Background
The Wilks family had an extraordinarily profound influence on the course of the Rover company, and by extension, the topography of the British motor industry of the post-war era. Maurice Wilks, the creator of the Land Rover and ultimately Rover’s Chief Engineer and Managing Director, was the youngest of the Wilks children. Older brother Spencer would be Rover’s Managing Director and eventually Chairman. Maurice’s sister, Amy, would become the mother of Charles Spencer “Spen” King, the designer behind the P6, SD1 and Range Rover. Maurice’s other brother, Geoffrey, would be father to Peter Wilks, who became Rover’s Technical Director in 1964. Rover was pretty much the Wilks family firm for nearly half a century.
Immediately after the Second World War, Spencer Wilks was looking to resurrect Rover’s civilian car production, and fast. 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 Rover.
As luck would have it, 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 – by then Rover MD. Maurice’s coup de grâce, however, was to build the car from an aluminium sheet called Birmabright, which was extensively used in aircraft manufacture and hence ubiquitous 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.
