The Rover company of Coventry, England, had a fine history, dating back to the 1880s when its founder, John Kemp Starley (1854–1901), invented the ‘safety bicycle’ – the modern, lower form of bicycle that for the first time women felt able to ride.
Rover grew as an engineering-led company, making sound, quality cars aimed to appeal to professional types, rather than speed seekers, and during World War II was enlisted to manufacture the Whittle jet engine in quantity. This tangled saga led to bitter recriminations from its inventor, Frank Whittle, who accused Rover of attempting to take over his brainchild and of making unauthorized and deleterious changes to his design. Rover handed the hot potato on to Rolls-Royce, but its amended design was an important step towards the postwar Rolls-Royce jets.
After the war, Rover returned to car production, but partner and chief designer Maurice Wilks (1904–63), who ran a war-surplus Willys Jeep on his farm, realized how useful a similar four-wheel-drive vehicle would be, especially one that was less spartan and had a greater general utility than the Jeep. Thus Land Rover was born as a British attempt to make a reliable and sturdy country vehicle. It was to use as many parts from the Rover saloon car range as possible, while body parts were mainly flat, with straight folds, to avoid expensive press tools.
The Land Rover appeared in 1948 to tremendous acclaim and by 1951 was outselling ordinary Rover cars by two to one. It had robust engineering, was functionally excellent and was decades ahead of any rival. Moreover it won extensive orders from police, military and government agencies, not only in the UK but also all around the world. The Rover company had the ball at its feet.
Boxy, robust and effective, for decades the Land Rover had no rivals anywhere.