Range Rover The Creators of an Icon

By Graham Bannock

Origins and history of the Range Rover marque, design and development of early models plus market research in Europe, Africa and the USA. A personal memoir by, author, Graham Bannock, of his time with the Rover Company in the late 1950s and the 1960s, which was the time the Range Rover was under development. Contents: Introduction; The Pearl in the Oyster: Origins of the Range Rover; Earlier History; How it was: Solihull in the 1960s; Across Africa: I The Sudan; Across Africa: II Ethiopia: Travels in North America, Europe and Africa; Renaissance - Appendix I: Rover's Finances by Graham Bannock and Alan Doran; Appendix II: Rover Gas Turbines by Graham Bannock and James Taylor; Appendix III - Internal memoranda; Bibliography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M-Y Books
• Release date: Aug 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783180288

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Bernard Light, the Rover Company historian, was on what proved to be his death-bed when he sent a message asking me to go and see him. It was in the Summer of 1971 and Bernard died in December of that year. I remember the sun streaming through the windows of the downstairs front room where he lay, his wife in a chair beside the bed. He had been given only months to live by the doctors. His face though, bore no sign of this terrible sentence; indeed he seemed quite cheerful and business-like. Bernard was 66 years old having retired from the company the previous Spring after 25 years service. The cancer that killed him must have been very advanced and diagnosed late. Although Bernard Light’s contributions to the history of Rover are well known and acknowledged by all contemporary authors on the subject, I knew and know little about him as a man. It was known that he served in the Territorial Army because he wrote a book about it (Light 1947). At Rover, he was a Warranty Supervisor in the Technical Service Department. Rover News, the Company newspaper reported on his retirement that he was appointed Company Historian in 1964. This appointment recognised both his efforts in his free time to acquire knowledge about the firm’s past and confirmed the value placed by the directors on the Company’s past record.

For my part I had joined ‘The Rover’, as it was known locally, in 1958 as Market Research Manager and had left for good in 1967, four years before my meeting with Bernard. What Bernard wanted, he said, was for me to finish his history of the firm. He said: ‘I know, Graham that you will write the truth’. I took this to be a reference to the recent merger with British Leyland which pretty well everyone in Solihull had been dead against.

Bernard’s request was flattering and sounded like an interesting thing to do. I said yes I would do it but warned that it would be some considerable time before I could start. I took away with me a large suitcase and several packages of stuff that I have carried around with me through many removals including one to France and back. I did not realise at the time that it would be almost 50 years before I could fulfil my promise.

Later, that day when I looked at the material Bernard had given me I found that there was no history to finish though there was quite a bit of material for one. In the suitcase there were all 26 of episodes of the company history which he had contributed to Rover News, as well as a set of the issues of that publication from 1961 to 1971. There were several copies of a dealer hand-out, A Short History of Rover, a 14 page booklet, notes on some of the directors, salesmen’s manuals, photographs, specification books, but no drafts of what Bernard had in mind, not even an outline. There were several books about Rover and early motoring and a curious little volume by R.L. Jefferson on his lengthy journeys across Europe on a Rover Imperial Cycle (1895). Mr Jefferson had no trouble with his bicycle but was wary of Continental Europeans. He found it necessary to write in his introduction that on this kind of journey:

‘What every cyclist …. should not fail to take with him is a full stock of good humour and patience. It never pays, at least according to my way of thinking, to carry our British prejudices to the land of the foreigner. I do not suggest that the cyclist need kowtow or humble himself before the foreigner ….. Bullying and rowing won’t help one any. In Continental countries where militarism and officialism is rampant everywhere, the obstreperous tourist will find his way made very hard for him indeed..’ (Jefferson 1895).

