About BGU 122G-Rover 3.5 Litre P5B Coupe

“…Shone Like A Meteor Streaming To The Wind.” (Rover 3 ½ Litre Brochure, 1968).

My Rover P5B Coupe, registration BGU 122G,  was manufactured 0n 22 August 1968 and despatched from the Solihull factory on 3 September 1968. The car has a Silver Birch roof over Admiralty Blue bodywork, with Buckskin (cream) leather and Mortlake Brown (fawn) carpets.

Its history is a mystery until 1986, when it was first registered in the UK – 18 years after leaving the factory. The car is verified as RHD Home Market Specification, so it could have been registered to an embassy, the MoD or Government, registered in the Isle of Mann or Guernsey/Jersey, or even overseas (that seems unlikely as it’s a UK-spec car). It’s also highly unlikely an embassy, the MoD or Government would keep a car for 18 years, and most, if not all, of the Government cars were saloons, not Coupes. The car was delivered and distributed to Henlys Limited, London, who were distributors that handled a great many of Rover’s cars and also had some dealer premises, so that doesn’t really help explain things either.

The most likely (and least exciting) explanation could just be that DVLA messed-up the cars records. Paper records were ‘computerised’ in the ’80’s and ’90’s, and inevitably mistakes happened. Perhaps someone transposed the year (1968 and 1986 look very similar), or paper records were lost so someone just put the earliest date records for the car started. Who knows.

It would be lovely to find out what happened in this mysterious 18 year gap, but it’s likely to remain a mystery unless a small miracle occurs.

The car was manufactured just after Rover became part of BLMC (British Leyland Motor Corporation Ltd). Rover had joined the successful Leyland Motor Corporation (LMC) in 1967, sitting alongside Triumph, as part of the ongoing rationalisation and restructuring of the British motor industry. Then in 1968 LMC merged with the failing British Motor Corporation (BMC) to create BLMC. The hope was that LMC would rescue BMC.

The reality was that BMC dragged-down LMC, until the government had to rescue the whole lot in 1974 and create the nationalised British Leyland. When Rover became part of BLMC alongside Jaguar in 1968, it’s fate was basically sealed, as new Rover models being worked on (the P8, which was due to replace the P5 in 1972, and the P9 sports car) were cancelled apparently to reduce model overlap with other Leyland marques, which makes sense in many ways but was a tragedy for Rover.


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