Secret Rovers E-Book

James Taylor

• Herausgeber: The Crowood Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 246

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In the late 1960s, the old Rover Company put everything it knew into a complex luxury saloon codenamed P8. At the same time, it planned to branch out into a new sector of the market with a stunningly advanced mid-engined sports car prototype that became a formal project with the codename of P9. However, with the forced merger into British Leyland in 1968, Rover found itself squeezed between Triumph and Jaguar: neither marque welcomed the new sports car, and Jaguar particularly did not welcome the new luxury saloon. Little by little, Rover's plans were undermined, and in 1970 the sports car was killed off, followed by the luxury saloon, which was axed in 1971, a mere six months before production was due to start. Just a year later, Rover itself ceased to exist as a separate business after a forced merger with Triumph.

Leseprobe

First published in 2025 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

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www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2025

© James Taylor and D.J. Cooke 2025

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7198 4490 4

The right of James Taylor and D.J. Cooke to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover design by Sergey Tsvetkov

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1Understanding the Background

Chapter 2BS: The Skunk Works Project, 1965–1967

Chapter 3Determination to Succeed, 1967–1968

Chapter 4The P9 Project, 1969–1970

Chapter 5P8: The Early Days, 1964–1969

Chapter 6P8: The Styling Story, 1967–1971

Chapter 7P8: The Final Countdown, 1970–1971

Chapter 8The Damage

Appendix: Who was Who

Index

Foreword

This book recounts one of the most remarkable stories of British automotive success and failure, rolled into one. The events presented here in unique, painstaking detail by the authors describe a critical few years that took the Rover Company Ltd from the pinnacle of success for its staple models in 1965 to the cancellation of two nearly complete flagships in 1971. These calamities went on to blight Rover’s prospects for the 30-odd more years that it lasted.

The demise of Rover’s P8 luxury saloon and its radical P9 mid-engined sports car were not a simple result of their weaknesses as automotive products, as you might expect. As the authors make clear, both were the work of inspired design and engineering teams that had launched the acclaimed Rover 2000 and the mighty Range Rover. Those people definitely knew how to make winning cars.

True, the P8 and P9 had weaknesses in development. All of this is laid bare inside and punctuated with unseen images that have taken the authors five years to amass. But there can be no doubt that these were promising products. Old-time Rover employees involved in the two models’ creation – many of them consulted and quoted in these pages – still say they wish they could have owned the cars, because they remain convinced they would have represented the best of Rover’s traditional, special marque values.

As Taylor and Cooke explain, the P8 and P9 failures have many causes: an initial amalgam of cack-handed corporate re-organisations outside Rover’s control, some doubtful reactive moves by the Rover board (evidently better at cars than business), various blind interventions by ‘big picture’ politicians with no clue about the damage they would do, some safety glitches, and some harmful interference from the bosses of rival British Leyland brands that had abruptly become Rover’s unsuitable bedfellows. In modern parlance, this made for the perfect car company storm.

Even so, we learn from these pages that the P8 and P9 were well conceived cars, bristling with desirability and ingenuity. Despite their failure, they influenced other Rovers (notably the acclaimed if not-quite-successful SD1 luxury 5 door hatch) with both their design and engineering, and by maintaining that special Rover ethos that endured while the company stayed alive – and which is still detectable in Range Rovers today. These were great British cars, and they deserved better.

STEVE CROPLEY Editor-in-Chief, AutocarOctober 2024

Introduction

The main purpose of this book is to tell the story of the cancellation of two extremely promising new car models that were intended to come from the old Rover Company in the early 1970s. They were planned, they were developed, but they were cancelled because of clashes within the British Leyland group that owned Rover at the time. These aborted models were known by the project codes of P8 and P9; P8 was a big luxury saloon, and P9 was a midengined sports car. Both had the potential to be world-beaters and to sell strongly on export markets, so bringing in the revenue that British Leyland sorely lacked.

There are mysteries and myths attached to these cars, and their cancellation led to partisan accounts of the story that over the years have tended to be regarded as factual. One of the aims of this book is therefore to disentangle myth from fact and to explain what really happened. Another is to show the fascinating and complex story behind each model.

