THE MAKING OF A LEGEND
“IT HIT LIKE LIGHTNING, WITH A DEMAND THEY HAD NEVER ANTICIPATED.”
Opposite: Queen Elizabeth II has been a longtime Land Rover owner and driver (and even mechanic).
As with anything in life, context is everything. To understand the genesis of Land Rover, one first must survey the smoldering landscape of its birthplace in Great Britain. It was 1947, just a few years removed from the devastation of WWII. The nation lay in rubble, infrastructure destroyed, factories barely powering back up under heavy limitations on materials, energy, and capital.
This is the setting where, on an overcast beach in Wales, brothers Maurice and Spencer Wilks found themselves discussing their next move. As board members of one of the largest automakers in the land, the Rover Car Company, there was little room for error.
Rover was then known for building sprawling luxury cars, for which there was now zero demand. Maurice grabbed a piece of driftwood, bent over the golden sand, and sketched the outline of a Jeep-like vehicle. “This,” he said, looking up at his brother as he roughly outlined the small truck.
“This is what we’re going to build.”
That this sandy image looked a lot like a Jeep was no coincidence. While laboring on and clearing his Anglesey farm, Maurice had fallen in love with a surplus military Willys, his do-everything beast of choice.
Taking inventory of the countless obstacles that his company—and the nation at large—would have to overcome to slog their way out of the war-torn decade, Maurice’s idea was a wise one. “The country just came out of a massive war; it was victorious, yet the entire area was on its knees. The industry was down, there were massive issues overall,
