It’s me, Mark Stone, and in this episode of the Backseat Driver Podcast, I’m joined by Ruben Verdes, a leading authority on Rolls-Royce and Bentley, to explore the remarkable history, craftsmanship and stories behind some of the world’s most celebrated motor cars.

Ruben’s involvement with these marques stretches far beyond simply owning or admiring the cars. As a consultant, museum manager, concours judge, editor and treasurer of the Rolls-Royce Foundation, he has spent decades researching the vehicles, the people who built them and the owners whose stories form part of their history.

We trace Ruben’s fascination with cars back to childhood journeys with his father before exploring how that interest developed into a lifelong dedication to automotive history and preservation.

Our conversation takes us through the evolution of Rolls-Royce, from the days when customers purchased a chassis and commissioned a coachbuilder to create the body, through to the move towards factory-built cars. We also discuss the enormous importance of aero engines to Rolls-Royce, the company’s relationship with America and the fascinating story of cars produced at its Springfield factory.

Ruben takes us behind some of the mythology surrounding the marque too, including the legendary Silver Ghost reliability trials, badges, coachwork and the importance of establishing genuine provenance. He explains how careful archival research can sometimes reveal a very different story from the one that has been repeated about a particular car for decades.

Ultimately, this is a conversation about much more than Rolls-Royce. It is about preserving motoring history properly, understanding the craftsmanship and engineering behind these extraordinary machines, and making sure the stories attached to them are every bit as authentic as the cars themselves

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I'd like to welcome to the Backseat Driver podcast a man whose resume.

Now there you are, there's a clue.

Resume, not cv, is seriously impressive.

Besides being a car consultant, he has been treasurer of the Rolls Royce foundation, an organization that exists to promote the preservation and historical pursuits, as well as managing a museum exhibiting Rolls Royce and Bentley Automo Mills in Pennsylvania.

He also used to co own the Rolls Royce that appeared with Douglie Moore in Arthur.

He seriously regrets not buying a Mercedes SL many years ago.

He's one of the leading lights in judging at American Concourse events and he's a friend of past guest Michael Manns, which is the reason I'm delighted to say I can welcome Ruben Verdes to the Backseat Driver podcast.

Ruben, welcome.

Well, thank you.

Thanks for having me.

So I know you probably got bored having all that read out, but it gives people a good idea of the caliber of person and we're actually chatting with.

How did all this come about?

What triggered your passion for cars?

Well, like many people or many people that are car enthusiasts these days, they can remember that going around with their fathers.

And my father was a car guy, not, not as crazy as myself.

But we've all played the game that, you know, you're driving around and you point that cars and then you're to name the near make, model and so on.

So this goes back to when a.

And if you know what that looks like, it's half rocket ship, half yacht and whatever leftover is car.

Yeah.

By definition with its steering wheel, although it's rather square for those who are familiar with those, those Chryslers of that time.

And well, that, that was always a lot of fun and there was never any discussion.

Do you like doing this?

Or anything like that?

I guess my father threw it out as a game and the fact that I caught on was probably an indication that was somewhat in that wavelength.

And so we're driving around and having fun pointing out Buicks and their characteristics, you know, the little side holdings that give them away as Buicks.

And every car has a signature of styling and, and that's one of the wonderful things about cars.

They're an absolute.

This distillation of all the arts of humanity, from culture and style to technology and aspirations and that sort of thing.

So one day there's a car that goes by and it doesn't look like any other car.

And at the time that would have been a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud.

Yeah.

And to combine his enthusiasm for cars, my father had a rather unique sense of humor that I think I've inherited, which some of it centers around playing with the young lads, heads all the time, that sort of thing.

So he looks at me and goes, well, Reuben, you know, that's a Rolls Royce.

And he lets it hang there.

Yeah.

So I go, okay, dad, what's the big deal?

He goes, well, you have to understand these cars are handmade.

It takes months to finish one and not a one leaves the factory unless it's perfect.

So I guess you could wrap the whole car thing early on to that and my admiration for Rolls Royces from that rather impressive description of what a Rolls Royce is.

And of course there are a lot of cars that fall under the category, category of, you know, superlatives.

You have the Duesenbergs, you have the Dillahy's, you have the Bugattis.

These are cars like a Rolex isn't about telling time.

Well, this isn't.

These cars aren't just about getting from point A to point B. Yeah.

And, and, and, and sometimes it's a Ferrari or the like and then it's from getting point A to point B rather swiftly.

Yeah.

And that's an art form onto itself.

Naturally.

So there's something very Don Quixote about, you know, that level of appreciation for the automobile.

Yeah.

Because it's aspirational.

And where I ended up falling into clearly is going certain, to a certain amount head over heels about the history of these things and how they come about.

Because obviously they're endless numbers of books that center around the appraisal of the car and the people that, you know, bought them, both the icons and the failures and all the rest.

So a lot of human drama goes here.

I mean, with Rolls Royce, I mean, at the era you're talking, I mean, there will probably still have been.

