Land Rover Legends: Part Six
Meet Bill Morris, who joined Land Rover in 1960 and was responsible for the SIII, 200Tdi engine and Discovery 1
Bill Morris joined Land Rover in 1960 and embarked on a remarkable career in which his achievements included the Series III, the development of the 200Tdi engine and the original Discovery
There cannot have been many engineering directors in the global car industry who have also been aero engine and rocket engineers, as well as a ship’s engineer. But Bill Morris has been all four. His introduction to life at sea began when he was a boy, when his father bought a 70 foot ex-admiralty vessel which he refurbished before deciding in 1947 to sail it to South Africa to, as Bill puts it, “find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” There was no pot of gold, and the family returned to the UK the following year. “To my disappointment, that beautiful little boat stayed behind,” he says wistfully.
After completing his schooling in Somerset, in 1951 Bill signed-up for a five-year engineering apprenticeship with the de Havilland Aircraft Company at Stag Lane aerodrome near Edgware, on the outskirts of North London. “I spent my time on engines,” he recalls. “De Havilland had acquired a wonderful reputation with their pre-war Moth series of biplanes, perhaps the most famous of which is the Tiger Moth, to say nothing of the Rolls-royce Merlin-powered Mosquito fighter-bomber, the famous Wooden Wonder, which served with the RAF during the War. They also built some of the world’s very first airliners, such as the twinengined Dragon Rapide biplane. These biplanes were all powered by variants of the de Havilland Gipsy piston engine, which had been developed even further by the early 1950s and was used on the twin-engined Dove and the fourengined Heron airliners.
“I spent most of my apprenticeship working on these Gipsy engines, but I also got involved with the assembly of the Goblin and Ghost turbojets, which powered the Vampire, one of the RAF’S first jet interceptors, and the later Venom.
“The de Havilland Engine Company was also contracted by the government to develop the Spectre rocket engine, which was intended to be the rocket part of the combination rocket- and jet-powered interceptor aircraft being developed for the RAF, such as the Saunders-roe SR.53. In the event, both the SR.53 and the Spectre were cancelled by the government, but working on the Spectre does mean that I can legitimately claim to have been a rocket engineer!”
It was during his apprenticeship that Bill discovered an enthusiasm for racing, when he and his car-mad fellow apprentices found that they could race their cars around the airfield perimeter track at de Havilland’s facility at
Leavesden, near Watford. “I had an HRG at the time,” he says, “and I generally did all right!” Their informal racing activities were briefly curtailed when it was suggested they should not race their cars along that bit of the perimeter track that passed directly in front of the boardroom windows, but alternative routes around the back of the plant were soon adopted, and nobody suggested it should be stopped.
Bill’s National Service had been deferred as a result of his employment in the defence industry, and this meant that instead of doing his stint at the age of 18, he would be required to do it at 25. At the time, he was renting rooms at a house in Kensington owned by an RAF Squadron Leader who told Bill that National Service at the age of 25 would not be much fun and worth avoiding. Bill discovered that if he was in the Merchant Service and was at sea to the age of 26, he would be exempted from National Service entirely, so on completion of his de Havilland apprenticeship and two years in the Rocket Division, he promptly signed-on as a Junior Engineer with the Ellerman City Line, and went to sea for a year.
He completed two voyages to Japan via Port Sudan, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. “It was certainly an adventure, and the engines I worked on were rather larger than the ones I was used to. Climbing into the crankcase through an inspection cover and standing on the big-ends to carry our maintenance work was different, but I decided it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
From aircrafts to vehicles
“When I left the Merchant Service, I didn’t reapply to return to de Havilland. The MP Duncan Sandys had been appointed Minister of Defence in 1957, and promptly produced a white paper that argued that missiles should replace aircraft, and many aircraft manufacturers were losing contracts and having research projects cancelled as a result. Some even went out of business. It didn’t seem to be the time to be working in military aircraft engineering, so I started to look elsewhere.
