Jaguar and Land Rover - a surprising pairing?

 William Lyons and the Wilks brothers created remarkable companies which made iconic vehicles. Was it just fate that brought the companies together?

William Lyons and Maurice Wilks were born three years apart; Lyons in 1901 in Blackpool.

Son of a piano maker, William attended Arnold House School and in 1922 set up in business making sidecars in partnership with William Walmsley. They progressed into body work for cars; the Austin Swallow was one result of this. Their first full car was the Swallow Sports 'SS' which caused a sensation at the 1931 motor show; SS Cars Ltd was born. Four years later the first Jaguar emerged as the first production car to exceed 100mph. The war intervened and SS Cars played their part. The company changed it name top Jaguar Cars Ltd in 1945.

The post image is of an ashtray that was my father's. He had owned one of the first Jaguars in the 1930s; I still have the leather covered wheel hammer.

Maurice Wilks was educated at Malvern and went to the USA in 1926 to work with General Motors. After two years he returned and joined Hillman as a planning engineer. In 1930 he joined Rover as chief engineer being promoted to technical director in 1946. In the aftermath of the war, Maurice and his brother Spencer created a vehicle originally made for farmers from aluminium left over from aircraft production – the Land Rover. Interestingly they always had greater pride in their luxury cars.

The route to the first ‘marriage’ was circuitous.

In the fifties, William Lyons and Jaguar were doing well, producing cars much in demand and they had virtually doubled in size by buying Daimler, but also Coventry Climax and Guy Motors. To be honest this was a pretty rich mix. It therefore still strikes me as strange that Lyons would enter into merger discussions with George Harriman at BMC. Yet, we have to remember the times  –  when BMC’s Mini was the 'must have' car for swinging sixties. BMC also owned MG and Austin-Healey whose sports cars were much in demand.  It seems that Lyons saw BMC as having the weight to finance the development of the Jaguar models which he had at least in his mind if not on the drawing board. Jaguar merged with BMC to become British Motor Holdings in 1966.

The Wilks brothers had retired from Rover in the early sixties and Donald Stokes of Leyland viewed the company as offering a slice of motoring quality to the bus and truck company which he ran. Rover would join Triumph which had become part of Leyland with the Standard-Triumph acquisition in 1960.

The mid sixties saw BMH running into trouble. The answer in the eyes of the new Labour government was size and this would be provided by the charismatic Donald Stokes and Leyland. The merger took place in 1968.

The new group had riches beyond price in terms of wonderful motor cars. The Jaguar E-type and XJ6, the Rover P6, the Triumph 2000, not to mention the MGB and Triumph TR5, and the Land Rover. Rather more ominously it had a large number of old factories, dominant shop stewards and mass market motor cars that the public didn’t really want.

I explore what became the British Leyland story in my book, Vehicles to Vaccines.

For this blog I note just three events that ensured that Jaguar and Land Rover would survive.

The rationalisation of BL could so easily have led to the loss of the Land Rover; instead the factory at Solihull was made over to 4x4 production. The Range Rover had been introduced at the end of the sixties just as BL was running out of money. The car was perfectly timed and demand soon far exceeded supply.

A little later, a brilliant manager, Geoffrey Robinson, was appointed Managing Director of Jaguar. He had no intention of the marque losing it kudos and initiated an ambitious plan to bring the company back on track. A lack of money caused this plan to run into the buffers. The appointment of Michael Edwards to lead to the eventual breakup of British Leyland had for Jaguar a streak of brilliance for he appointed John Egan to take up the reins at the then floundering motor company. Egan and his team brought Jaguar back so much so that, following privatisation, Ford paid handsomely for what was to lead their new speciality car group.

British Leyland became the Rover Group and this was bought by BMW. They in turn sold Land Rover to Ford where it worked closely with Jaguar.

The rest as they say is history, Jaguar and Land Rover both now prosper as JLR as part of the Tata Group.

It is ironic that the Wilks family didn’t see the Land Rover as their great success; it was the experimental vehicle powered by a gas turbine – Rover had after all been part of the development of the jet engine. Had this been the case, Jaguar and Rover would have been head to head. Had Land Rover stuck to the utility vehicle so loved by explorers, Ford may well not have looked at them. Yet with the Range Rover successors, Land Rover and Jaguar together look to the luxury car market where they both can prosper.