Remarkably, physical traces of both remain today. One of the P8 saloon test prototypes is in the collection of the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust at the British Motor Museum in Gaydon, and there are long-term plans to restore it to a presentable condition. Also in the collection is the unique mid-engined P6BS experimental car that sired the P9 project, and regularly on display is a scale model of the intended production P9 shape.

Uncovering the story behind these two cars has been a lengthy, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately thoroughly rewarding process. Both of us felt that existing versions of the story were inadequate, sometimes contradictory, and not infrequently biased, and that it was important to find the truth while those who knew it were still alive to tell us. It has actually taken five years of dedicated work to produce this book, and we are extremely grateful to a whole group of Rover engineers and designers (and in some cases to their descendants as well) who dug into their memories and their lofts for us, and delivered parts of the story that were simply not available anywhere else. In alphabetical order, then, to avoid favouritism, our sincere thanks go to the following people:

Martin Armstrong, Mark Bache (son of the late David Bache), Tony Bates, the late John Bilton, John Boulton, Eric Branson, Mike Brown, Jim Cash, Denis Chick, Keith Hales, Nigel Heslop, Maureen Hill, Dave Hussey (son of the late Clive Hussey), Rob Lyall, Phil Mander, Geoff Purkis, John Rowson, David Searle, Jim Shaw (son of the late Jim Shaw, Rover brake specialist), Kevin Spindler, Peter Storrie, the late Lyn Thomas, Andy Todd, John Vaughan, Chris Wade, Jill and David Wilkes, Peter Willmer and Peter Wilson.

More information or help has come from Brian Cupples, Mike Dunn, David Knowles, Gregg D. Merksamer (New York Auto Show historian), Philip and Penny Walker (née King), and from Nick and Gillian Wilks. In addition, material has come from interviews conducted many years ago with David Bache, Gordon Bashford, Spen King, Bruce McWilliams, William Martin-Hurst and Tony Poole, all of whom are sadly no longer with us. Toby Silverton also played an important role in the early days of this project, as did Stuart Reid in the later stages. We are also grateful to Chris Parsons of British Motor Heritage, to Stephen Laing at the British Motor Museum for making both the P6BS and the seventh P8 prototype available for examination in the metal, and to Jeff Coope, Cat Boxall and Richard Bacchus of the same institution for their invaluable help.

James Taylor, D.J. Cooke, 2024

CHAPTER 1

Understanding the Background

By the middle of the 1960s the Rover Company was doing very well indeed. In the year to 31 July 1965, its profits were the highest that the company had ever had, and although the subsequent year was not as good, there were encouraging signs of growth. Vehicle production rose from 72,000 to 77,000 and turnover from £61 million to £68 million, the negative factors being unusually high warranty costs and wage increases that followed the engineering industry’s introduction of a 40-hour working week in July 1965.

Rover was in expansionist mood. In the summer of 1965 it had bought out the old-established Alvis company, which provided additional premises against future needs, and also came with the respected Alvis military vehicle range as a companion for Rover’s globally successful Land Rovers. The Land Rovers had been the mainstay of the company’s production since the early 1950s, when their annual volumes had begun to exceed those of the passenger cars on which the company had made its name. Demand for Land Rovers kept the Rover production lines at full stretch, and to a degree obviated the need for major specification changes. But car production had begun to catch up.

By the mid-1960s, Rover’s big seller was the 2000 saloon. Pictured is a 2000TC (twin carburettor) with several options, including Rostyle chromed wheels, rubber-faced over-riders and a side trim strip.

The older 3-litre or P5 model was still selling strongly in two different forms. This was the Saloon in its latest Mk III guise, as introduced in autumn 1965.

The Coupé variant of the P5 3-litre had a stylish lower roofline.