Maybe I could be wrong.

My knowledge of American car history isn't all it could be.

But I mean, there were the great, There were the Cadillacs, the Lincolns, the Packards.

I mean, well, Packard even built Rolls Royce engines.

I mean, were they as prestigious as Rolls Royce or did the Rolls Royce still eclipse them?

I think that the Rolls Royce eclipsed everyone most of the 20th century.

The car was marketed as the best car in the world.

Yeah.

And they had a legal department that was devoted to sending cease and desist letters to companies that would trade on the back of Rolls Royce and say, this is the Rolls Royce of washing machines or whatnot.

And, you know, nobody, as far as I know, nobody sent cease and desist letters from General Motors, legal or, you know, this is the Cadillac of this.

Although they may have.

Yeah.

But the, the, also the, the trademark Rolls Royce.

You know, I'm not a trademark expert, but you kind of delve into that a little bit if you're a Marc enthusiast for Rolls Royce.

And you know, there's certain marks on this planet that have, that sit above other marks.

And there's a proper name for that terminology that escapes me at the moment.

Yeah.

But all's Royce is up there with Coca Cola and some other trademarks that, you know, are, but have the characteristics of being unique.

Yeah.

This is something, for example, that Bentley has had a problem with because Bentley is a, is a common.

Not a common, but it's a surname.

And you know, you can't trademark words in the English language.

Just ask Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook.

He wanted to trademark anything with the word book in it.

Yeah.

You know, Facebook, this book.

And basically my understanding was completely and flat looking turned down because you can't go around trademarking, you know, words in the English language.

Yeah.

So Coca Cola qualifies because the combination of the words create a, a unique phrase.

And Rolls Royce is in that similar category.

When you take those two names, even if you were to sit there all day long and say, well, Royce is a common name, but you know, that's not the trademark and the trademark exists.

And for anyone listening, please, when you write Rolls Royce, include the hyphen and that.

Wait, wait, that sounds funny.

That sounds funny.

But the first managing director of Rolls Royce was a fellow named Claude Johnson.

He was head of the Royal Automobile Club and he worked for roles and he was the first managing director of Old Choice and he was so instrumental, his business acumen was so celebrated and the success of Rolls Royce was very much tied with him that he was given the nickname the Hyphen in Rolls Royce and that was the title of his biography.

So to forget the hyphen is to forget the contributions of Claude Johnson to the success of Rolls Royce.

Well, I know the first Rolls Royce were made in Manchester, which isn't too far away from me.

I also know the fact that I was told this by a friend of mine who owned Three Shadows.

If you're going to abbreviate the name.

They are not Rolls, they are Royces.

He said.

So instead of saying, well, which roles shall we take?

He said, the correct term, if you must, is which Royce should we take?

Yes, as well.

Royce was the engineer.

Yeah.

And.

And of course, not all that.

Not all too many folks realize that Royce Limited was a big electrical engineering firm and they made electrical devices, dynamos and, and whatnot.

In fact, the light bulb, the English light bulb with.

What are they called?

The little bits that stick out the bayonet fit.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That was the voice patent.

Yeah.

And one of their first successes was the, the doorbell, the electric doorbell.

Yeah.

And he made heavy equipment cranes for docks and that sort of thing, and then decided to go into motor car production.

And we all know what happened after that, but there were actually three Royce cars that were made and they were the prototypes and that was the car that Rolls saw, the Royce car.

And the first Rolls Royce and the Royce car, almost indistinguishable except for the Parthenon radiator.

But the first actual Rolls Royce had the same squarish radiator that the three Rolls Roll Royce prototype.

Yeah.

Now I'm down a rabbit hole.

I mean, the other thing is with Rolls Royce, people have said to me, I mean, they did bring it back for whatever reason, but when Rolls was killed, the red painter, red enamel inlays into the badge on the, at the top of the grill underneath.

Eleanor Thornton, better known as the Spirits of Ecstasy.

The.

The red enamel paint was replaced by black enamel paint as a mark of honour and to acknowledge the passing of Rolls.

Well, actually, you were close.

And Rolls was, I, I guess the equivalent of a Sir Richard Branson or an Elon Musk at the time, a very adventurous person and he want, he wanted desperately for Royce and the company to get into aero engine production and that sort of thing.

And that did not happen because Roy said, wait, the, the thing with road engines is if a car gives out in the middle of the road, you get out and push.

If an engine or something goes wrong in the air, you're going to die.

Yeah.

That kind of reputational risk attached to the company.

And we all know the rest of the story, because what you can argue is that the longevity of Rolls Royce as a, as a business concern was wound up hugely in their aero production side of the business.

And I don't know if saying ironically, Rolls perished and it was an aero competition and he had to do a landing in a very specific spot.

Yeah.

And.

And lost control of the plane and it crashed and he died instantly of a broken neck, I believe.

Yeah.

In 19 king 10.

Now, he died before you mentioned the spirit of ecstasy.