Joseph, Harry and Oliver Lucas

 Joseph Lucas was born in 1834, lived in Hockley, Birmingham and worked in tin, manufacturing lamps for ships and the new world of photography. In 1855, his wife gave birth to a son, Harry, who at the age of sixteen joined his father in the business.

It was the invention and growing ownership of bicycles that caught Harry's attention; this was surely an area of growth on which he and his father should devote their resources. Although without much formal education, Harry grasped the essentials of business.

He knew that sustainable businesses are built on quality products and this led to the famous King of the Road lamp. He was not alone supplying the bicycle trade, and competitors offered cheaper but poorer products. He addressed this by introducing a cheaper but still high quality lamp, the Lucas 90 Plus, whilst keeping the King of the Road for the discerning cyclist.

He understood that products ordered needed to be delivered on time. Here came a clash with his father who was a much more impetuous man who would be so taken over by the thrill of winning an order that he would promise the earth and offer prices with little consideration of cost. Harry kept pulling him into line.

Cash is king, and Harry understood this. It was a constant struggle for the business to have enough cash resource to expand to meet demand as well as manufacturing to fulfil orders.

Roy Church tells how Harry wrestled with finances as he focused on cash flow and just how difficult it was for a young company to grow. Yet, they acquired additional premises in 1895 and, as the work force grew, mercifully so did demand, and profits began to come through in handsome numbers – some £23,000 per year on average in the three years to 1897 when the partnership became Joseph Lucas Limited.

Harry's son, Oliver was born in 1892 and attended King Edward's school, on leaving which he joined his father in the business. During the war he would invent the OL daylight signalling lamp.

Joseph Lucas died in 1902.

Harry Lucas was quick to see the opportunities of moving into lighting and starting motor cars. There were of course others keen to enter this promising market. Roy Church mentions Rotax in Willesden in north-west London, and the larger C.A. Vandervell (CAV) in Acton in west London in which Herbert Austin held debentures.

The First World War presented challenges to the company. A major problem of which I write in my book Ordnance was that the War Office had specified Bosch Magnetos for their vehicles. The components industry pre-war had been content with this, and the ability of British companies to supply magnetos was strictly limited. One company in particular, Thomson Bennett, rose to the challenge. Harry Lucas pounced when, in 1914, the opportunity arose to purchase it. This was going to prove of massive value to Lucas in the years to come, not least in the person of Peter Bennett.

Harry was growing old and Oliver Lucas was not ready to take over; the time had come for Peter Bennett to take the tiller. He became joint managing director with Harry in 1920 and then with Oliver in 1923. Harry died in 1939.

Lucas were growing their business in a number of very focused ways. They accepted offers by smaller component manufacturers to buy their businesses, and then, a little later, agreed to buy their two larger competitors, Rotax and CAV when the latter experienced harsh trading conditions in the mid 1920s. The expanded company focussed individual parts of the business in three locations: Birmingham, Acton and Willesden. At the same time, the company was researching solutions to technical problems, such as the magneto, dynamo and starter motor.

Marketing was key and this was where Oliver stepped in. He developed good relationships with William Morris and many others. He embraced vital aspects of manufacturing. He was as interested in the manufacturing process as in the product and so achieved great economies. Above all he was committed to what we now know as life-long learning. He encouraged his managers to learn from each other and from other companies. He espoused relationships with academia including financing a chair, the Lucas Professor of Production Engineering, at the University of Birmingham.

He carried out vital research into the development and large scale manufacture of fuel injection pumps which made possible the growth of the heavy vehicle industry. During the Second World War as Director of Research and Development at the Ministry of Supply, he led the overhauling the design and production of the Cruiser tank. Tragically he died young in 1948.

I write of the growth of Lucas in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and of its considerable contribution to the national effort in the Second World War in both HBSTMW and War on Wheels, Peter Bennett had been knighted in 1941 and had made his own significant contribution in a number of senior positions in the Ministry of Supply, including Director of Tanks and Vehicles. Following the death of Oliver Lucas, Peter Bennett was joined as joint managing director by Bertram Waring. He became Member of Parliament for Edgbaston in 1940 and became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minster of Labour in 1951-52. He was made a peer in 1953 and died in 1957.

