In 1945, the Rover Company took on a new recruit in the form of Charles Spencer “Spen” King, who came on board after a stint at Rolls Royce to design a new gas turbine car engine.
At the time, the concept of a turbine engine was revolutionary and was something that Rover had been working on since World War II. Under the stewardship of Maurice Wilks, himself the mastermind behind the original Series I Land Rover and incidentally Spen’s uncle, Rover successfully developed the first-ever turbine powered car in 1949.
Although the idea almost made it to fruition with Chrysler developing a separate turbine vehicle in the 1950s, by that time Rover had largely lost interest in the turbine car and the project was shelved.
Regardless, Spen, who had only been an apprentice at Rolls Royce for a short time working on Spitfire fighter planes, would end up spending the rest of his career with Rover after being recruited by Maurice and his brother Spencer.
Spen’s contribution to Rover’s history cannot be understated; responsible for the Rover P6 series, he also designed and oversaw construction of the Rover-based Marauder sports car in 1950 and many other experimental prototype vehicles.
Having survived Rover’s takeover by the Leyland Motor Corporation, which subsequently became British Leyland, he also led teams responsible for the Triumph TR6, Triumph Stag and the innovative 16-valve cylinder head used on the Triumph Dolomite Sprint.
Yet despite all of his work with advanced engineering concepts, the legacy that Spen will be best remembered for forever will be his role in creating the original Range Rover. Unfortunately for him, he absolutely hated the thing.
Rover had been experimenting with a larger version of the Land Rover Series as far back as 1951, when the Rover P4-based ‘Road Rover’ project was developed with two-wheel drive. Shelved seven years later, the idea lay dormant until 1966 when Spen was drafted in to start work on a new model.
Nobody, least of all Spen himself, expected the Range Rover to become the enormous success it is today, with the vehicle’s blend of versatility and luxury igniting an unprecedented demand for what’s gone on to become a British icon.
In the words of Autocar, the Range Rover “changed the way off-roaders are viewed, right across the world, and spawned dozens of imitations”, being the ride of choice from rock stars to royalty and more than a few well-heeled soccer mums.
Even the Pope, when he arrived in Britain in 1984, had a custom Popemobile that was based on a Range Rover frame, such was the all-encompassing appeal of the vehicle.
Yet the Range Rover’s distinctive lines were a result not of any master stroke on behalf of Spen King, but rather on a few hurried drawings. Spen had toiled for months over a new mechanical layout with a large V8 engine sitting at the heart and, when he needed a body to fit the layout inside, simply drew a box shape around it.
However, Rover reckoned that the design was so good that when the company’s styling head David Bache came to transform the drawing into a production vehicle, he simply tweaked the edges and retained the same essential shape.
It was a move that was to torture the perfectionist Spen right up until he died, insisting year in year out that the design was only ever supposed to be a stopgap and had taken up “0.1 per cent” of his development time.
Worse still, when the first generation Range Rover was officially launched to market in 1970, it became the first ever vehicle to go on display in the Louvre museum in Paris as “an exemplary work of industrial design”.
For Spen, it was all too much. To him, the ideal Range Rover had cloth seats and an interior designed to be scrubbed down with the garden hose. The ultimate follow-up to the Land Rover, the Range Rover was meant to be a farmer’s rid for rounding up cows and carrying muddy tools around rural roads.
Unfortunately, the most basic Range Rover trim was phased out almost immediately after its introduction, and it’s safe to say that the modern iteration is a long way indeed from his original vision.
It’s not just the car itself that he took exception to either, but particularly the sorts of people who bought them. Range Rover buyers irked him so much, that in 2004 he blasted them in a Scottish Daily Record article, claiming that he found them “deeply unattractive”.
“The 4x4 was never intended as a status symbol, but later incarnations of my design seem to be intended for that purpose,” he moaned. “Sadly, the 4x4 has become an alternative to a Mercedes or BMW for the pompous, self-important driver. To use the 4x4 for the school run, or even in cities or towns at all, is completely stupid.”
There you have it, the inventor of the Chelsea tractor rueing the fact that his slapdash attempt at vehicle design was misappropriated and turned into a Frankenstein’s monster that was a far cry from his original, humbler concept.
Somewhat ironically though, Spen had more than a few commonalities with the modern Range Rover owners he despised so much. Upon his death in 2010 at the age of 85, his obituary listed his interests as including skiing in Aspen, sailing in a yacht, photography and listening to classical music.
Perhaps he resented those things being appropriated by the new breed of upwardly-mobile young bourgeois owners, or maybe he was literally just the ultimate embodiment of the crusty, cynical Englishman.
Either way, one thing was for sure: you wouldn’t have caught him dead behind the wheel of one of his creations. In his later days, his two daily drivers were a MINI Cooper S and a Golf GTI with not an SUV in sight.