The newest Rover – the Rover 2000, known internally as the P6 – had been a huge success since its introduction in 1963, and accounted for a large percentage of those record profits in the year to July 1965. It had won the first Car of the Year award in 1964, and the Don Safety Award the following year, and was widely respected as an advanced design. Its companion in the showrooms was the more expensive 3-litre (or P5) model that had been introduced in 1958, a more conservative design that appealed to the buyers of luxury and prestige saloons. This sold steadily but far more slowly than the 2000, annual sales of the cheaper model being roughly five times those of the more expensive one.

On top of that, Rover’s subsidiary company, Rover Gas Turbines Ltd, was ticking over nicely, producing auxiliary power units for the armed forces together with portable power generator sets and the like for more general consumption. Rover had several royal warrants, and was known to supply cars and Land Rovers – including the highly visible State Review vehicles – to the British royal family. All this added to the prestige of what was still a relatively small and proudly independent company. Its products had appealed to the professional middle classes since the 1930s, and to a large extent they still did, even though social attitudes were changing in the 1960s as Britain slowly became a less rigidly class-based society.

In summer 1965, Rover took over the Alvis company. Its military products, such as this amphibious Stalwart, were continued, but the cars were not.

The Rover Company’s headquarters and primary assembly plant was at Solihull in the west Midlands, just south-east of Birmingham. There were other satellite feeder factories in the area, and of course Rover sub-contracted specialist work to other companies. So, for example, Land Rover chassis frames came from John Thompson Pressings at Wolverhampton, and bodyshells came from the Pressed Steel Corporation at Cowley and Linwood.

Inside Rover

Within the Rover Company, industrial relations were generally good – although they would gradually deteriorate in this period, as they did within other British car companies. The company was small enough to have something akin to a family atmosphere, which had been fostered by its top management for many years to positive effect. Rover looked after its employees, and the minutes of the Rover Board record several instances of benevolence towards former staff who had fallen on hard times.

Yet this was also a dynamic environment to work in, and there was no shortage within Rover of either new ideas or optimism for the future. The company had a strong ‘can do’ attitude, which stemmed in large part from the period when Maurice Wilks had been its engineering chief. Although Wilks had died in 1963, his legacy remained very much alive: he had been an enthusiast for new ideas himself and had always encouraged the same attitude in his staff. He never quite let go of Rover engineering even when he became the company’s Chairman in 1962, and to make sure that the company would maintain the ethos that had led it to success, he set up a separate department to take on the task of thinking about future products. This department was founded in 1961 as New Vehicle Projects, and its task was to investigate new ideas and to do the preliminary design work on projects that looked promising.

Maurice Wilks was a key figure in the Wilks dynasty that had been, and to a large extent still was, central to Rover. He had joined the company as its Chief Engineer in 1930, following his older brother SB (Spencer) Wilks who had been appointed General Manager in 1929 and who not long afterwards became Managing Director. It was not at all surprising that younger members of the Wilks clan had also subsequently joined Rover, or that they were blessed with similar quantities of talent. Peter Wilks, a nephew of the senior Wilks brothers, had become Chief Engineer in 1964 after working his way up through the company, and his cousin and close friend Spen King took charge of New Vehicle Projects after spending the 1950s as a leading light in Rover’s experiments with gas-turbine propulsion for cars. Both of them had made significant contributions to the design of the hugely successful P6 saloon range.

Rover had a sideline in small gas turbine engines; one of their uses was as an auxiliary power unit in the RAF’s Vulcan bomber aircraft.

Experiments with gas turbine engines for cars had run up against a brick wall, but not before Rover had produced some interesting prototypes. This one is the 1961 T4, with a gas turbine engine in a modified prototype Rover 2000 structure.

Rover supplied the special State Review Land Rovers for Her Majesty the Queen. This 1958 example was based on a Series II model.

The main Rover factory and the company’s administrative headquarters were at Solihull. This was the imposing front of the main block, with offices in the front and assembly lines behind them.

Equally important at Rover by the mid-1960s was another member of the Wilks dynasty, although in this case he was a member by marriage. William Martin-Hurst had become Managing Director in 1962, and was an energetic leader who would have a huge influence on Rover during the rest of that decade. In particular, he was the driving force behind changes in the company that were intended to secure the future that so obviously beckoned. Other key members of the Rover Board at the time were its Chairman, George Farmer, an accountant by training who had been a Board member since 1940, and SB Wilks, who remained a director even though he had retired as Chairman in 1962.

