Thread: 'Stop Gap' DVD

Hi All,

I thought I would draw your attention to Graeme Aldous (First Overland DVD) and his recent newsletter on the release of his next Land Rover based documentary called ‘Stop Gap’, that was filmed around the visit and reunion of Arthur Goddard, (the original Land Rover Project engineer in 1948) with Land Rover, Solihull last year.

'Arthur Goddard DVD' Newsletter Page

Aside for the general interest in the ‘new’ history and odds and ends of old Land Rovers we can all dig into a touch more, this story is in many ways very much an Australian story as it is an English one. The reasons for the Australian connections are simple, but run a touch deeper than any of you could see at the time we were running about last year looking this all up. Firstly we know Alex Massey (LRO53) and his family are all very patriotic Queenslanders and that fateful discovery by them, of Arthur and that he was still very much with us. Arthur has so much more to tell us of the clues in how the 86” design that started in late 1950 to be such a foresighted design, a lot of which went into the Series 2 and still is in the Defender today.

Arthur made Australia his home in 1970 and very soon came to know and understand the Australian car industry as well as anyone being the Managing Director of Girlock Brakes in Sydney. Arthur went on to manage Quinton Hazell Australia then his own business, Vehicle Components in Brisbane where he still is.

The next connection to Australia was myself, from Melbourne. Luckily I had trawled through enough stuff at BMIHT at Gaydon in England to really notice Arthur at Rover and the huge number of development vehicles he had control of in the early days. The reason for all this in depth research by me was to really get to know how many Land Rovers had been sent to Australia early on.

The forth and most surprising to me was that once we had the story really going along well and Arthur was saying this, that and the next thing. Roger Crathorne who was helping us with it all from the Jaguar Land Rover side is a huge fan of CKD Land Rovers from anywhere and knows them back to front. Also exactly who assemble which particular models. So to get the old early drawings back for the 80” and help confirm what Arthur was telling us, we went to the old Rover Australia collection of drawings. Given all the mergers and owners of Land Rover over the past 60 years, this was the easy way to get what we needed.

It turns out that as we all thought when the wheels on an Oz in around the time of the 1953 80” suddenly become ‘Made in Australia’ this is when Rover began partly manufacturing Land Rovers in Australia and to start to make this happen at the time they copied all the Land Rover plans back to 1947 and sent them to Rover Australia, who were at the time based in Melbourne in Jolimont Terrence opposite the MCG.

So all of what Arthur told us was confirmed using copies of original 80” and 86” Land Rover drawings from Rover Australia!!!

The last connection and a minor one was when Arthur first appeared I went to visit Spen King who was one of Arthur’s Rover colleagues from the 40’s and 50’s. Arthur had worked with him as Technical Director of Girling in the 1960’s as well. Spen was great and more than happy to talk about those days at Rover and Arthur. At one point he suddenly changed the topic and said in a really good mock Aussie accent, ‘and me father was one of you lot mate’. It turned out that Spens father was Australian and from Glen Iris in Melbourne. Just up the road from me in Elsternwick. Spen knew Melbourne well enough and obviously his mother is the sister of Spencer and Maurice Wilks who went on to run the great Rover Company originally of Coventry in the 1930’s.

So I have put all this and more into a book called ‘They Found Our Engineer’, which you will see will be out on the 1st of May with Graeme’s ‘Stop Gap’ DVD. The ‘They’ in the title comes from a throw away comment but really means ‘Us’. Us also is not just Alex, his Dad Russell and me but the enthusiast movement in general, and how we have helped each other find things historic, part wise or simply enjoying a trip together. The enthusiast movement for Land Rovers has come a long way but for specific interest in the history came from the mid 1970’s. If it wasn’t for that enthusiasm and a lucky break not that long ago in Brisbane by Alex and Russell, none of this would have really come to light,

Thanks

Here is the second blog post for you to read,

Enjoy

http://theyfoundourengineer.authorsx...irst-engineer/