Mayflower Automotive Products

Mayflower Automotive Products Ltd traded from Hamilton Works, Plymouth Road, Tavistock, Devon, and took the Mayflower sailing ship as its badge; the works name and the firm's later grouping with W. R. Hamilton (Plymouth) point to a Plymouth motor-trade connection, though the founding date has not been established. The idea of fitting free-wheeling hubs to the Land Rover came in the late 1950s, towards the end of Series I production, and the first hub to win the Rover Company's approval was made by the Barton Motor Company of Plymouth; the manufacturing rights soon passed to MAP, whose earliest hubs were also fitted to the Austin Gipsy. The familiar MAP hub had an aluminium outer casing, a steel inner running in a bronze bush and a centre actuator nut turned a quarter-turn with the vehicle's own wheel brace. Early castings carried an etched brass Mayflower decal; twenty-four-spline hubs followed for the Series III long-wheelbase, and from the mid-1960s MAP also offered an automatic hub with roller clutches.

By 1964 MAP was advertising winches in Country Life as 'fully approved by The Rover Company Limited for fitting to all models', and Land Rover's own approved-equipment booklet (Pub. 658/E) listed a Mayflower front-mounted recovery winch, driven by a propeller shaft from a special power take-off, with a 4,000 lb pull and a replaceable shear pin. In 1969 MAP added a crankshaft-driven capstan winch, the first to fit both four- and six-cylinder Land Rovers without modification; it was undergoing type approval by Rover's Special Projects department in April 1969 and was shown at the Rovershow in Northampton. Early bollards had a flat cap with M.A.P. cast in the top; somewhere between serial numbers 200 and 400 the ribbed bollard that lasted to the end of production was adopted.

In December 1970 Avimo, the Taunton optical and engineering group, took over W. R. Hamilton (Plymouth) and Mayflower Automotive Products, and in August 1971 sold MAP and Avimo Telecommunications to the Fairey Aviation Co. so that it could concentrate on optical and electronic instruments. Fairey continued the hubs, drum winch and capstan under the Fairey Winches name at Tavistock; the capstan was relettered FWL. Grace's Guide and Wikipedia date Fairey's acquisition of MAP to the late 1950s, but the contemporary newspaper reports of 1970 and 1971 cited by Grace's Guide place the sale in 1971. The Tavistock business later moved to Abbey Rise (1974) and passed to the American winch maker Superwinch in 1985.