The record
Rover launched the Land Rover in 1948 as a tax-exempt agricultural workhorse, and almost immediately offered a second, more civilised body option: the Station Wagon. The body was not built at Solihull but by Tickford Ltd of Newport Pagnell, a coachbuilder better known for its work on Rolls-Royce and Lagonda chassis. Constructed in the traditional coachbuilt manner — aluminium alloy panels over a timber frame — the body was mounted on the standard 80-inch Series I chassis with its 1.6-litre petrol engine, and offered seating for seven, with four removable folding seats in the rear.
Compared with the spartan standard Land Rover the Tickford was well equipped, with leather seats, a heater, a one-piece laminated windscreen, a tin-plate spare wheel cover and interior trim. It was, in effect, an early ancestor of the modern SUV, offering estate-car versatility on a four-wheel-drive platform two decades before the Range Rover.
The model was undone by economics. The labour-intensive wooden construction made it expensive to build, and the taxation authorities classified it as a private car, so unlike the commercial-vehicle Land Rover it attracted Purchase Tax. That took the price to £959 in 1949, against about £580 for the tax-exempt standard Series I. Sales at home collapsed as a result: sources put total production at around 641-651 vehicles (contemporary accounts say 'fewer than 700'), of which over 600 went for export — a number of them to aid agencies including UNICEF — and only about 50 were sold in Britain. Production ended in 1951, and Land Rover's next station wagons, from 1954, used in-house all-metal bodies.
Today the Tickford is one of the rarest and most sought-after early Land Rover variants, with only around 20 examples estimated to survive. A 1949 example built on 31 October 1949, gifted by a private collector in 2005, is displayed at the British Motor Museum at Gaydon, and an unrestored ex-UNICEF 1950 example (HSL 605) has been photographed as part of the Dunsfold Collection in Surrey.
.jpg){kind=link}
