Land Rover: The Story of the Car that Conquered the World. Ben Fogle
beloved Labrador Inca at my side we would drive the length and breadth of the UK to cover rural affairs for Countryfile. A great test of early girlfriends was to see if they could endure a Defender journey to Scotland and back – and I don’t just mean to the border, I mean right up to the Highlands and Islands. I’ll admit it, they were arduous journeys; the shaking and the noise left one feeling slightly frazzled. I must have done that trip a dozen times in a Defender. With nowhere to put a coffee cup or even a bottle of water and too much noise to listen to the radio, they weren’t the easiest journeys, but therein lies the sheer joy of Land Rover travel.
The beauty of the Land Rover lies partly in its characterful imperfections. No matter how noisy or bone-shockingly jarring a journey, I always smiled. She always left me feeling fulfilled. You see, a Land Rover really is so much more than just a vehicle – it becomes an extension of you. You begin to know and understand the nuances and quirks of your car. You can recognise every tiny feature of them. They become something so deeply personal that a criticism of your Land Rover is almost a criticism of you.
It is a well-known fact that the car of choice for the Chelsea mother is a 4×4. Indeed, the characterisation has led to its own term: the Chelsea Tractor. Drive past any school in London’s Kensington and Chelsea between 8am and 9am and you will see an ocean of 4×4s.
Now I will admit that living in Kensington and Chelsea and driving a ubiquitous 4×4 sometimes left me feeling a little guilty. ‘But I use it mostly in the country,’ I would invariably argue when confronted about it by one of my green-conscious friends. Indeed, the Silver Bullet probably saw more of the UK countryside than most Land Rovers, but she still retained an air of urban sophistication that meant she stood out just as much in the countryside. I would often deliberately drive up a couple of verges and through some muddy puddles before arriving at any farms or country fairs. I became conscious of her shiny metallic silver body that jarred against the standard-issue Land Rovers favoured by farmers.
All good things must come to an end, though, and in this case it really was self-inflicted.
Shortly before I rowed the Atlantic in 2005, I had started seeing a beautiful girl, Marina, who would later become my wife. In the early days of our relationship I decided it would be a good idea to drive her down to Devon in the Silver Bullet. It would be the early death knell for the Defender.
Soon after rowing the Atlantic I proposed to Marina. Our lives were amalgamated and Marina gently suggested that the Defender was no longer the most ‘suitable’ family car.
Now, this is far from unique. It is a time-honoured tradition that when a man gains a wife, he loses a car. Some of us fight for both, but one of them usually goes, and in my case I relented, but we wouldn’t lose the marque. We went for a Land Rover Discovery.
Before we took delivery of our black Discovery I had to decide what to do with the Silver Bullet. We didn’t need and couldn’t afford to keep two cars, so the Defender had to go.
I had let go of cars before, of course, but this was different. She really had become a part of me. Together we had been through so much. We had travelled the country together, she had towed my Atlantic rowing boat, we had been ‘papped’ together more times than I can recall (although I do remember the time we were papped on the phone together – me and the car, that is).
If I had had the means and wherewithal to keep her safe somewhere for the future, I would have done it in a flash, but she had to go.
I called some Land Rover dealerships to see if they wanted her and eventually settled on one just outside of Oxford. That final journey was like a funeral cortège. There was an overwhelming sadness as I found myself looking mournfully over her bonnet as we drove up the A40.
It may seem strange to mourn a car, and it had certainly never happened to me before, but there was a sense of finality when I handed over her keys. It was like closing a whole chapter of my life. This was the car I had dreamed of owning, and now that dream was over. It was like splitting up from a girl you still really like.
Now, don’t for a moment blame my wife. She was quite right. The Defender had served me well as a bachelor, but we needed something more suitable for the two of us. We were a partnership, after all, and it was a case of choosing a vehicle that met both our needs.
Marriage is all about compromise. Much is made about being ‘under the thumb’ and forced to make decisions you would never normally have made, but in our case it was about twinning our lives. I know of friends who had the same issues with their sports cars, who similarly mourned the loss of their beloved Porsche or Aston Martin on marriage.
Although it was time for the Defender to go, I resolved that one day I would once again drive the noisiest and most uncomfortable car.
The Discovery was a spaceship by compassion. It was like swapping from a Cessna aircraft to a Learjet. She was brimming with shiny lights, buttons and technology that the Defender could only ever dream of. But here’s the thing: the perfection obliterated the character and charm of her predecessor. I will admit that longer journeys took on a more comfortable edge, but I’ll be honest here, it never felt quite the same as getting into my old Defender. Without the quirks and the imperfections the Discovery became just a tiny bit bland. To use a male dating analogy, it would be like leaving an averagely pretty girl with a great personality for a supermodel. The supermodel is great for a while until you begin to miss character.
It is this that drives the world of the Land Rover aficionado. It is its spirit that we often talk about. The Defender is brimming with character and quirkiness. Each vehicle is different. Each one has its own tale to tell.
PART I
The story of the Land Rover begins way back in the dark days of the Second World War. Although the Amsterdam Motor Show of April 1948 is regarded as the birthplace of the marque, it was actually conceived much earlier. The vehicle that started it all had a very long gestation period, brought about by fate – and the war. Look closely at the red-brick walls of the office block at Land Rover’s famous factory in Solihull, on the outskirts of Birmingham, and you can still see traces of the camouflage paint applied during the 1939–45 conflict. The idea behind this paint job was to confuse Luftwaffe bombers, and presumably it worked, because while nearby Coventry was flattened the Solihull factory survived intact.
Rover had been building cars in Coventry since 1901, but the war changed its fortunes. In 1940, after the Coventry factory was destroyed by the German Luftwaffe’s blanket bombing of that city, Rover continued production of aero engines for the war effort at a government shadow factory – a few miles away at Solihull. The company was so successful that after the war the factory looked for new, civilian projects to keep its staff employed.
Steel was required to rebuild a war-torn world, but it was in short supply. Like everything else in post-war Britain, this metal was strictly rationed. What the country desperately needed was earnings from exports; to get steel, companies had to export 75 per cent of what they manufactured. That was a tall order, even for a successful car manufacturer like Rover, which had earned a comfortable living by selling plush saloon cars to the middle classes on the domestic market in the pre-war years. Now, although new models were planned, its 1930s designs were outdated and didn’t appeal to British motorists, let alone overseas buyers. It seemed that Rover had little chance of persuading the government to allocate the all-important steel it needed. But there was, on the other hand, mountains of aluminium left over from the aircraft industry, if only somebody could find a use for it …
Although quirky four-wheel-drive cars had been in existence since the early years of the twentieth century, it was in the late 1930s, with the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Japan’s imperial ambitions, and when war looked inevitable, that a go-anywhere utility vehicle became a necessity. The Americans realised that they were eventually likely to get involved in the European conflict, so the US government invited tenders for the 4×4 military vehicle that would eventually become the Jeep (designed by the