“I was still into cars, and when I saw that Rover were advertising for engineers I put in my application. My girlfriend at the time, Marie, who later became my wife, was originally from the Midlands so she was quite enthusiastic about returning there. I got the job and expected to be working on Rover cars, which I had a soft spot for. I started there in 1960 and I was surprised to find on my first day that I had been allocated to Land Rovers, which I have to say I knew very little about. In those days, you never saw a Land Rover in London!”
Bill quickly became an enthusiastic Land Rover man, though, not least through his introduction by Tim Harding to the factory-run Land Rover Owners’ Club, of which Tim was Secretary. “In those days, Rover was very supportive of off road trialling and would let employees use company vehicles to enter, as long as there were people from the workshop involved. It was also very easy to buy ex-factory vehicles for private use, and that’s how I acquired and refurbished a prototype 88in Series II. We had great fun with this including a tour of Norway all the way up to the Arctic Circle. I sold it some years later to fund a brief excursion to a Rover P6 TC. I later became eligible for a company vehicle and returned to a 109 Station Wagon. After that, I bought a prototype Series III to refurbish as an 18th birthday present for my son. He’s 50 now, and we still haven’t managed to complete the longoverdue rebuild!
“In later years I also acquired an off-tools prototype Discovery I, registered C742 HUH, which I used for trialling for quite a few years until the regulations changed and obliged me to fit a roll-bar. Although I was more than happy to use the vehicle off-road, I wasn’t prepared to cut holes in it to fit a roll-bar, so it was retired. Eventually, Marie decided it was lowering the tone of the neighbourhood, sitting on the drive in original and unrestored condition as it was, and she sold it to Charles Whitaker. I also ran around in one of the G-WAC launch vehicles for a while, but that too has gone now, sadly.”
Bill’s initial stint at Land Rover as a Technical Assistant lasted for two years until 1962. “I never liked that job title,” he smiles. “At de Havilland I had been a Development Engineer, and at sea I was an Engineer, so it always struck me as odd that I should be known as a Technical Assistant at Land Rover, but that’s the way it was.” During this time, Bill worked on the 129-inch 30cwt truck project. “Someone decided that we needed to build something to compete with the Dodge Power Wagon trucks used by Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil company, and that’s how the 129 came into being, although it never got beyond the sixth prototype,” Bill recalls.
It was in 1961 that Land Rover began its long association with the Eastnor Castle estate, when it was looking for a location that would provide a vehicle testing and assessment
“Rover was very supportive of off-road trialling and would let employees use company vehicles”
facility. Geof Miller and Bill were among the first to visit, taking with them a 129 prototype, and they concluded that Eastnor met all their requirements. And so began a partnership with the estate that endures to this day. Indeed, in 2011 JLR organised an international media event there to commemorate the 50th anniversary of this partnership, and Bill was present to share his memories of those pioneering days.
At that time, Alan Jackson-mee was 129in Land Rover Project Engineer and Geof Miller was Assistant Project Engineer, and when Geof was promoted to Project Engineer in 1962, Bill was appointed Assistant PE working for Geof. One of their major programmes at that time was the single wiper motor installation in the Series II.
Development of the Series III
Between 1965 and 1974, Bill was Land Rover Project Engineer, Basic Vehicles, with responsibility for the civilian models. He oversaw the development and launch of the Series III in 1971, which he says was forced on the company because of changing safety legislation that consigned the dashboard bar into history. “We had very little money to spend on the development,” he says, “and there was very little senior management involvement in the programme from Tom Barton or others, perhaps with the exception of some strong top management opinion about the way the ventilation system should work. I think this was because there had been some complaints from Rover 2000 saloon customers about the eyeball air vents, so we just put the vents on the top of the dash. Really, we were just left to get on with it and ensure that what we created would pass the safety regs. We didn’t really feel that we were designing a new model, and it was only later that the sales and marketing team decided to christen it with the name Series III.”
Throughout this period, Tom Barton remained in overall control as Land Rover Chief Engineer, and he was rather notorious for his dislike of coil springs. The Range Rover had been developed with coils by New Vehicle Projects under Spen King, which was outside Tom’s direct responsibility, but within the Land Rover side of the house, leaf springs reigned supreme.
