THE ONE TO HAVE
AS drawing boards for new vehicles go, the sand of a Welsh beach probably isn’t the fifirst choice for many. But if we believe the legend, it was the perfect medium for brothers Maurice and Spencer Wilks, engineering director and managing director respectively of Rover, who, in the late 1940s, sketched out an idea for a rugged four-wheel drive in the sand of Red Wharf Bay.
That idea was incentivised by a need to export products after World War II. The brothers had used an ex-US army Jeep on their 250 acre Welsh farm. Enjoying farming and off-roading, rumour has it the car and Maurice were never apart. Spencer’s innocent question of what would replace the ageing US workhorse set in motion a plan to produce such a car themselves as a post-war stopgap – hence the legendary sand drawing. The idea was to make a rugged, working vehicle, with power take-offs everywhere,