He died even before that was created, because that was created, I believe, a year after his death by Charles Sykes.

Yeah.

And right around that time, they were going to change the red badge to black badge.

If I'm not mistaken.

I think Royce himself signed the order just coincided with his death.

And the reason apparently was that the red color at times clashed with whatever colors were used on, on, on, on the automobile's body.

Yeah.

So they figured that black would not conflict with anything.

Yeah, it would, you know, it would just be so.

I, I almost hate to mention this because I rather think that that story is charming as a, as a moniker of mourning for the passing of Royce.

It's a charming story, but unfortunately it's not really true.

In fact.

And in fact, to underscore that there were, you know, the, at that time, the Royal Royce, Rolls Royce production for cars was basically divided between two lines.

What they called the small horsepower cars and the large horsepower cars, the Phantom 2s and that sort of thing.

And there were plenty, if I'm memory serves, there were quite a number of small horsepower cars after then that still had the red badge.

And I believe the reason was, is that they were clearing the inventory.

Right.

Don't throw them away.

We'll still.

We'll carry on using them.

Exactly, exactly.

So it's funny when you.

This is really commonplace in a lot of stories in automotive history.

They're wound up in things that sound very grandiose.

And then the next thing you know, it's like, well, it has kind of a.

Either a business line story of practicality or just commonplace human habits.

Yeah, I did, I did a history on a Rolls Royce that had the conspicuous deliver Delivery date of December 25th.

Oh, so this was a Springfield Phantom one.

For a while, Rolls Royce made silver ghosts and Phantom ones in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only time their old horses were made outside of England.

This particular car had a wonderful roadster body made by Murphy.

And for the people that know that name, Walter Murphy, the Pasadena coach builder, built a grand number of the bodies on Duesenbergs.

This car, this Rolls Royce had one of those bodies with the disappearing uploads.

The body beautiful car.

And so a whole story evolved around this car about it being a presence for the purchaser's second wife, who was a lovely lady that worked on A Chorus Line in Broadway shows and that sort of thing.

Yeah.

And the story was that he demolished one of the walls of the drawing room in his mansion so he could place the car next to the Christmas tree.

Right.

And in doing the history for this car, I had all the lineage of owners lined up, except for the last one.

And I started to sweat because the restoration was coming to completion and I needed to finish the book that was going to go with it.

Yeah.

And I finally tracked down a grandson living in Florida.

And the first 10 minutes of the conversation, he was berating me under the thought of how incredibly weird it was for anybody to be concerned with who owned the car nearly 100 years before.

And then at the end of the conversation, the guy goes, me, well, maybe you could talk to my brother.

He seems to like family history and that sort of thing.

Yeah.

I remember thinking to myself, because I'm trying to be polite, thinking to myself, but why couldn't you have started with that instead of putting me through this whole.

This whole beratement of.

And the brother had the goods.

He had everything.

Pictures.

And I asked him that question, what about this thing?

He goes, no, that never happened.

And here's a picture of the mansion.

It never had the wall removed.

But he said, but he used to drive one of his Rolls Royces.

He had about 10 of them.

Yeah, right.

He goes, I don't know if it was your car, but he drove the cars from Massachusetts down to Florida to his vacation home.

And he broke down in one of the Carolinas along the way.

And the mechanic said it would take him a day and a half to get parts from Springfield to fix the car.

And he didn't want to wait.

He traded the Rolls Royce for a V8 Ford or something like that.

He could be on his way.

And.

And the reason I'm telling you the story is, is one simple fact that I have found sometimes, and oftentimes the truth is more interesting than the lie.

Yeah.

I mean, I actually.

I actually have a book, and it's called 99 Rolls Royce Myths.

So I know that book is fabulous.

Some are true, some are not.

But it is a fascinating book.

I'll tell you this now.

A friend of mine used to have a car hire business for weddings, and he had three shadows, two Mark 1 shadows and a Mark 2 shadow.

And occasionally, if I wasn't doing anything or I was back in the uk, he used to ring me up and say, are you busy on Saturday afternoon?

I used to say, which one am I driving and where am I going?

Which meant I have to put a suit on and go and show for a Rolls Royce.

I, I used to have to remind, remind myself, you are not setting a lap speed here.

This has to be very elegant.

But I read the book behind the Wheel of a Silver Shadow,.

So, I.

Mean, it's a fascinating book.

But the one thing I've always known, I mean, you mentioned Springfield, where.

I mean, they were built in Springfield, I think, or I was told to reduce the costs of, of the car because of importation.

And the other thing I know about.

And the other thing I know about American Rolls Royce is the famous.

The most famous bodies are the Brewster bodies, which tend to be identifiable because they have this twin front bumper.

Ah, okay.

Well, that is true to an extent, because that twin front bumper is easily visible.

But I'll, I'll give you something that will help you pretty much 95% of the time.

And this you could tell from far away.

Yeah.

The hubs on Darby made Rolls Royces.

Those are the Dunlop hubs.

Yeah.