I write of the later development of Lucas Industries in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Further reading:

• Nockolds, Harold, Lucas The First Hundred Years (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1978)
• Church, Roy A. “Innovation, Monopoly, and the Supply of Vehicle Components in Britain, 1880-1930: The Growth of Joseph Lucas Ltd.” The Business History Review, vol. 52, no. 2, 1978, pp. 226–49. JSTOR, https://doi-org.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/10.2307/3113036. Accessed 26 Aug. 2026.

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F.W. Lanchester - motor engineer

Born in 1868, Lanchester was at the centre of the transition from steam under pressure working a piston to ignited gas propelling a piston, to ignition of an evaporation of benzine.

Sounds simple.

With an engine bolted on to heavy concrete, vibration didn’t really matter; we are after all talking of an explosion in a confined space. Once that explosion occurred aboard a vehicle on four wheels, vibrations were keenly felt.

Lanchester has seen the experiments in Germany with engines attached to carriages, or, worse, engines coupled with contraptions on fewer than four wheels. He simply could not accept them.

He had attended school with no great distinction but nonetheless gained a place at what would become part of Imperial College, London. He found the course short on practical application and so alongside attended a night class at a technical college. The Lanchester who emerged into the world of road transport was thus well equipped.

He took a job with the Forward Gas Engine Works in Saltley, Birmingham on a pittance of a wage but with the agreement that any inventions should be his. It was a good decision for he secured patents for: a Pendulum Governor, a Pendulum Accelerometer, a self starting device for gas engines. There were many more.

I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how Lanchester founded a company and made motor cars with engineering but not financial success..

He was a man who, faced with a problem, would work it through theoretically and then test his solution in practice. He wouldn’t leave it there, for he needed also to create the tools necessary for its manufacture. His competitors were very much trial and error men and in the case of Harry Lawson and the British Daimler company a pedlar of promises.

He was not one to confine himself to a single area of engineering. Whilst he was creating motor cars, he also explored air transport. He eschewed the crude early attempts at flight, committing himself instead to a detailed study of birds finding how they achieved seemingly effortless flight compared to the struggles of the early aviators. Rolt is of the opinion that Lanchester’s writing on flight paved the way to aeronautical engineering. Lanchester created models based on his research, one powered by elastic bands (remember?). Rolt offers a description:

‘When the weather was calm, the models carved their way through the air as if running on invisible rails. When flight was made in a gale wind, the flight path took the form of a sinuous curve without momentary suggestion of loss of equilibrium but rather with the appearance of some set and intelligent purpose.’

He published two seminal works which were received with hostility in England and France, but welcomed in Germany. It wasn’t until after his death that his work was acknowledged by the Royal Aeronautical Society in their obituary of him. He was a man far ahead of his time.

In the First World War he served for two years as President of the Junior Institution of Engineers which had been founded as the Vulcanic Society by a group of Maudsley’s apprentices. Everything is connected.

Rolt compares Lanchester with Trevithick and notes that unlike Watt neither had a Boulton as a business partner. Lanchester did receive professional acclaim towards the end of his life in 1945 but never financial reward. The diverse places from which acclaim came speaks loudly. A Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellowship and Gold medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham and a Guggenheim Gold Medal.

Further reading:

Rolt, L.T.C., Great Engineers (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1962)

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Herbert, Lord Austin

 Herbert Austin's father was an unsuccessful Buckinghamshire farmer who had the good fortune to have as a brother the architect to Earl Fitzwilliam and the Wentworth Estate in Yorkshire. When forced to give up his own farm, Giles Austin secured the appointment as farm bailiff on the Wentworth Estate. Herbert had been born in Buckinghamshire in 1866 but he and his elder brother Ernest moved with his parents to Yorkshire where three brothers and a sister followed. Life on the estate was pleasant and Herbert attended the local school and discovered an aptitude for drawing. He went on to Rotherham Grammar school and thence to commercial college.

