Rover's Rebirth (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

Background and Overview

By the time World War II began in September 1939, the Rover Company enjoyed a solid reputation in Britain as the makers of ‘One of Britain’s Fine Cars’. The slogan dated from 1936, by which time the company had emerged from a difficult financial period in the early years of the decade and had begun to earn the lasting respect of the professional classes for whom its cars were mostly built.

Rover in this period was based in Coventry, with its main factory and headquarters at Helen Street in the Stoke Heath (now Foleshill) district to the northeast of the city centre. It had an exceptionally strong management team, with the board of directors led by Ransom Harrison, Howe Graham as financial director, and S. B. (Spencer) Wilks as managing director. Chief engineer was Maurice Wilks, the younger brother of the managing director, and he oversaw an equally strong team of engineers. Rover was an independent company, quite small by motor industry standards, but it was run almost like a family business and engendered great loyalty from its employees. By the end of the 1930s, it was selling between 10,000 and 11,000 cars a year.

World War II brought this idyllic existence to an abrupt end. Rover introduced their 1940- model cars as planned in September 1939, but had already turned part of their manufacturing capability over to repairing military aircraft. Since the middle of the decade, they had been running a ‘shadow factory’ at Acocks Green, building aero engines for military use, and during 1939 they took on the management of a second one, at Solihull to the southeast of Birmingham. Car production was halted on government orders in May 1940, and the entire resources of the company were redirected to the war effort. The Helen Street factory was severely damaged by enemy bombing in the Coventry Blitz in November 1940, and the Rover staff dispersed – some of them to a group of repurposed cotton mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire, where they assisted Frank Whittle with the development of his jet engine for aircraft.

It was not until June 1944, as the D-Day landings made clear that the tide of war in Europe was turning, that Rover was able to contemplate with any clarity its future as a car manufacturer. No new design work had been done during the war years, although new models had been planned before the war and the work done for them had not been lost. The Helen Street factory in Coventry had been hastily patched up to enable it to continue producing war matériel, but there was a tantalising alternative to returning there. The Solihull factory was much newer, more modern, and larger, and the government had offered Rover first refusal on it once it was no longer needed for war work.

Rover’s initial offer to buy the factory outright was rejected, but subsequent discussions about a long-term lease proved fruitful. In February 1945, the Rover Board agreed to lease the factory and to dispose of the Helen Street works, which was sold in July to the Coventry machine tool makers Alfred Herbert. By March, Rover had begun to move into their new Solihull headquarters.

A New Dawn

As early as 1944, the company had also begun to think about the cars it would be selling once peace returned. There were still many unknowns, of course, and whatever plans they developed would have to be modified in the light of events. No surviving documents tell us who took the responsibility for this aspect of company planning, but the strong probability is that the Wilks brothers took the lead. As managing director, S. B. Wilks was used to setting the direction that Rover should take, and he could not have done so at this stage without consulting his brother who, as chief engineer, knew what the company had been working on before the war and what was likely to be feasible.

It was inevitable that both men should have considered the company’s previous experience in similar circumstances, and should have looked at what happened immediately after the end of World War I. The period immediately after 1919 had seen a strong demand for small and inexpensive cars, and there was every reason to imagine that the same would happen again. The British economy was likely to remain in the doldrums for at least a few years, which argued against Rover relying on the sort of expensive, high-quality cars that they had been building for the professional classes in the late 1930s. Similarly, there would be many returning servicemen who wanted to start a new life and would see car ownership as part of that, but who would initially only be able to afford a secondhand one or an inexpensive new one.

It was quite clear to Rover management that the company would be wise to enter the postwar market with a small economy car, perhaps alongside a more traditional Rover or perhaps instead of it for a time. So early thoughts in 1944 were focused on the design of such a machine, and between then and the middle of 1946 the Rover designers and engineers put a great deal of effort into what became known as the M Model. This was a small car, intended for the cheapest 6hp class and essentially a two-seater (although space for children in the rear was also found as the design progressed). The M Model was eventually cancelled before entering production but, as Chapter 3 makes clear, the need to design it brought out considerable inventiveness and ingenuity in the Rover team.

Of course, the M Model was not and could not have been ready for production by the time peace came in May 1945. Although the war still rumbled on in the Far East, it was clear that Europe could begin to return to normality – although it would be a new version of that normality – and that the government would once again permit car production as the need to produce war matériel receded. Rover did not have a new car ready to enter production, and so it did the same as other makers were obliged to do: it made plans to put the cars that it had been building in 1940 back into production until such time as it had something newer to offer.

That was very much easier said than done. At least Rover was fortunate that the jigs and tools associated with the 1940 models had survived the bombing of the Helen Street factory. They were, however, located in Coventry, and Rover planned to restart production at the Solihull factory to which it would relocate entirely during 1945. So, over a period of eight months between March and November that year, the Rover works engineers transported the production tooling and the assembly lines from Coventry to Solihull, where they set it all up and made it ready for use again.

Rover also looked back at the plans for new models it had been working on when car production was halted by the war during 1940. Plans for the 1941-season and later cars had been quite well advanced, and the new Rovers were intended to have a sturdy new box-section chassis frame, plus new and highly efficient engines with an inlet-over-exhaust valve arrangement and a sloping cylinder head face. Some ideas for new body designs had also been worked up to the full-size mock-up stage. None of this was lost; all of it could be gathered together and would feed into the thinking about the new full-size post-war Rover saloons. But it could not happen yet. The market had to recover, and Rover had to recover. Nevertheless, as Chapter 4 explains, there is clear evidence that the company began work on those new cars as early as November 1945. They knew them in the beginning as Model P.

Diversification

In addition to work on the Model M and Model P cars, there was a third strand to Rover product development as 1945 came to an end. Between 1940 and 1943, several of the company’s senior engineers had been seconded to the jet engine project led by Frank Whittle, and had come to understand these engines very well. Among them had been Maurice Wilks, who had led a team that had redesigned the Whittle engine for greater efficiency, and it had been a development of the Rover-designed engine that had eventually entered production to give Britain its first jet engine. By then, the jet engine work had been handed over to Rolls-Royce, at least partly to prevent strife between Whittle and the Rover people slowing progress on a project seen as vital to Britain’s war effort. But Maurice Wilks had not forgotten the experience, and by late...