Thread: Look who I had lunch with today....

Last time I saw Hue it was tucked away in a corner in Gaydon

First Series 1 Land Rover.jpg

Land Rover Number One
by Robert Lewis (15 Oct 02)

When you accept an invitation to drive the first Land Rover, company people tend to hold back as you get close to the vehicle, and ask smilingly, "Can you find your way in?"
That's because HUE 166 - usually referred to as "Huey" - has no exterior door handles. But there's a little triangular canvas flap on the trailing edge, and the interior handle is just inside it. Simple and straightforward, but only if you know in advance.
Huey's own history, or so it seems, isn't quite so straightforward. HUE 166 is now part of the magnificent collection at the Heritage Motor Centre at Gaydon in Warwickshire. Although this was founded to house vehicles with Rover/BL/Leyland/BMC connections (right back to a mid-1890s Wolseley) and currently shares the Gaydon estate with Land Rover's headquarters and test track, it's now, like Land Rover itself, owned by Ford.
I think Uncle Henry was rather puzzled that his buy-out of Land Rover (from BMW) also included a splendid motor museum, but he's happy to run it, for the moment at least.
The snag about Huey is that, according to various bits of documentation all available at the same time, it's either "the first pre-production Land Rover built in 1948", or "the authenticated 'number one' production Land Rover sold in July 1948" or "the first Land Rover built in 1947".
One way or another, and discounting the original prototypes, Huey is the real numero uno, and a vehicle of great period charm. The designers were brothers Maurice and Spencer Wilks, respectively managing director and chief engineer of Rover at the time.
Where It Came From
They made no bones about the fact that the inspiration for the Land Rover was the wartime Willys Jeep. With steel supplies severely rationed in the post-WWII period, it decided to use aluminium wherever possible in the construction of what was originally intended to be a stop-gap model.
Some stop-gap, when you consider that within a year of being introduced the Land Rover was out-selling all Rover's private cars added together, and that the 2002 Defender is an obvious, direct though much-developed descendant of the vehicle that went on sale 54 years ago.
The bulkhead is steel, but as much of the rest of the structure as possible is made of lightweight and rust-resistant aluminium. The roof is even lighter-weight canvas. Huey is a two-seater with right-hand drive, but the original idea was for the Land Rover to have a central driving seat, so that it could be exported to left-hand drive markets without any modifications.
Rover did build a central-seat prototype, which appears in some of the company's archive photographs, but nobody now knows what happened to that version. It was probably broken up, but may just possibly turn up some day as the Holy Grail of Land Rover historians.
Although intended from the start as a workhorse, in the same way that the Defender is today, Huey is now treated as a retired old gentleman, and guest drivers are asked to take it easy over any bumps and potholes. It started out in 1948, though, putting in long hours on a Warwickshire farm. Rover eventually bought it back, and restored it to its present - not fancy, but still workmanlike - condition.
Out On The Road, Gently
The four-cylinder 1595cc engine is a typical Rover overhead-inlet, side-exhaust valve design of the period, and it peaks at 50bhp. So there's no great burst of acceleration, and the top speed, although not many drivers take Huey there, is about 50mph.
These days, Huey's short test runs don't involve any serious rough or off-road going, but the original four-wheel drive system is still in place. Although it's sometimes said that through all its history Land Rover has never built a two-wheel drive vehicle, that's not strictly true. A few were specially produced for military jobs like acting as tenders on RAF airfields.
Slow off the line, then, and let the very modest acceleration build up. Huey has an unexpectedly thin-rimmed steering wheel, and the quite high-set driving position offers a good view over the bonnet-mounted spare wheel. There are windscreen wipers of a very grudging sort. With their low arc and feeble wipe they're more ornamental than useful.
It's important to remember that this is a vehicle which needs double-declutching on the way down through the box to first. If you forget, or have lost the knack, or never acquired it in this era of all-synchromesh manual transmissions, Huey will make anybody within a 50-yard radius aware of your shortcomings in that department.
Historic 4x4s may not be quite in the same league as GTs or sports two-seaters, but Huey is quite a character, as well as being the first of more than three million (and counting) vehicles to wear the Land Rover badge.