With drawing as a gift and an uncle as an architect, Herbert took articles only to find that it was not the career for him. Luck once more intervened for a maternal uncle had gone to Australia and was much taken by the new country. Herbert folllowed excited by the prospects. He spent a while working with his uncle before taken a couple more jobs before Wolseley and a sheep shearing machine beckoned. I wrote of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Herbert also found a wife of Scottish extraction, Helen Dron

Herbert, his wife and the Wolseley company moved back to Britain where Herbert first wrestled with problems with the production of the sheep shearer. It wasn't long before he and Wolseley progressed to their first vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine. Herbert was in his element and he produced a number of successful designs. Herbert though was destined to be more than a general manager of a company then owned by Vickers and as I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World Herbert left and founded the company that bears his name. It also competed magnificently in the many motor races that were held around the country and indeed the world in those days.

Herbert Austin was a big and determined man. He was known as 'Pa' to those who worked with him. He loved the technical side of his work. He was a great inventor of better ways of doing things.

From 1905 through to the end of the First World War, the Austin Motor Company was successful and produced many fine cars. Herbert was awarded a KBE for his work on munitions. In 1914 the factory had stood idle but by the autumn of 1915 orders from the Ministry began to flow. Austin made eight million shells, thousands of vehicles and much more. In particular the company was asked to produce aircraft. To facilitate this they cleared a large expanse of neighbouring land as a runway; after the war this doubled as a test track. The company also build the Longbridge Estate from American manufactured wooden cabins to house workers who were previously travelling long distances. Some 3,000 Belgian refugees were welcomed, housed and given vital work. At one time the total number of men and women working on site numbered 22,000. Tragically Herbert's only son, Vernon, was shot by a sniper late in the war.

The 1920s saw the company's Longbridge factory, underutilised; it had grown to meet the war effort but without the demands of war was simply too big. Herbert had ploughed what had become considerable wealth into the company and other investments leaving him short of liquidity so much so that the Official Receiver was appointed.

Wealth might have gone, but Herbert was in his prime and launched a 20hp car with a 12hp version which was used by 90% of London taxis. His wife pointed out that the public needed a smaller more affordable family car and the Austin Seven was born to great acclaim. It was produced from 1922 to 1939 outselling both Ford and Morris. It performed well in the many motor races held in Britain and around the world.

Austin and Morris are frequently compared and two particular differences emerge. Austin grew organically whereas Morris grew by acquisitions. Morris sourced car parts from external suppliers whereas Austin was keen to produce everything in house. In 1925 Longbridge covered 62 acres on a 220 acre site with 8,000 employees producing 25,000 cars each year. It had its own foundry, forge and machinery shop; body pressing, assembly and paint plant. There were then shops for engines, gear boxes and rear axles.

In 1926 a winding up order was made on the Wolseley Company which had been making substantial losses. Herbert really wanted to buy it, not least for sentimental reasons. William Morris also wanted it to add to his string of acquisitions. Sadly for Herbert, Morris was better placed financially and secured what remained of the company. Entrepreneur Dudley Docker who was instrumental in creating Metro-Vick had since 1924 been floating the idea of bring not only Wolseley and Morris together but adding Austin to create a company big enough to compete internationally. Herbert was keen, not so Morris and so the suggestion lapsed. Interesting in the foreword to Austin's biography, Miles Thomas, former managing director of Morris, said this of Austin losing out to Morris on the purchase of Wolseley:

"'Pa' did not sulk or moan. He just got on with the job of building the Austin empire until it was big enough, some time after his death, to absorb and digest old rival, the then Nuffield Organisation. Thus was created the British Motor Corporation."

In 1936 he was created Lord Austin. He had died in 1941. In his later years he gave substantially to good causes mainly hospitals and £250,000 to the Rutherford Laboratory in Cambridge.

Further reading:

Z.E. Lambert and R.J. Wyatt, Lord Austin - The Man (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1968)

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William Morris - Lord Nuffield

William Richard Morris was born on 10 October 1877 in Worcester where his father, Frederick, was working as a draper. Both Frederick and William's mother, Emily Ann, were of Oxfordshire yeoman stock and both had received a sound education. The indoor life of a draper didn't suit Frederick and so the family returned to Oxford and farming in Cowley. They had seven children of whom William was the eldest. Five died in childhood but William's sister lived a full life in Oxford.

William attended the village school but left at age fifteen when his father had to give up his job through ill health. Frederick returned to bookkeeping which he had learnt at the drapers and he was by all accounts meticulous. The evidence was there to see in the early records of his son's business.