Other important figures at Rover in this period were the heads of the separate Rover and Land Rover engineering divisions, each with the rank of Assistant Chief Engineer. In charge of car engineering was Dick Oxley, and his equivalent on the Land Rover side of the house was Tom Barton. Other senior figures who played important parts in the story that this book tells included Gordon Bashford, the company’s chief chassis designer who was now working within New Vehicle Projects; Jack Swaine, who was in charge of engine design; Frank Shaw, in charge of transmission design; and David Bache, who ran the Styling Department and was responsible for the way the cars looked, both on the outside and on the inside. Market research in the modern sense did not really exist, although when he became Managing Director, William Martin-Hurst had engaged Graham Bannock to advise him on the relevant issues.

Maurice Wilks was the dominant force behind Rover engineering until his death in 1963, but he set the tone for the company’s future products.

SB (Spencer) Wilks was the sober-minded older brother who had been on the Rover Board since 1932 and was one of the company’s guiding lights.

Spen King was an innovative engineer who was responsible for the groundwork on the two planned new models that are covered in this book.

Peter Wilks had become Technical Director in 1964. He was a nephew of the Wilks brothers.

George Farmer was an accountant by training, but had been another important figure on the Rover Board since 1940.

David Bache was the talented head of the Rover Styling Department.

Further down the hierarchy were the product development engineers, and their role in the present story was also a very important one. A typical development team working on a planned new product was much smaller than its modern equivalent, and might consist of no more than three or four people. It would be led by a Project Engineer, whose deputy would have the title of Assistant Project Engineer, and there would be one or more Technical Assistants, who were typically young engineers fresh from a Rover apprenticeship. Modern product development programmes get through hundreds of prototypes before a new car enters production, but in the mid-1960s the numbers were still tiny. The fifteen prototypes and 50 pilot-production cars of the P6 programme were huge numbers by Rover’s previous standards; there had been just two prototypes before the P5 went into production in 1958, even though some items had been tested in ‘mules’ converted from other cars!

WILLIAM MARTIN-HURST

When William Martin-Hurst joined the Rover Company in 1960, he had already been a part of the extended Rover family for some time. His sister Barbara was the wife of the car company’s Managing Director, Maurice Wilks, and the records show that Martin-Hurst was sometimes lent new cars for evaluation. His values and attitudes were clearly those of the Rover management, and he probably understood the expectations of the Rover buyer as instinctively as his brother-in-law did.

William (Bill) Martin-Hurst was Rover’s Managing Director for most of the 1960s.

Yet Martin-Hurst’s appointment was certainly not pure nepotism. He was exactly the man that the company needed. Born in 1903 and then in his mid-fifties, Martin-Hurst – Bill to his peers and ‘MH’ to those lower down the Rover tree – was a dynamic and enthusiastic individual. He had spent his life in company management, latterly as the Managing Director of Teddington Aircraft Controls, and no doubt Maurice Wilks had seen in him somebody who would fit in well with the Rover way of doing things.

Wilks himself had already overseen some major changes at Rover after the middle of the 1950s, adding a new layer of management to allow the Rover cars and Land Rover sides of the business to develop individually as they needed to, and encouraging a new generation of young engineers to come forward with new ideas. It was Wilks who had promoted the idea of the forward engineering ‘think tank’ that later became New Vehicle Projects in order to provide a mechanism through which this could work.

Martin-Hurst did not disappoint. He joined Rover in January 1960 as Executive Director (Production), which was a temporary post until a more senior one became available – but he did not waste his time. In that period, he played an important part in securing the Pengam Moors site in Wales for a new Rover factory (which went on to build gearboxes for the P6 range). In October that year he became Deputy Managing Director, and following a reshuffle at Board level, he became full Managing Director in November 1961 and took office with effect from January 1962.

The Rover-BRM gas turbine racing car helped to give the company a new image during the 1960s.