Where you have a center screw that you unscrew and a plate comes off and then you fit, you know, the wrench onto the hub to remove the wheel.

Yeah.

Well, the American Rolls Royces had American hubs that look more like Gusenberg hubs where there was no plate, there was just a fitting where you would put the wrench onto.

Yeah.

And unscrew the thing.

And those are Buffalo hubs.

Right.

See them a mile away.

So you could just looking across the way, you could look at a Rolls Royce and say, that's a Springfield car just by looking at the hubs.

Yeah.

And.

And, well, anyway, that's, that's a basic.

There are other things, but you're absolutely right.

In fact, when a Rolls Royce.

Well, the United States has always been an incredible market.

I was just going to say my opinion.

I mean, in England, maybe not as much these days, but the Rolls Royce in America has, to my mind, always been a more prestigious car in America than it has been in England.

I, I've never really thought about that too much, and it's an interesting point, but Rolls Royce was selling cars here very early on.

Now that, as I said when we spoke before we went on air, I had the privilege many years ago of actually riding in and driving that car.

Unbelievable piece of machinery.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

That, that, I mean that's, you know, the, that was the car that was taken.

And again, here's Claude Johnson.

Okay.

He contrived this trial, this reliability trial.

He was going back and forth from London to Edinburgh.

I, I memory serves for the better part of about 15,000 miles.

Yeah.

Without any, you know, involuntary stopping or breakdowns or anything like that.

Okay.

Most cars could not make it a couple of hundred miles.

No.

Yeah.

So that's, supposedly, that's where the, the, the saying the best car in the world came from.

And that phrase has always been attributed to a newspaper reporter or reports on it.

And I believe it was the company that got behind that or authored that.

And I wouldn't be surprised if it was Claude Johnson.

And again, I'm dealing with my memory.

Some things you remember very clearly and then over time it's like you're looking at them through a cheesecloth.

But if memory serves, that's how it went.

And in any case, that's, that's a, the very special car.

And it was called the Silver Ghost because people name cars like you name a yacht back then.

Yeah, you know, that was the Silver Ghost.

There were all kinds of other names, you know, the, all these different names given to those early cars.

Yeah.

I mean, the other thing about them, early Rolls Royce such as that one have a very famous competition history.

I mean, they took part in the Coupe des Alps, the famous Alpine trophy races.

And I think one of the cars that did well, they were called the Alpine E. And Rolls has a very, very successful competition history that most people don't realize.

Well, on that note, I'll tell you that before the, before the Silver Ghost came out, Rolls Royce was making five different models.

And Rolls Royce actually start that start.

Yeah.

A Rolls Royce was really just a car made under a memorandum agreement between the honorable Charles Rolls and Royce Limited Where Rolls would sell as many cars as Royce could make and Royce would make as many cars as Rolls could sell.

But they were making a two cylinder, 10 horsepower, which is basically that Royce prototype, a 15 horsepower, three cylinder, 20 horsepower, four cylinder, a 30 horsepower six cylinder, which was different from the Silver Ghost because it was three banks of two cylinders and actually a V8 engine car that was envisioned to be competition for electric cars.

There was a horseless carriage.

Yeah.

Which made it the only Rolls Royce without the famous radiator.

Yeah.

It's the only model of Rolls Royce that doesn't exist today.

But it had pressure, feet, lubrication where the others.

And this is why I mentioned it, they were that one of those four cylinder, horsepower, 20 horsepower cars.

Rolls himself came to New York and raced it in Yonperson and won and had it shipped down to Florida to race on Ormond Beach.

Yeah.

And they actually won certain speed awards.

So Rolls Royce kind of started out at Rolls, of course, the TT races and all the rest.

They started out with an eye towards competition and that's really counterintuitive when you think of the general profile of the mark.

Yeah.

I mean, everybody thinks they're a large, refined car, which they are a large refined car.

Sure.

But I mean some people now a Shadow and a Corniche, they actually modify them and use them on the big things like the Peking Paris Rally.

They use them on some serious events and these cars usually do well.

And it's always been, it's always been my argument and people laugh at me when I say this.

I said, especially the Shadows.

I have, I have not driven more modern Rolls Royce but I've always said the Shadow, you can actually throw them about for fun.

The handling is superb out of them.

Yes.

They're big, they're heavy, they're two and a half tons.

Used to set them up early into a corner.

And this is from the days when they used to run on Avon Turbo steel tires which sing for fun.

They howl around every corner.

But you can, you can throw a Rolls Royce about and it is a pleasure to do it.

I don't know whether you've ever succumbed to that.

Well, one thing I will say about the Silver Shadow with starting off by totally agreeing with everything you just said.

The nice thing is that there were quite for Rolls Royce quite a number of these cars made.

And if you, if you're in enthusiast circles, there's a certain amount of cringing that goes around when they're so heavily modified or.

Excuse me, for racing or even to try fun things with them.

Yeah.

And.

And my attitude towards all that is like, Phyllis, there's enough of these cars.

Yeah.