William showed an early aptitude for things mechanical, particularly bicycles. He owned a penny farthing and an early solid-tired safety bicycle. His first job was in the bicycle trade where he learnt his basic skills. These he developed when he set up on his own. As an engineer he was entirely self taught.

William Morris was a remarkable man by any measure. Among my father's books was a biography of Morris by P.W.S. Andrews and Elizabeth Brunner and I drew on this for my book How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World in which I seek to tell the Morris story in the context of British manufacturing more generally. Here I record just four anecdotes which seem to me helpful in summing up the man who did of course found the Morris Motor Company and endow the Nuffield Foundation.

The first was the occasion of the 1906 General Election, and candidates were perceiving a benefit in having a motor car to carry them round on their electioneering. It seems the Morris’s reputation was spreading far and wide, for he was asked by a candidate in Stirling to find a suitable car. There were none available in Britain, and so Morris set off for Paris where he found a Lacoste & Batman car. This was a highly regarded make, and Morris must have felt thoroughly satisfied. That is, until twenty-five miles from Paris, when the car broke down with a seized gear-box and back-axle. He discovered that despite promises, oil and grease had not been filled before he set off. Morris returned to Paris, and bought the necessary parts, which he then fitted and set off again. Five miles short of Amiens, a broken exhaust valve stopped the car once more. Happily, spare valves had been provided, but they were one eighth of an inch too long. He did what many early motorists did in such circumstances, and spent one and a half hours grinding the valve down on the cobble stones to the required size. He then made it back to Oxford where his staff took over to drive up to Stirling. Late that night, he received a message that the car had broken down again, just short of York, with a broken bevel gear in the back axle. Morris set off for York, and, with the help of a local blacksmith, made and brazed two new teeth to the bevel. This sequence of break down and repair followed him all the way to Stirling, where he arrived two weeks late and much the poorer. He offered to rescind the contract, but the purchaser went ahead and no more was heard. Morris had though learned a great deal, all of which he incorporated into the design of the Morris Oxford. The other thing he learnt was not to make all the car himself, but to seek reliable suppliers of the key parts.

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In the mid thirties, a delegation from the War Office visited Moscow to witness the annual armaments parade and they saw a very basic but very fast tank. On making enquiries they discovered that it was built round a new suspension system developed by a man called Christie in the United States. The system enabled the tank to go fast, but also relatively smoothly, making it much safer for the driver, who previously would often be knocked out should the tank encounter a sharp undulation in the land it was crossing. Lord Nuffield purchased a Christie tank with his company’s own money and then proceeded to develop a new Nuffield tank employing the Christie suspension. The result was the Cruiser. In May 1940 the first few Cruiser tanks arrived in France.

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Another major Nuffield initiative was that of the Civil Repair Organisation. This had begun as an RAF initiative, but, with increasing demands on their manpower, they were content to hand it over to Lord Nuffield as Director General of Maintenance - RAF, with headquarters and one of the six repair depots at Cowley. Throughout the Battle of Britain, RAF planes were being shot down, making forced landings or landing at base with battle damage. It soon became obvious that to carry out repairs to get the planes airborne must make sense. Andrews gives some numbers. The total number of people employed in aircraft production was 664,200; a further 63,600 carried out repairs on some 80,000 aircraft put back into service over the period. Ernest Fairfax, in his closer look at the wartime contribution of the Nuffield companies, Calling All Arms, adds some more detail. There were in effect three strands to the operation: those mobile units who would go round the country retrieving damaged aircraft; the repair factories themselves; but then the foundries where scrap metal would be recycled into new aircraft. He suggests that the metal recovered was enough to build five thousand new planes.

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Lord Nuffield, who had been to see Chilwell, had told the War Minister, Mr Hore Belisha, about all that was happening in the mechanisation of the army. So, when in the summer of 1939 the question of an appointment as Deputy Director of Ordnance Services (Motor Transport) came up, the War Minister asked, ‘why not Williams at Chilwell?’

Williams was my father and Chilwell the Army Centre for Mechanisation which he created. He went on to serve as Controller of Ordnance Services of which I write in War on Wheels.

Further reading:

Andrews, P.W.S. and Brunner, Elizabeth The Life of Lord Nuffield – A Study in Enterprise and Benevolence, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955).

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