“Tom was always heavily influenced by the military requirements for the Land Rover, and the military always favoured leaf springs because they could be easily repaired in the field. He also believed that in our export markets, local drivers would drive as fast as they could endure, and leaf springs set a limit to that endurance, which would be a good thing for the longevity and durability of the vehicle. Tom did come round to the benefits of coils in the end, though.”
In 1975, Bill was appointed Design Manager for Land Rover, “although this was military and civilian vehicle engineering design, rather than styling, which was a separate department,” he says. He held this role until 1979. That year, with the introduction of a new matrix organisation, he was made Chief Engineer on Range Rover. At the same time Trevor Greenway, who had started his career at Rover as a machinist, was appointed Chief Engineer Land Rover with responsibility for the One Ten, both of them reporting to Mike Broadhead who in turn reported to Tom Barton.
“In 1978 there was a significant realignment within British Leyland, and it was split into two separate profit centres: Cars and Land Rover/freight Rover. Mike Hodgkinson was Managing Director of the Land Rover business and, freed from the millstone that was the car business, Land Rover began to thrive,” recalls Bill.
The four-door Range Rover
In 1980, Bill became Chief Engineer Land Rover with responsibility for all vehicle development, testing and the relationship with the manufacturing and service teams, and the following years saw significant development of the Range Rover, beginning with the limited-edition two-door In Vogue model and culminating in the four-door, all of which were the start of the Range Rover’s inexorable climb to luxury vehicle and fashion icon.
“Mike Broadhead was a disciple of Spen King,” Bill recalls. “The received wisdom was to keep the Range Rover as a twodoor, even though a four-door had been prototyped within a couple of years of the launch, and customers had been asking for one for years, but there was no budget for significant development work. And then Monteverdi in Switzerland approached us through an agent to ask if they could develop a four-door, and an agreement was reached.
“I was part of a Land Rover management group that visited Monteverdi to examine one of their first vehicles,” Bill recalls. “It all got a bit heated when our Quality Director criticised one or two details that he thought were poor, not realising that the things he didn’t like were actually the way we were building the vehicles, and nothing to do with Monteverdi’s work. I had to pour a lot of oil on troubled waters,” he laughs.
“Mike Broadhead was not supportive of us making a fourdoor ourselves, though, and Tom Barton asked me to take on the project. We outsourced body development to Carbodies of Coventry, who were interested in using the Range Rover as the basis for a new taxi design, but it was really Land Rover’s Managing Director at the time, Mike Hodgkinson, who saw the market potential for the four-door and ensured that it became reality. Mike also pushed for the introduction of an automatic option, although no one was very happy with the three-speed Chrysler Torqueflite gearbox that we eventually went with.”
There were big changes in 1983, when Mike Hodgkinson departed and was replaced as Managing Director by Tony Gilroy, who had just completed an impressive turnaround at Freight Rover. “Tony was a pretty fiery guy with strong opinions who didn’t suffer any opposition to his plans”, recalls Bill, “and he and Tom Barton didn’t get on. Tom had actually retired in 1980 but had been hired back as a consultant by Mike Hodgkinson, but Tony put an end to that and banned Tom from setting foot in the factory.
“Mike Broadhead had replaced Tom as Director of
“He oversaw the launch of the SIII, which was forced on the company because of safety regs”
Engineering, but Mike found it difficult to work with Tony as well, and in 1984 he decided to leave the company and do his own thing. That’s when I was asked to become Director of Engineering, although I reckon Tony wanted to appoint someone from outside the company. He couldn’t find anyone, though, so I got the job,” says Bill with typical modesty.
This was a very challenging time for Land Rover, with declining sales in its export and military markets and intensifying competition courtesy of the Japanese manufacturers, who were offering family and leisure market 4x4s that were more civilised than the Land Rover, and cheaper than the Range Rover. Tony Gilroy initiated a complete review of the company’s markets and its product range, and he and his board took the critical decision that arguably saved Land Rover: the creation of a new vehicle that would tackle the Japanese competition head-on, which would be codenamed Project Jay – and later known to the world as the Discovery.