Okay.

That you don't have to worry about bastardizing a few to, you know, have a bit of fun.

In fact, Jay Leno, if I remember, had a motorcycle made with a decommissioned helicopter jet engine.

Yeah.

That was made by Rolls Royce.

Oh.

And, and after a certain service life, these engines which work perfectly well, they're taken out of service because again, you don't, you don't want an engine failing on, on an aircraft.

No.

So I've always fancied the idea.

Boy, wouldn't it be fun to have a proper Rolls Royce jet engine put into a silver shadow?

And, and I, and whatever I say that I think I get ahead of, put my arms over my, over my head and face to, to guard myself about, over incoming projectiles because, you know, that sort of thing doesn't go over well in enthusiast circles.

But at the end of the day, you know, the owner of a car, that's his car.

Yeah.

So everybody can have an opinion.

And I think that that just sits right at the water's edge.

That's all well and good.

If you were going to take the last one, say if somebody found one of those VA cars, there are many people have been looking for decades and, and according to Rolls Royce records, it was destroyed.

But records aren't always accurate.

But that's another rabbit hole.

Yeah.

But you know, again, I mean, just, just to put a bow on it, if you have a silver Shadow, there's plenty of them that are taken apart for parks.

Cars, for God's sakes.

If somebody can figure out how to put one back on the road, even if it has, you know, a monster engine with the bits extending out of the bonnet because they carved a hole in it, you know, have at it.

You know, I mean, the thing is about the shadows, especially the shadow ones, and you see a lot, you see a lot of them in, in over here in England.

They rust and corrode for fun.

Most of, most of them are in terrible condition, I dare say, over where you are on the east coast.

They will suffer just as they do in England.

You get west coast where it's dry and sunny.

They will survive a lot more.

Yes, they do.

Yes.

Yes.

So there are plenty of these.

In fact, I was mentioning early on or in a previous conversation that I was at an event this weekend for the local Florida region chapter of the Rolls Royce Owners Club at an event I started 25 years ago that we call the labor of Love.

Yeah.

Over Labor Day weekend, which is a holiday weekend here in the States and plenty of silver shadows.

The, the, the gentleman, Matthew, who put the was leading the event.

He drives this lovely green silver Shadow.

And then.

And I think the designs held up very well.

Yeah.

Time.

And it's very elegant.

Yeah.

And of course as the, shall we say the Shadow derivatives which are the, in my opinion, the Corniche.

I think the Corniche is a stunning car and absolutely phenomenal to drive.

They.

And they're holding their value with no apologies.

It's because, you know, I had, I had a 77 Cornish coupe.

Very rare car that over a 10 year lifespan they only made a thousand of them.

Yeah.

And they only stopped making them because they were selling more of those than the Camargue at the time.

Yeah.

And this particular car butting in that was an acquired taste was the Camargue.

Yes.

Yeah.

Well again they were selling more of the Cornish and so anyway, at least that's the story.

And this particular car was made for use in Switzerland and at that time, speaking of the Comar, the Combark had a different engine.

It had instead of the twin Sus, it had a single Solix carburetor.

Yeah.

Which really made the car perform.

Perform marvelously.

And since it was made for Switzerland here in the States we had, you know, at the time it was the advent of using only unleaded gas and we have pollution control and the catalytic converters.

This car had none of it.

Yeah.

Okay.

So it, I mean the thing took off like, like a bat out of hell.

And you know, I, I liked it because it had very, very nice English coachwork touches because they put nice little trim around all the windows and all the rest.

And then after, you know, owning the car for a while, I drove a friend of mine's Drop Head Corniche.

Yeah.

And instantly I said now I know why people just love this car.

You're in California and you're Florida or something like that.

You got the top down and you're riding around in the car, you can't help but smile.

No, he's just going to have a silly smile the whole time.

I mean they are boulevard cruisers but you know it's, it's just.

And they're, and they're beautiful and the, the, the guts of the car basically.

Well, they followed along with all improvements.

I mean from the Shadow era they basically had this shadow drive frame.

Through the Spirit Spur era they, they progressed along the line.

They were a Cossack engineer.

Yeah.

That's really remarkable.

In a Way.

Now, just out of interest, we mentioned them a while ago.

How does the Bentley fit into all this?

Because the Bentley in England has always been regarded well, it was until the split when BMW of course have Rolls Royce and VW have Bentley.

But until then, when they were both produced at Crewe, the Bentley was looked upon as a.

The more sporting variant.

The sporting gentleman drove a Bentley and they were always a little bit cheaper than a Rolls Royce.

So some people used to say, oh, you bought a Bentley because you can't afford the real thing.

I mean, how are Bentleys looked upon in America?

Well, depends on the era of the car, but I don't think that that was actually the perception.

I think they're pretty close to each other.

I think that for a long time the look of the Rolls Royce radiator and the Flying lady gave, you know, communicated all the aura that accrued to the Rolls Royce.

And since the Bentley was a little bit more modest.

Yeah, it was.

