What do botanical survey teams, tsetse fly control and the late Queen Elizabeth have in common? The answer is the Land-Rover, which was nothing if not adaptable. It wasn’t necessarily an innovative vehicle – four-wheel drive had been used on a Scottish steam carriage as early as 1825 – but its continued success lay in the fact that, like the Willys Jeep of 1941, it was small and quick enough to fulfil most of the functions desired of a passenger vehicle, rugged enough for all manner of off-road applications, and simple enough to be built en masse and sold very cheaply.
The Jeep had impressed a lot of people, but perhaps none more so than brothers Spencer and Maurice Wilks, managing director and head of engineering respectively at the Rover Company in Solihull. Rover had purchased a couple of war-surplus Jeeps to study, and Maurice the engineer particularly admired it, although he felt there was scope for improvement.
He duly cobbled together a prototype using a combination of Jeep and Rover parts, with a central driving position in anticipation of mainly agricultural use. A string of further prototypes with right-hand drive followed before the first Land-Rovers went into production in