A new vehicle to save Land Rover
Gilroy’s vision to put the company back where it belonged also encompassed the development of an upgraded Range Rover (Project Eagle) that would take the vehicle into the lucrative US market; the commencement of design work on a successor to the first-generation Range Rover, codenamed Pegasus; and a new vehicle codenamed Llama for the military. In addition there would be a series of vitally important engine development programmes.
As Director of Engineering, Bill, together with his team, was heavily involved in all of these initiatives. As an interim solution, the Italian-built VM 2.4 turbodiesel (later increased to 2.5 litres) would be installed in the Range Rover under Project Beaver, to meet an urgent requirement for a diesel Range Rover for the Continental European markets, while this engine would also be a fallback option for Project Jay.
The programme to turbocharge the existing 2.5 diesel was named Project Falcon, but the really important engine project was Gemini, which would take development on the in-house 2.5 diesel even further, encompassing directinjection and a new aluminium cylinder head, creating an engine that would be suitable for Jay as well as the firstgeneration Range Rover, and the Ninety and One Ten. In the event, Gemini became very closely aligned with the requirements of Project Jay, and the plan was to use the new engine in the new model before making it available in the Ninety/one Ten and the Range Rover. The resultant engine became known as the 200Tdi. It and its successor, the 300Tdi, are regarded by many as perhaps the best diesel engines the company has ever produced. The ubiquitous Buick-derived 3.5 V8 petrol engine would continue in the Range Rover and also be available in de-tuned form in the Project Jay vehicle. And it was Project Jay that was to be the real game changer for the car maker.
Tony Gilroy created a six-man team known as Swift Group to determine how best to go about creating this third product, with the twin objectives of rapid development and ensuring no overlap with the Land Rover and Range Rover models. Some at the company were already convinced that the new vehicle should be based on the Range Rover chassis, and Marketing Director Tim Ackerley had already presented the idea the previous year, as an Interim Model Strategy.
Ackerley managed to convince three of his fellow directors of the wisdom of using the Range Rover as the basis of the new vehicle: Bob Dover in Manufacturing, Alan Edis in Project Planning, and Bill, and in 1986 Tony Gilroy appointed Mike Donovan as the head of a skunk works multi-disciplinary team to drive the development of Project Jay.
Development of the new vehicle was very rapid, in part due to the decision to use the Range Rover chassis and a number of Range Rover body panels, but also because of the multi-disciplinary team approach, which developed all aspects of the new vehicle in a parallel fashion, rather than a linear one.
Project Jay remained a well-kept secret until the middle of 1988, when photographs were taken in the design studio and leaked, or sold, to the media. A full-on internal investigation was set-up, led by no less than John Stalker, the former Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, but the guilty party was never found. In the event, the leak was perhaps more helpful than damaging, and the new Discovery was launched in the autumn of 1989 at Plymouth, to universal acclaim.
Fitting neatly between the Land Rover County Station Wagon and the Range Rover, the Discovery was a dramatic departure from the norm, and had instant appeal to the market that Land Rover had targeted so precisely. The rest, as they say, is history.
The BAE takeover
“It had now become apparent that Range Rover was coming to the limit of its development and a replacement vehicle was required,” Bill remembers. “Tony wanted fresh blood to lead this and this resulted in my losing the Engineering Directorship to return to being Group Chief Engineer, Civil and Military Land Rover. Stan Manton took my seat on the Board but this did not last long as there was more upheaval over the horizon.”
Along the way, though, the company had weathered more crises. “In early 1986 it became clear that the Government was keen to sell Land Rover, the most profitable part of the British Leyland empire, and General Motors was the leading contender to acquire the business,” Bill recalls. “Tony Gilroy attempted to put together a management team buy-out, which I first heard about when I was working with the company’s military customers in Norway, where I received a
“Tony Gilroy saved Land Rover with the creation of a new vehicle codename Project Jay”
call from Tony asking if I would participate in the buyout. I said yes, but the plan came to nothing when the government shelved the plans to sell, and Land Rover soldiered on under state ownership for another two years”.