As you know, there were quite a number of cars that had rounded radiators.

So it's possible, for example, for the untrained eye to confuse, you know, an S1, 2 or 3 Bentley with say a Jaguar Mark 9 or something like that for the untrained eye.

And those early WO Bentleys are absolutely marvelous cars.

In fact, an 8 liter Bentley I think is what really motivated Roll Royce to want to absorb the mark.

Because there's two ways to beat the competition.

You can outperform them or you can buy them.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

And.

And the 8 liter wo Bentley is really just an extraordinary car.

And because it came at the end, they all.

There were only 100 of them made.

And I think that's also a neat number.

Exactly 100 of them.

Yeah.

And.

And then Rolls Royce, they couldn't just buy the Mark and bury it.

So they created really lovely refined cars that they marketed as the silent sports car.

Okay, how's that for Rolls Royce take on something of that sporting?

My opinion is that the Rolls Royce engineers were dying to sink their teeth into making a sporting automobile.

Yeah.

And those Darby Bentleys.

And they're called Darby Bentleys because they were made at the Darby plant in the 30s.

Yeah, okay.

And only until after World War II because crew was built build the aero engines, the Merlin engines and all automobile production moved to CREW after World War II because essentially by then Rolls Royce was really an aerospace company.

Yeah.

All right.

In fact, you can argue that the Rolls Royce automobile, you could argue that its survivability was inexorably tied to the overwhelming importance of that aero engine aspect which Duesenberg and Pierce Arrow and all these marks that, that died in the Depression.

They didn't have that, that spark, that extra business line.

No.

Right.

So the Darby Bentleys were just exquisite cars.

And here's another thing.

After World War II, okay.

A lot of people don't realize that before World War II, Rolls Royce never made a car.

What they made was a chassis.

Yeah.

And you had to get a coach builder.

Or you put you, you went, you chose your favorite coach builder and they put the bodywork on them.

Exactly.

And then this has happened to me many times.

I'm walking a concord field and I'll be eavesdropping in conversations and I'll be standing for example, next to a Phantom 3.

And.

And somebody will say, oh, my friend has a Phantom 3, looks nothing like this.

Yeah.

And I think, well that sure.

Because your friends maybe you know, was made by Freestone and Webb.

And this is an H.J.

Moliner.

Yeah.

It's literally a different car.

Yeah.

And.

And then sometimes somebody will come in and say, don't show me any of your standard designs.

I want you to design this, this and this and this.

Why in the pre war period you have these one off cars.

Okay.

Because they were made especially to order.

The same way you would go into a tailor and say, don't show me a design.

I want you to make a jacket or a suit or what have you just on.

On my spec.

Okay, fine.

Into the post war era.

Okay.

There were these lovely cars that were made out of crew for Bentley called Bentley Continentals.

Yeah.

Okay.

All the Continentals were the.

And these were chassis.

There's no such thing as a standard body Bentley Continental.

No.

They're all coach built.

Yeah.

Either HG Boner or the whatever coach builder survive.

You have the famous fastback H.J.

Mulliner.

Those cars routinely sell well over a million dollars.

As much as two that area at the time they were built, they were the fastest 4 seater production car in the world.

Yeah.

So this I torch performance was a thing.

Plus since you had the ability to even if you ordered a standard car to tell the company, nope, don't put the standard body.

I want a coach built.

There were a lot of really high rollers that could certainly afford the Rolls Royce.

And they've had Rolls Royce would buy the belt.

Yeah.

And preferred the Bentley.

They liked the subduedness of that, you know.

And I did a history book for a couple of Bentleys that were owned by Martha Rockefeller.

Oh yeah, she, she loved, she had a park war drop head R type and she had an S1 drop head Bentley.

Okay.

So I think that that end of the equation going into the post war era, the pe, the people on the high end that bought those cars could, could afford civil rights.

They wanted the Bentley.

Yeah.

What happened later on is by the time you get into the Silver Shadow, the reciprocal Bentley was the T and later, later on the Mosane and these cars that were variants of the Silver Spur and so forth.

I, I, I think there was a lot of thinking in World choice the they were on the precipice of discontinuing that.

Yeah.

Because they were kind of an anecdotal thing I guess in comparison to the sales of All Voices.

Then they turned around and they started making cars that were performing.

They had the turbo R, all those knees and then they turned their eye back to that as you were saying, the performance end of the spectrum.

And that's when it really ended up taking off in the latter part of the 80s and the 90s and so forth.

And by the time the split in the two marks came around, I guess, you know, for those that are alive now that have no clue what they were in the same company for, you know, just about 70 years, I think they've taken on a signature character, both marks onto themselves, which I think is helpful.

Yeah.

I mean the ironic thing is you mentioned like the cars with the coachwork.

That was the era when either British coach work or some of the European like Satuki Chick.

That's when the flamboyance hit unbelievable levels, didn't it?

Yes, yes.

And, and, and when money is no object and you want the thing that you want sound.

Chick really picked up on that as well.

