Background
Immediately after the World War II, Spencer Wilks, Rover’s Managing Director, was looking to resurrect the firm’s civilian car production. Decisive action was needed to keep the famous Viking longship from terminally taking on water. The company’s finances had been seriously depleted during the war, and the Government was only prepared to offer Rover enough steel to produce around 1,100 of their conservative saloon cars per year. This was considered woefully too little and too late by Wilks.
Fortuitously, Spencer’s brother Maurice Wilks had been using an American military Willys Jeep as a workhorse on his Anglesey farm. Maurice felt sure he could design a similar, but better, vehicle specifically for the, then, huge agricultural and mining sectors. Maurice famously drew his proposed design in the wet sand of Red Wharf Bay in Anglesey for his brother Spencer Wilks. Maurice’s masterstroke, however, was to propose building the car from an aluminium sheet called Birmabright which was extensively used in aircraft manufacture and hence readily available in Britain’s post-war industrial economy. No more government steel quotas to worry about.
In 1949 the Series I Land Rover was launched at the Amsterdam Motor Show. The rest, of course, is history and the Series Land Rovers went on to be built in huge numbers across three main iterations between 1949 and 1985. The Series III, as featured here, was the last iteration of the Series Land Rovers before the arrival of the coil sprung “Ninety” and “One Ten” vehicles. Over 440,000 Series III Land Rovers were ultimately built and sold between 1971 and 1985. The millionth Land Rover appeared in Series III guise in 1976 and can be found today as part of the British Motor Museum collection.