It was Martin-Hurst who initiated a competitions programme for Rover, initially pitching the big P5 3-litres into endurance rallies, and then following up with the new P6 Rover 2000s. It was also his initiative to gain publicity for Rover’s gas-turbine work by teaming up with Sir Alfred Owen’s BRM racing team and creating the Rover-BRM gas-turbine racing car that performed so well at Le Mans in 1963 that the race organisers invited it back in 1965.

Martin-Hurst also did his very best to gain Rover some success in the USA. When he arrived, the US operation was a half-hearted affair run by Gordon Munro (with whom Martin-Hurst did not get on well). By 1962 he had found the man he wanted to replace Munro, and appointed Bruce McWilliams, who had been with the Studebaker-Packard Corporation. Martin-Hurst and McWilliams got on extremely well, and when McWilliams said that he could sell more Land Rovers if Rover gave them more performance with an American V8 engine, Martin-Hurst simply gave him the green light to find one.

The story was not quite linear after that, because it was Martin-Hurst who actually found the Buick V8, and it would not go into Land Rovers for many years because Rover put a priority on using it in their saloon cars. Nevertheless, it was Martin-Hurst’s instinct and his dogged perseverance that secured the rights to the engine for Rover in early 1965. It entered production in the UK two years later and completely transformed the car range.

Martin-Hurst retired as Managing Director in September 1969 but remained on the Rover payroll as Consultant Engineering Director until October 1970. On his retirement, he moved back to his beloved south Wales, where he took an active part in the Welsh Development Board. He died in 1985 in Brecknock, after an accident in which a motorcycle ran into the car his wife was driving.

Future Plans

By the mid-1960s, then, Rover had every reason to be optimistic. Its car and Land Rover products were selling strongly around the world, it had become highly respected within the motor industry for its creative thinking and innovative products, it was financially stable and certain of a strong future, and it was positively bursting with ideas as a result of the attitudes that Maurice Wilks in particular had fostered in earlier times. The future was certainly bright.

Central to Rover’s future product policy from 1965 was the new V8 engine that it had bought from General Motors. This engine opened up multiple new possibilities for both Rovers and Land Rovers thanks to its combination of compactness, light weight and power. In the short term, the plan was to use it to rejuvenate the P5 range and then to create an incremental model of the P6, but it was a design that could be further developed and was likely to have a long future with Rover. It certainly figured in the company’s medium-term planning as well.

The medium-term plans on the car side of the house were focused on a new saloon model that would incorporate more of the advanced technology that the P6 had led Rover buyers to expect. As early as 1964, when Rover had looked at its medium-term future, it had concluded that trying to develop a separate replacement model for each of its two car ranges would place unsustainable demands on its resources. The planned strategy was therefore to develop a single model that could be adapted as necessary to replace both of them. This new model would be ready some time after 1970, and would initially replace the low-volume P5 model and subsequently the high-volume P6. Top models of what was known internally as P8 were intended to use the new V8 engine.

Land Rover sales were of huge importance to the company, and far outstripped Rover cars in quantity. This is an 88-inch, or shortwheelbase model.

The long-wheelbase, or 109-inch Land Rover, is seen here in twelve-seater Station Wagon form. Land Rovers were popular with military and police users, and this one belonged to the Royal Hong Kong Police.

Rover did not want to risk losing its military business, and was always prepared to create special models to meet military requirements. The mid-1960s saw the creation of the so-called Lightweight, a version of the 88-inch model designed for airportability. This was the second prototype, stripped down to reduce weight for helicopter lifting.

Always looking for new opportunities, Rover built six of these 30cwt 129-inch models as prototypes. They were originally intended for oilfield use and were offered to the military, but there were no orders.

On the Land Rover side of the house it was very largely business as usual, as orders continued to exceed Rover’s ability to meet them. Several new variants were under investigation, all depending on existing design elements, but the one that had attracted serious attention was a passengercarrying model that was intended as a companion to the mainstream utility types. This was an idea that had come from New Vehicle Projects rather than from the Land Rover engineers themselves, and it incorporated some ideas drawn from the P6 saloon programme. Its creation was also supported by market research findings, and unsurprisingly, the V8 engine was again central to it. Known as the 100-inch Station Wagon, it was expected to be ready around 1970 (and would reach the market with the name of Range Rover).