I mean some really out out there designed but that wasn't.

Rolls Royce was not immune to that sort of thing.

There were some really out there cars to the point that Rolls Royce made it a corporate policy I think across the board never to comment on their, the taste of the cars.

The owners of the cars which, which.

I think exists today, given shall we say the people who own the modern Rolls Royce, like the rap artists and things like that.

Do you think how not being funny, how tasteless do you have to be to want your Rolls Royce to look like that?

Well, you know there was that, I mean people, there were many people at the time when John Lennon took what was a black Phantom 5 limousine and turned it into probably one of the most iconic Rolls Royces with the psychedelic job.

Yeah.

How could you possibly do that?

And by the way, I mean there, there's certainly not a lot of Phantom 5 we're talking about in their entire production run.

In the hundreds.

That's it.

Yeah, but that's enough that like, that's okay.

We can, we could tolerate one of them that looks like, you know, somebody's nightmare or somebody's dream.

Whichever side of the spectrum you want to lie your tastes on.

I mean, they are big.

I mean, have you driven a Phantom?

I mean they are very big and very heavy to drive.

Yes, yes.

But something like a Phantom 5 was always intended to be, you know, basically choker driven opposition.

Yeah.

There are actually some of those Phantoms that were made into coups.

James Young made a pair of them.

And that's a coach builder.

Yeah.

James Young and unlike H.J.

They wanted to secure the supply of bodies for their car and actually bought booster.

So, yes, that whole end of bespoke or custom coachwork history is very much attached to the roll of Royce.

And in fact, even today they have a department in Goodwood that will look at people's special commissions and engineer them to add there.

There are a bunch of modern roll choices out there that folks don't have a clue how.

Some of them are really quite special.

Yeah.

And the design approach would be, is this going to be a design unique to this car or is this a design that you.

If we like it, we might put it into other cars or they offer it.

Yeah.

So that really all exists.

It just doesn't exist in, in that business model of, of years gone by where you have literally two separate makers of a car.

Yeah.

I mean you have a Rolls Royce, you open the door and then you'll see the coach plate.

You know, I'll say, you know, Freestone and Webb.

Who's Freestone and Webb?

They're the folks in their own works that made the body and then put it onto this chassis.

Yeah.

Separate company.

Yeah.

Well, what people don't realize, a lot of the coach work literally came from the companies who made coaches for horses to be, to draw.

That's the story of H.J.

Mohner and that's the story of Brewster.

Yeah.

And so forth.

And even in America.

Okay, but I mentioned earlier the Duesenbergs, Walter Murphy, Pasadena, California.

And, and Fleetwood.

Okay.

Fleetwood is a, people think of it as a model of Cadillac.

No, Fleetwood was a coach builder in Fleetwood, Pennsylvania.

Right.

Okay.

And, and, and sister body was, you know, so this model, the, the history of the car grew up around engineers that made these chassis and then wanted to sell them.

So the, the shortest line between A and B is to go to your local, you know, wagon maker.

Yeah.

And get a body put on it because they know how to do this coach work and, you know, and there it is.

And some, some coach builders, I mentioned Park Ward, they grew up in the automobile.

Yeah.

Some are counterintuitive.

Like there's a very famous pre war coach builder, Henry Binder.

It's not Henri Bender, it's Henry Bender.

In fact, even though this French coach builder of German surname, heritage, all him and his brothers all had Anglican names.

He was Henry, his brother was Charles.

Yeah.

Very famous coach builder.

Yeah.

Or thereabouts.

He never designed any of those wonderful automobiles.

There's, there's, there's a very famous One of the six Type 41 Bugatti Royales.

Yeah.

That was coach built by Binder.

Well, he wasn't alive to design that.

And here's the sad thing, at least from this brainiac's pedantic view of researching automotive history, I don't know the names of the designers at Binder.

Yeah.

So all these absolutely gorgeous cars that were designed in the classic era in the 20s and 30s by Henry Binder.

That was the name.

And as we know in all business models, sometimes the goodwill and value.

Of.

A trademark is where the value lies.

Yeah, but I don't know who designed.

And maybe somebody listens to this and, and says, oh, that dopey guy, he didn't know that, you know, so and so designed it.

I, I, I, I, I know a lot about the history of Henry Binder, but not enough to know who are the actual artists.

Yeah, they're lost to history.

Somebody please find it.

Well, it's a little, it's a bit like the, the glamour or the supposed glamour of Corsican bodywork, Corsican coach work.

And everybody automatically thinks it was some little artisan on the village of Corsica.

Who designed them?

It wasn't.

They were built on Corsica Street.

Corsica street in London.

There you go.

So all the glamour of having, oh, it's got Corsican body wear.

It does sound impressive when you say that, but I'm sorry, it was a street in London.

Well, the flip side of all the gooblygop that we just said is there's a certain amount in enthusiast circle, I would say of, of getting a little bit religious about the history of these things and what's correct or not correct and in judging and all the rest of that.

And it.

