Celebrating Sweet 16

"I was born in Melbourne on a big family farm, just outside of the city," says Mike Bishop, Senior Instructor, Land Rover Experience.

Name: Michael Bishop

Born: Melbourne Austalia

Vehicle: Land Rover pre-production prototype number 16, from the first batch of 25 Land Rovers ever made in 1947

Registration: 260 AC

"It was 2,500 acres, which is relatively small by Australian standards. I used to go and mess around on the farm and I was quite into machinery and so I wanted something to play with while I was there. A friend of mine had an ex-military Series IIA, so it made me quite determined that if he could have something like that then so could I.

"I’d been working in a paper shop and I started to spot very early Land Rovers for sale.

"So I decided to buy myself a late 1949 Series One in bits for the princely sum of $700, which was a good buy. Australia had been one of the biggest export markets for those vehicles. I got some help putting it back together from the Land Rover Owners Club of Victoria and by the time I was 16, I had it up and running. I was then bitten by the bug and the curiosity of it all. I spent the next few years getting to know them and also collecting them. I wasn’t off-roading so much, it was the history that interested me more. I was far more determined to find the earliest ones that I could. I set up a process of finding the rarest Land Rovers in Australia. I visited lots of scrapyards to find what was there and who was also visiting the scrapyards like me to buy rarer parts.

"On the back of that I found another 1948 model in Australia and a 1949 factory welder, which is the earliest factory welder in existence. I found that when I was 19. In my 20s I got to know lots of people in the UK associated with Land Rovers and I was buying and selling a lot of parts. Because of my dual nationality I just went every summer to the UK, like a continuous backpacking trip for five years meeting people. I got to know the scene extremely well. That’s when I first encountered number 16 in the 1990s, at the age of 25. I was commissioned by the owner to put number 16 back together for him. He had another welder and wanted to put number 16 back together for a trip he was planning to Switzerland in the summer of 1998. It all had to come together really quickly. So I did that and got back to my life. Then 10 years later, I was contacted by the owner out of the blue, who said to me that he didn’t use it as much as he should and it’s been sat in a shed.

"He asked if I’d like to buy it so that it was used. I asked him if he was completely mad? I bought it with a friend, so we have a 50/50 share. By that point I’d had 60 Series Ones. Number 16 was one of 48, like HUE. I was so proud that 16 was used for the final Defender celebration at Solihull as it was one of the three vehicles that launched Land Rover in the UK at the Bath and West show. They originally used pre-pros 12, 15 and 16 on the show stand. I love upholding the continuity. You might wonder why it has two sets of plates. It’s because 16 was never registered. Its trade plates are 260 AC and that’s how most people at the factory remember it.

"These plates were bolted on to the car. It was a service department run-about. It did lots of odd jobs, like towing cars for years and it was usually the first car apprentices drove. In the 1980s, the DVLA said that a car couldn’t just have trade plates. It left the factory in 1980 as a tired old Land Rover. It was bought by a jig shop foreman for his son to run around in. When he realised that he’d bought something very special, he sold it on to an enthusiast to restore it properly.

"When the enthusiasts got hold of it, they had to register it. They thought they’d found its original plate based on the other vehicles registered at the time with HNX 331, which was close. However, HNX 331 was a different vehicle so it has the wrong number, but it’s still within the right range of number of the pre-pros. You’re only ever a custodian of 16. I don’t think you ever truly own it. It’s never really had a formal owner. The restoration was in fact done by many people, which is very fitting to the rest of its story."