In 1988, the Rover Group was off-loaded to British Aerospace in what was clearly a politically-motivated and highly-convenient move for the government, which achieved its objective of privatising British Leyland while at the same time apparently ticking the box regarding ongoing British ownership. Graham Day, who had been the head of Rover Group, moved to take up a position on the BAE board, and was replaced by George Simpson. “I was in Tony’s office when the call came through to tell him that George was to be his new boss,” Bill recalls. “Tony’s reaction was explosive, and he made it clear that there was no way he would work for Simpson. By the end of the day he had cleared out his office and was gone.”
Bill’s position was affected by the upheavals that followed the BAE takeover. “BAE decided they didn’t want two car companies,” Bill states, “and they proceeded to repeat the mistakes of the BL days when they merged the car and Land Rover businesses. Stan Manton lost his seat on the board of directors but remained in the top position in Land Rover, although he didn’t stay long in the role and in 1990 he was succeeded by Alex Stephenson, who came in from Perkins.”
Following Manton’s appointment in 1988, Bill was made Chief Engineer, Land Rover and Military Vehicles, a position he held until he took early retirement in 1990. It was in this role that he was to oversee another important development, when the Land Rover family of vehicles were renamed Defender. Bill takes up the story.
“When we launched the Range Rover in the US, we set-up an operation known as Range Rover North America,” he says. “All that was fine, but when we launched the Discovery there three years later, people became confused. The Discovery was branded as a Land Rover, and of course the 90 and 110 were Land Rovers. Was a Range Rover also a Land Rover, and how did it all fit together? When the Land Rover, Discovery and Range Rover were marketed and sold together, it created a degree of confusion in the customer’s mind. Why did the new Discovery appear to have a different company behind it, Land Rover, while the Range Rover was sold by Range Rover North America?”
The Defender name is usually attributed to Alan Edis, who was Product Planning Director, and it connected the military use of the vehicles for defence, and the notion that the 90 and 110 family were defenders of the company’s 4x4 heritage. The Defender name was formally adopted in 1990, and laid the foundation for JLR’S current product strategy, which is to have three families of vehicle: Defender, Discovery and Range Rover. “It’s interesting to see that today the Defender name is being applied to the vehicles that were previously known as Series I, II and III,” he laughs, “but I guess that is just a marketing convenience”.
Life after Land Rover
After leaving Land Rover, Bill joined a consultancy firm and spent some time working on the MG car project, before accepting a position with Taiwanese automotive company YTM, which at the time was attempting to design and build a forward control-type truck and a medium car. Bill moved to Taiwan for two years but, despite his best efforts, the project came to nothing.
While he was in Taiwan, Bill met the young daughter of a friend who was keen to study in the UK, so he and Marie generously decided to sponsor her and she lived with them for several years in Warwick, eventually graduating from the University of Central England in Birmingham and now works as a teacher in London.
After YTM, Bill worked as an independent consultant for GKN, which was unfolding itself from a joint venture with Mitsubishi in the manufacture of composite springs. Bill’s job was to oversee the removal of an entire factory from Telford to Japan, in a project that eventually took two years to accomplish successfully.
From 1998, Bill also headed the Institution of Mechanical Engineers assessment panel for the West Midlands, where he and his panel colleagues assessed graduate and associate engineers for the award of Chartered status and upgrading to Fellow. He headed the panel until 2010.
And will that prototype Series III receive its long-overdue rebuild? “I have my doubts,” says Bill, “because it will be a big job for an 83-year-old,” before explaining how he had spent the last few days dismantling and reassembling the family cooker to repair a fault in the grill. “And that only involved six screws!” he laughs.
“The Rover Group was off-loaded to British Aerospace – a politicallymotivated, convenient move for the government”