It's a healthy memory to, or thought to remind ourselves of is that these were business concerns.

Okay.

These folks were trying to make money selling these cars and they weren't thinking about, well, if we do, this will not be, you know, correct in this way or that.

They're not thinking on those terms.

So, you know, it's, it's a little rather like, you know, that story I was telling about, you know, that Rolls Royce under the Christmas tree and say that this is how a lore starts in automotive history.

Yeah.

And I'm just a firm believer that the truth is more compelling and we do really want to tell the whole story.

It's not just the car.

The car is the artifact.

That's where the story starts.

You look at it and you want to drill it down to figure out the aspirations, the pressures, the business concerns, the inspirations.

Why do we have fins on automobiles in the late.

In the 50s and early 60s?

It's tied up with the space age.

There's all these different threads.

Yeah.

That flow through all of this.

And the distillation is the artifact.

The automobile.

But it is a distillation.

Yeah.

It speaks to us.

And, and, and I will say, unlike the art world, which I admire very much.

I mean, I'll admire Picasso or Rubens with an S, but you can't take your Picasso around the block.

Yeah.

And you know, we.

For the sole purpose.

And it, and it was restored by sears in the 50s to look just like the car.

Pretty much like the car that raced in on the beach.

Yeah.

And we ran it down the beach 100 years right after it won there.

And we had one of every model.

In fact, Rolls Royce was kind enough to bring their experimental Phantom B16 car.

Yeah.

So we had one of every model going down the beach in Almond beach with one of those three remaining pre ghosts Rolls Royce.

A very charming car.

And now I forgot why I went down that rabbit hole.

But what I'm going to after.

I mean, this is.

It's the irony is one of the best conversations I've had on Rolls Royce is with an American.

And don't take that the wrong way, that it's been fascinating.

But before compliment.

But before we bring part one to an end, because we have all these shows and the various organizations you remember of.

Of to chat about what Rolls Royce do you want or what Rolls Royces do you want?

That's a great question.

And I say it's a great question simply because it's a question I've been asked so many times, particularly when I was president of the Rolls Royce Owners Club, which was about 10 years ago.

Yeah.

Reuben, what Rolls Royce would you have that you could have?

And what.

And my answer is always the same.

I'd say the one Rolls Royce that I can't have.

And it would be that aforementioned V8.

1905 Rolls Royce.

Yeah.

It was an absolute tour force engineering marvel.

In fact, if they visit, I mentioned they made five different models when the.

The Silver Ghost was the sixth.

Yeah.

Okay.

And here's this, as you mentioned, this little Manchester firm and they got together and said, we're going to make six chassis.

Now let's discontinue all these other cars.

Yeah.

And concentrate on making the one that's obviously the winner.

Yeah.

Okay.

But the Silver Ghost had pressure feed lubrication.

Yeah.

Which was ended here.

Engineer for that da car.

And you know, if they had continued with that car, they would have probably stolen a lot of the thunder that came.

Cadillac and Ford and all the other V8 makers.

Because they were the first.

Yeah.

And a lot of people say, well, they didn't make many of them.

No, they didn't.

There weren't that many of them.

It was a rich man sport.

Yeah.

Okay.

But that car came very late in the equation and was summarily wiped off.

But it was offered in the sales catalog.

It wasn't a secret.

Okay.

Okay.

You could buy for under 500 pounds.

A two cylinder.

Own voice.

Yeah.

So you would have to pay more than double the amount for one of these V8 cars.

So it wasn't really a big sales success.

Yeah.

More windows.

Story.

If I opened Ruben Videz's garage door, what Rolls Royce would I see?

Probably I.

And.

And right now I don't have one.

My last car that I had was a marvelous silver spur.

Yeah.

And I bought it because it had every mark, every stitch of.

Of paperwork and service history.

And the guy saved everything down to the cardboard protective things that will come in delivery.

When you put the carport protector over the dials for the dual air conditioning, you had everything.

And the car even.

And the.

And the sales invoice was dated in the year and date.

Exactly.

I was married.

Right.

So that car.

I loved it.

Everything worked.

And I wasn't driving it that much.

Yeah.

And I have.

I have this thought that if you're not driving the car, you really should own it.

No.

And can I say, these cars and many collector cars, I would say it's not unique to all Troys, but cars take revenge on you if you don't use them.

Very true.

Very.

I once bought a Jaguar xjs, one of the very last ones built, and they said the owner hasn't used it very much.

I discovered the.

You.

The.

The owner hadn't used it hardly at all.

And it cost me a fortune recommissioning it.

Yes.

And.

And that's exactly the equation.

And I thought to myself, let me pass this on.

Somebody will enjoy it.

Somebody will drive it, and I'll only preside under its deterioration.

Not good.

Not good at all.

Reuben vez, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you.

As I said, we will come back again and we will cover all the other aspects of Ruben's life involved with chorus.

And it is plentiful.

But for the.

For the moment and the end of part one, Reuben vez, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting.

Thank you very much.