The book you have in your hands, or on your e-reader, may not be exactly the sort of book I imagine Bernard expected me to write, a detailed history. It is rather a personal memoir of my time with the Rover Company in the late 1950s and the 1960s, which was the time the Range Rover was under development. There are other books on the company, which give details of its history and products, notably those of Oliver (1971), Robson (1988), Taylor (1983, 1987, 1993) and Dymock (1993). I have included a chapter (number three) which very briefly summarises some key events in Rover’s illustrious history. That history is important because the strong corporate brands now being restored and developed by Jaguar Land Rover, the new owners, still bear traces of events long ago. It is not possible to appreciate fully Rover’s products without some understanding of its history. Also included, in Appendix II, is a detailed account of Rover’s gas turbine work. This information is not readily available elsewhere and as the turbine work left its mark on the Rover 2000 and the Range Rover, it is pertinent. As it is, this book concentrates on the Range Rover, the people who originally developed it, the market research behind it and the unique company environment that made it all possible. A reader of an early draft of this book expressed surprise and disappointment at the lack of stories of conflicts between members of the company and its directors and executives. That reader felt this lack of conflicts not only reduced the credibility of my story but made it less exciting than it might have been. But this was how it was; the harmonious and decentralised system of management was a crucial element in the creativity of the Rover enterprise.

It is interesting that Rover as a very successful quality car manufacturer before the mergers, did not survive the BLMC debacle whereas Jaguar and Land Rover did. Perhaps the answer is that BLMC hung onto Land Rover as long as it could because it was profitable, complemented Rover cars and did not compete with other parts of the group. The last was not true of Jaguar and Rover cars. The two marques would have clashed directly more and more as the latter’s product plans evolved. After nationalisation, Jaguar could also conveniently be floated off as a self-contained entity. A brief account of the successive owners of the components of Rover and their impact is given in Chapters 3 and 8 below. Land Rover, if not Rover cars, has, in fact come back from the dead.

Graham Bannock.

2.1 Bruce and Jimmy McWilliams. McWilliams

2.2 The view from the helicopter. Graham Bannock

Chapter 2

THE PEARL IN THE OYSTER: ORIGINS OF THE RANGE ROVER

It was in July 1965 that I arrived in New York to be met by Bruce McWilliams, President of Rover North America (RNA). Straight off the plane Bruce drove us to the Port of New York Authority tower block. On the roof a distressingly small helicopter with perspex bubble cockpit waited, its blades idling, and took me for a tour of the Manhattan canyons. I later learned that this was a typical Bruce stunt to be followed by many others and a friendship that lasted until his death aged 85 in 2006.

Bruce was small, slim, man with a big personality. He was bespectacled, with a domed, largely bald, head, a great raconteur and a voracious reader but not of the desk-bound kind - his favourite relaxation was shifting rocks and earth and tearing out tree roots with his John Deere back-hoe at his home in Upstate New York (later at Stonington, Maine). He had helped to develop European car imports, first at SAAB, then at Mercedes and had been offered the job for Rover when he met Martin-Hurst as part of an effort by Studebaker, holders of the Mercedes franchise, to widen its range of offerings to other European makes.

Rejected on medical grounds for the Army at the outset of World War II, Bruce trained as a cryptographer and was stationed in London. Later he was part of an Office of War Information team engaged in denazification of the German media. It was in Germany that he met his wife, an Englishwoman, who was later to be RNA’s Vice President of Advertising and Public Relations. Later Jimmy, née Gertrude Ivy Metcalfe, became an expert on car safety issues and after RNA in 1968 became a consultant to General Motors. Rover were not doing too well in America at the time, partly because the Land Rover was under-powered by American standards and Bruce had called Martin-Hurst (MH), Rover’s Managing Director, to suggest they look for an American engine and was told to get on with it.

2.3 William Martin-Hurst at his desk in Solihull. Rover Co.

2.4 Gordon Bashford’s early sketch of the Range Rover. McWilliams

MH’s famous stumbling on the Buick V8 on the floor of the Mercury workshop of Carl Kiekhaefer was not entirely accidental because MH was looking for an engine and was actually in the US to inspect a unit at Chrysler which Bruce had found. The alloy Buick was more suitable and when MH saw it he measured it up and found that it would fit nicely in both the P6 and the Land Rover engine bays. He was actually at Mercury to talk about selling them Rover gas turbine units for boats but it turned out that they were more interested in the 2 ¼ litre Rover diesel engine for Chinese junks. Kiekhaefer introduced MH to some people in GM who referred him up the chain. Negotiations took a long time because they did not really believe that MH was serious and were not used to licensing their engines anyway.

But