The seeds of LDV were sown in 1896 with the transfer of the Wolseley Sheep Shearing Company from Australia to Drews Lane in Washwood Heath, Birmingham.

The company founder, Frederick York Wolseley, was an Irish-born Australian sheep farmer who had invented a machine to automate sheep shearing.

He was helped by a talented engineer and would-be entrepreneur named Herbert Austin, who had served his apprenticeship in Melbourne.

Austin's relentless innovative spirit amid the birth of the British car industry quickly gave birth to the Wolseley Motor Company.

The company's potential as a pioneer car maker was soon spotted by Vickers, which even in the early days of the 20th century was a well established industrial and defence group, which quickly snapped it up.

Austin, of course, went on to establish a car company of his own at Longbridge.

By 1913 Wolseley's factory at Adderley Park, Aston, was the biggest car plant in the UK, with 3,000 employees, but some limited specialist vehicle production was still being carried out at Drews Lane.

The First World War saw Drews Lane mushroom into one of the country's biggest munitions factories employing tens of thousands of Brummies.

With the return of peace, Vickers decided to utilise the hugely-expanded plant by transferring production of Wolseley cars from Adderley Park.

Wolseley grew rapidly into one of the leading British car marques, but by 1926 the company was in severe difficulties - the result of severe under-investment in the factory and its products.

This was when a second great name in the British motor industry arrived on the scene.

William Morris (later Lord Nuffield) bought Wolseley for three-quarters of a million pounds, requipped the whole Drews Lane site, and introduced new models.

The years between Morris's timely intervention and the Second World War were the high water mark of Wolseley's reputation for stylish, well-built and affordable cars.

Car production was later moved to Morris's other factory at Oxford, and, in the early post-war years, Drews Lane emerged as a major centre for van manufacturing.

By 1981 the incessant wave of mergers, acquisitions, consolidations and re-groupings that was the hallmark of the British automotive industry of the time resulted in the emergence of Freight Rover Vans under the umbrella of the ill-fated British Leyland conglomerate.

The business, along with Lancashire-based Leyland Trucks, was sold to DAF of Holland in 1987, and rebranded Leyland DAF Vans.

Six years later, in February 1993, DAF hit a terminal financial crisis after investing huge amounts of money in new trucks and vans just as the European commercial vehicle market was slipping into deep recession.

Drews Lane needed a third saviour, and he emerged in the form of chief executive Allan Amey who led the management buyout of Leyland Daf Vans from the wreckage of the DAF group.

A finance package of about £40 million involving Royal Bank of Scotland, 3i and Mercury Asset Management was put together in ten weeks - a record for such a complex deal.

Mr Amey soon began capitalising on two of the new LDV company's strongest assets - its loyal customer base and its ability to produce bespoke vehicles.

The 14,096 vans that LDV sold in 1999, for example, represented less than a third of the sales of its biggest sector rival, Ford.

But LDV's success was not built on volumes but on an ability to tailor vehicles exactly to a customer's specification without the need for taking standard vehicles off the track and putting them through lengthy and expensive conversions.

Its Special Vehicle Options department caters for specialist carriers of all kinds - from police forces to breakdown services, from ambulance services to school bus operators, accounts for about 50 per cent of the Drews Lane output.

The company's link-up with Daewoo was the catalyst for a £180 million investment programme that providing Drews Lane with a new, state-of-the-art paint shop as well as extensive refurbishments of its assembly hall and body-in-white shop.

In December 2005, the company hit a cashflow crisis caused by the higher manufacturing costs of the Maxus - its first all-new model since it the 1993 management buyout. The firm was forced to temporarily lay off 700 work-ers and suspend production of the Maxus.

LDV was rescued with a deal that saw the firm put into administration and immediately bought by a consortium led by private equity group Sun European Partners.

Now Russian automotive group GAZ, part of the giant RusProm Avto group owned by Moscow-based billionaire Oleg Deripaska, has agreed to buy the firm from its American owners.

The announcement signals a new page in the 110-year old company but one that GAZ has assured will keep it in its historic home, Birmingham.