That new V8 engine had very much caught the imagination of those involved in planning and engineering, and as a result New Vehicle Projects had come up with a quite radical proposal for a high-performance sports car. Advanced in concept, this was intended to have the V8 engine mounted amidships. Sports cars were not among the Rover product portfolio at the time, and building one would have been a completely new departure for the company. The very idea of it was also a direct contradiction of the company’s earlier decision to develop one new car model rather than two – but it looked like being such an attractive product that the enthusiasts within the company simply could not overlook it. By the mid-1960s, what the engineers knew as the BS (for Buick Sports) had not yet been fully integrated into Rover’s forward product plan, but it was showing every sign of being a winning product that the company could, and should, build.

And Then Leyland

This massive optimism that was propelling Rover forwards was rudely disrupted during 1965 by the news that the British Motor Corporation (maker of Austin, Morris and several other car brands) was to buy out the car-body maker Pressed Steel. From BMC’s perspective it made very good sense, but from Rover’s perspective it was potentially disastrous. Pressed Steel was Rover’s sole supplier of bodies, and had been since the 1940s. If it passed into the hands of a rival manufacturer, there were serious implications.

The most immediately obvious of these implications was that Pressed Steel’s new owners might raise prices, which would obviously have an impact on Rover’s profitability. In an absolutely worst case scenario, the body maker might be instructed to cease its work for all car manufacturers except BMC. This scenario was only too easily imaginable, and Rover’s management would have remembered very well how Ford’s purchase of the Briggs body-making concern in the early 1950s starved the car maker Jowett of bodies and sent that company to the wall. Even if neither of these scenarios played out, relying on Pressed Steel was going to be uncomfortable. The body manufacturer worked closely with Rover in turning new designs into structures that could be mass produced, and pursuing those arrangements in the future would telegraph Rover’s product intentions to a rival car maker and negate the value of potentially profitable advances in design.

There were no real alternatives to working with Pressed Steel. Although other independent body makers existed, none had the capacity that Rover was likely to need – and at a time when the company was looking at expansion in the longer term, this was a serious problem. The Rover Board must have weighed up all the possibilities very carefully during 1965 and into 1966, but the formal minutes of their regular meetings contain no reference whatsoever to the issue. This must have been deliberate.

No doubt informal soundings were taken with trusted contacts, and in the end the decision seems to have been taken that the least of several evils was to seek a merger with the Leyland Motor Corporation. Leyland itself was a bus and truck manufacturer with an excellent world-wide reputation and was on a sound financial footing. It already owned Standard-Triumph International (STI), the maker of Triumph cars, but any product clashes with Rover could no doubt be worked out amicably. (The most obvious was that the Triumph 2000 was a rival for the Rover 2000.) The most important factor was that an alliance with the Leyland Motor Corporation would give Rover more muscle in any negotiations that later became necessary as a result of future difficulties with Pressed Steel.

So by the time the subject of a merger was mentioned in the Rover Board minutes for 15 December 1966, the deal was in effect already done. A press release had already been prepared, and the matter was to be put before the Rover shareholders later in the day. The minutes recorded in typical gentlemanly fashion that Rover intended to respond favourably to an approach from Leyland about a merger. What they did not say was that Rover (probably in the person of its Chairman, George Farmer) had actually invited Leyland to make that formal approach. The minutes went on:

With a view to achieving the co-ordination of future policy and the sales and cost benefits which it is confidently believed will stem from the proposed merger, it is intended that Mr LGT Farmer and Mr W Martin-Hurst (Managing Director of the Rover Company) will join the Board of Standard Triumph International, and that Sir Donald Stokes (Deputy Chairman and Managing Director of The Leyland Motor Corporation) and Mr GH Turnbull (General Manager of Standard Triumph International) will join the Board of the Rover Company.