Rover Cars and Motorcycles

Hi all The delight of a working pub lunch today brought the view of this classic motorcar which was driven into the car park. The driver was delighted to give permission for the pic to go on our site. As it was an everyday working car, I thought it deserved a place on our site, because both the lunch & the car made me very proud of our city. I do hope you like as much as I did. ps. "The Dr will be visiting later" Our family Doctor, Dr. Freeman had a Rover 90, very similar in shape to this.

They were the typical doctor's car, although solicitors seemed to like them too. They were from the days before the Rover name was downgraded from a quality car to the downmarket junk of recent years. Incidentally, was Dr Freeman the one at the surgery in Torcross Avenue? The reason I remember is that their phone number was one digit different from ours at home, so we always seemed to be getting calls asking for appointments.

Great pic, my friend's parents had one of those. On the odd Sunday afternoon he was allowed to use their Rover 90. If I remember right there was a wheel in the dashboard that you could turn so that the car would freewheel when you took your foot off the accelerator. Of course, we would turn it when he was not looking, then almost have an accident when he came to slow down at traffic lights. Beat my A35 van (primrose in colour). Mind you that was a write off after just three weeks. Not my fault, someone ran into the back of me and, no, it was not my mate's Rover 90 in freewheel.

Hi to you both. Yes, to Dr. Freeman. He was part of the practice of McNamara Freeman & Laird. I am sad about your event, Mattash. The freewheel where the manifold vacuum was released was a feature on many larger motors of the day. Maybe someone on here might enlighten us on the technology involved with freewheeling. There was a mechanical freewheel application involving ballbearings in graduated slots which was manufactured by 'Fairey' often applied to four wheel drive stuff. I am not an engineer so my knowledge on this is very suspect. ps. Regards odd phone numbers, my phone was one digit different to the Minister of Aldermans Green Church. I arranged no end of church events

Was the Rover P4 ever made in Coventry, I thought the company had already moved to Solihull? Incidentally, the P4's feature which intrigued me the most was its reserve fuel tank.

Hello Dutchman, Wiki states: The Rover Company is a former British car manufacturing company founded as Starley & Sutton Co. of Coventry in 1878. After developing the template for the modern bicycle with its Rover Safety Bicycle of 1885, the company moved into the automotive industry. It started building motorcycles and Rover cars, using their established marque with the iconic Viking Longship, from 1904 onwards. Land Rover vehicles were added from 1948 onwards, with all production moving to the Solihull plant after World War II. I was told that the last Rover car production in Coventry was at Helen St, which became a GEC assembly factory in the fifties. So the 90 & 85 must also have been a product of Solihull. I believe that nearly a third of the workforce at Solihull came from the Coventry area. ps. Just dropped on this comment also from Wiki: After the Second World War, the company abandoned Helen Street and bought the two shadow factories. Acocks Green carried on for a while, making Meteor engines for tanks, and Solihull became the new centre for vehicles, with production resuming in 1947; it would become the home of the Land Rover.

Hi Philip I think even the later freewheels used the same basic method. In the days of white-metalled bearings, using a freewheel with, shall we say, not enough sensitivity to the mechanicals, could cause a bearing to fail, usually a big end, due to the shock as it engaged. I think the vacuum was used so that the freewheel would be disengaged at high vacuum - on overrun - in order to give the driver back some engine braking. Going down a steep hill with a freewheel engaged together with the poor brake lining materials of those years was a recipe for disaster! They were unreliable though, and if the vacuum failed, the driver didn't know - until it was too late. Incidentally, the German target map shows "Meteor Works" (purpose unknown!) in the Barracks Square, not far from the old market. That must have been a Rover factory, up to 1940. (I believe the Solihull plant was christened Meteor Works too for a time. as I remember the telex address was Meteor.) The Germans thought the old Ordnance factory was Rover; I don't think it ever was used by Rover, but maybe someone knows better? I think the P3 was the first Rover to be made outside Coventry. I fancied a P4 years ago, but the price of a good one exceeded my pocket, so I never realised the ambition.

Yes Keith, I noticed that on their aerial reconnaissance photo. Bizarre, any kid living in the general area could have told them what the factory really made!

Hi d! Thanks for the photo. Just as bizarre was their thinking Coventry Chain was Coventry Motor and Sundries!! What was the Ordnance Works doing then? I thought it closed in the 20s. It's clear that their intelligence wasn't very good, because there are a lot of sites marked on the target map as "place of unknown purpose"; if they didn't know the purpose, you wouldn't have thought they would regard it as a worthwhile target! Incidentally, GEC Copsewood isn't marked, either. I don't think they had our long experience of spying - they certainly weren't very effective at it! (Perhaps as well )

It was a naval stores depot until very recently, the admiralty's logic being that Coventry was equally far from the sea in all directions!

So "Rover" on the German map could be taken to mean buccaneer Well Coventry had an association with naval ordnance for some time, didn't it? Birmingham too - there used to be a steam-powered lathe in the Birmingham Science Museum that had a 22 feet diameter horizontal faceplate, for turning the turret rings for Victorian battleships. I have never seen such a large lathe anywhere else! They must have had some very large machinery at Coventry Ordnance Works, too, when they made naval gun barrels there; there ought to be examples of it - and of what they made, such as the very good 5.5 inch gun used on WWI destroyers - in e.g. the Herbert Museum.

Hello again Dutchman Please let me compliment you again on your resourcefulness. There are so many points of interest on those maps that I could go on for days! So I will just keep looking at them. The last time I was walking past the 'Ord' works in Red Lane, I was told that it was being used as a grain store. Hope I have not picked up on the wrong building. Thank you

Thanks Philip Getting back to the original topic, can you believe I was talking to a Land Rover dealer in a model railway forum and he simply refused to believe that Rover was ever based in Coventry, he virtually accused me of making it up! More recently I was amused to discover that as Land Rovers were based on the P4 saloon it was quite easy to drop a modern turbocharged Land Rover diesel engine into the old car. It may sound like sacrilege but the P4 is apparently very heavy on petrol by modern standards and thus prohibitively expensive to run as an everyday vehicle.

I believe anything that you say, Dutchman, because you are so reliable & if there was ever an issue, you would be he first to correct anything anyway. I can see the old speedway / dog track off Lythalls Lane on the maps. The lie of the voiding line too, so much to look at. Thank you so much. If ever I have a specific query, without mentioning you, it's your reply that is guaranteed in my mind.

Worth a mention, Rover motorcycles, as surprisingly using the search facility showed no results.