and Rover is finding it difficult to recover after the Second World War and, to add the problems, the government is limiting the amount of sheet steel that they can use. 

    Rovers Managing Director Spencer Wilks is in turmoil over what to do, and as he casually remarks this to another Rover employee, he feels that his, and Rover's days are numbered.
    This 'other' Rover employee, Maurice Wilks, Spencer's younger brother, also realizes the problems with Rover, and he retires to his Anglesea farm to mull over the problem. Maurice's farm covered 400 Acres and in it there were woods, fields and a stretch of Coastline. Maurice used an old World War 2 Willis Jeep to get around as at that point it was the only four wheel drive transport available. Unfortunately for Maurice, his current Jeep was coming to the end of it's serviceable lifetime. This meant that he would have to purchase another Jeep, another American Jeep. Maurice thought to himself.

It suddenly dawned on him that there was a huge market for an all terrain vehicle made in Britain by a British company.
    

    Immediately Rover started drawing up plans for this new model, it initially was to be used as a stop-gap model: to gain valuable funds in a short period of time to fund a more permanent investment, in Rover.
Unfortunately for Rover they had wasted vast amounts of money on a small car project that had just not got off the ground properly, so there was not the funds to develop the car as much as they wished.

    However, they knew the specification of the new model, and set off to work at double pace to draw up the model. Next came the Pre-production prototypes...