In late 1946 or 1947, Spencer and Maurice Wilks, Chairman and Chief Engineer of the Rover Company, respectively, were spending some time in Anglesey, the island in the northwest corner of Wales where they took many of their vacations. They stayed at a house called Wern Farm on the shores of Red Wharf Bay, a large sandy beach in the northeast of Anglesey with a long beach at low tide.
Maurice Wilks was a tinkerer and always intrigued by former military equipment, and he had gotten his hands on a World War II-surplus Jeep to use on his family’s farm, and he was intrigued by the possibilities. It was a useful all-terrain vehicle, but it didn’t have a power take-off (PTO), and he felt that if it did it would have so much more potential as a vehicle that worked both on the farm and the road. Rover was in need of a lucrative, cheap-to-make vehicle to get back on their feet after the war, and this seemed like it could be just the ticket. One day, walking down the beach at Red Wharf Bay, he sketched out the core idea for the Land Rover in the tidal sands. Thus, on this beach, the Land Rover finds its spiritual birthplace.
For a few years now, Anglesey has been on my bucket list, in good part to explore the Land Rover connections here. (It also happens to be one of the most scenic parts of the Welsh coast, and I am a sucker for a good seascape to plant my camera in front of.) In 2015, when Land Rover announced the end of the Defender, they made a film with various vehicles in the Series-Defender lineage raking a massive outline of a Defender 90 into Red Wharf Bay. (Though it looked like it happened in a few hours, locals say it actually took a few weeks to set up and film.) It was then that the legacy of Red Wharf Bay went “more mainstream,” alongside the Two Millionth Defender produced later that year, with engravings of the shoreline on the wings and a map printed on the seatbacks.
The first place I stopped was Tacla Taid, the Anglesey Transport Museum. Arfon Williams started the museum in 2001 to showcase his collection of vehicles – cars, trucks, tractors, bikes, and military equipment. It also includes a collection of Land Rovers. Arfon has a Series I 88”, a Series IIB Forward Control, several 88” Series vehicles, and his pride and joy: his first Land Rover, a Series II 109” pickup which he has had for decades. It has a Rover V8 from a Rover Vitesse under the hood, stack exhausts, enough chrome and lighting to make a Texas truck stop weep, and the names of his daughters and granddaughters emblazoned on the front. Of all the vehicles in Tacla Taid, this is the one that is unequivocally never for sale.
I spent almost an hour with Arfon, talking about how Land Rovers have impacted our lives and how they were born of Anglesey. Arfon himself is a part of the landscape of Anglesey and takes great pride that several vehicles in his collection are lifelong island vehicles. He’s the de facto ambassador for Land Rover enthusiasts taking this pilgrimage here, and those that have done so include the famous African adventurer Kingsley Holgate, who came here last summer with a fleet of new Defenders on an expedition from the Cape of Good Hope, to Red Wharf Bay, to the North Cape in Norway. Arfon joined Holgate as they added the tidal waters of the Irish Sea to their calabash which they carried through their journey.
After Maurice Wilks drew that diagram in the sand at Red Wharf Bay, production started on the Centre Steer prototype, built on the chassis of a military Jeep. At this point, Maurice was staying at his own home on Anglesey, Tros Yr Afon, in the south near Newborough. A humble farmhouse overlooking the Newborough Stepping Stones, a local landmark on the Wales Coast Path, it was here that Maurice Wilks was most at home. Apparently, the house still has some of his engineering in its bones, including a refrigerator that he built that still functions decades later.
When the Centre Steer was ready, he took it to the dunes at Traeth Llanddwyn to give it some testing. The earliest films of him winging the prototype were filmed in these dunes, a stone’s throw from his house. (A small amount of testing was done at Red Wharf Bay, but for all intents and purposes, after the initial concept in the sand, Land Rover’s history here is in the southeast of Anglesey.) The dunes, and the journey through the woods to them, offered a diversity of terrain to give the new Land Rover a proper testing, close to hand for Maurice to go back home and give some thought to what needed changing.
Traeth Llanddwyn has been a protected natural area since 1955, so you can’t go dune-bashing there anymore. But you can still walk the dunes, and the big beach, and go out to the tidal island at the point where there’s a ruined lighthouse, and get a sense of two things: the diversity of terrains that drove Maurice Wilks to test the Land Rover here, and the beauty of this corner of Wales that drew him to make his respite and retreat here.
It was at Tros Yr Afon that Wilks died in September 1963, immensely prematurely. His death meant that Britain lost one of its greatest automotive engineers ever. Maurice Wilks wasn’t just responsible for the Land Rover, though it is certainly his most enduring achievement, with the same basic mechanics sketched out in Red Wharf Bay in the late 1940s still in production for seven decades, until 2016. He was also responsible for some of Rover’s non-4x4 achievements, including the Rove gas turbine car, part of a series of experiments in the mid-century period with turbine and jet-powered vehicles.
Maurice Wilks was buried at the church at Llanfair yn Cwmwd, a few miles from his home. Rover sent two black prototype Rover 2000s, which would go on sale four months after his death. Getting to the church is a typical British countryside drive. Turn off the main road onto a one-car-wide country lane, winding and tight even in my compact rental Citroen C3.
The turnoff to the church is easy to miss (I did) as it’s a narrow turn to a local farm. Double back, and there it is – a quiet Welsh country church, surrounded by a graveyard. At the farm next door, a Defender 90 with an oh-so-British Ifor Williams metal canopy and a horse trailer trundled around getting work done. It seemed appropriate that the neighbors would have a Land Rover, after all.
Maurice Wilks’ grave is just to the right as you go in the gate (which has a hand-written note on it with the dates of the monthly services as of 2019, written in Welsh in impeccable script), a simple stone slab with the epitaph carved into it with simple engineer’s precision, without excessive flourish.
MAURICE FERDNAND CARY WILKS AUGUST 19TH 1904 – SEPTEMBER 8TH 1963A MUCH LOVED GENTLE, MODEST MAN WHOSE SUDDEN DEATH ROBBED THE ROVER COMPANY OF A CHAIRMAN AND BRITAIN OF THE BRILLIANT PIONEER WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE WORLD’S FIRST GAS TURBINE DRIVEN CAR.
I don’t mean to sound excessively sentimental, but standing here, in this beautiful churchyard, at the grave of the man who engineered a vehicle that had fundamentally set the course of my life and the lives of many others, I was overcome with emotion. My visit to Anglesey felt very much like the semi-religious journey I always thought it would be, as a Land Rover nerd. Walking the dunes at Traeth Llanddwyn, walking on the stepping stones outside Tros Yr Afon, and drawing my own Land Rover into the sand at Red Wharf Bay, it all felt like a pure connection to the genesis of the vehicle.
After the Land Rover went on sale, Anglesey didn't have much to do with them anymore. Maurice Wilks' idea worked, and far from being a two or three year stopgap to make money after the war, it's the only remnant of the Rover Company still in profitable existence. The island had made its contribution to the concept, and it took off from there.
When I said goodbye Arfon at Tacla Taid, he waved from the door of his garage and told me, “keep believing in Land Rovers!” After visiting Anglesey, a place where the sand and the fields and the forest are built into the spirit of every vehicle even to this day, I left believing more than ever.
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