Project Silver Shadow
Dan continues refurbishing his land yacht and the bills are mounting up.
Pretty, isn’t she? The colour is a seldom seen factory metallic shade named Silver Mink. A previous owner made the decision to switch paintwork from the originally specified Caribbean Blue to the perfect hue for the discerning Manchester City fan (ahem!) at the turn of the century, but just as we were about to go to print, I discovered the car was originally ordered from Jack Barclay (the UK’s largest and oldest Bentley dealer) in a handsome finish of navy- esque Exeter Blue. The information is on the order sheet forming part of a huge history file featuring Crewe factory records and sent to me by The International Club for Rolls- Royce & Bentley Enthusiasts. The pages within feature all of my car’s construction and test records, correspondence between Jack Barclay employees and factory bosses, a stack of service history covering the car’s early life, plus that all- important order form and the corresponding bill of sale.
But wait! What’s this? Another order form! It seems Mr Cartwright (of Londonbased liquidators, Cartwright, Scruton, Trup & Co. Ltd.) changed his mind after ordering the car on November 13, 1979, with the aforementioned dark blue paint, Cumberland Stone carpets and Beige hide. The paperwork I’m in possession of shows that on January 25, 1980, he asked for the exterior colour to be changed to Caribbean Blue with Dark Blue carpets. Furthermore, he requested Dark Blue piping around the inside and outside edges of the seats and headrests. He also optioned Sundym tinted glass, lambswool over-rugs, Avon Turbosteel tyres and Dark Blue hide for the top roll, instrument board trim and radio surround.
I don’t wish to accuse Mr Cartwright of being fickle, but he changed his mind again during the construction process, which is why the car’s first owner is registered as famous Ugandan property tycoon, Zul Virani, then owner of the Ecclestone Hotel in the Victoria district of central London. Cartwright cancelled his
order, allowing Virani to sweep in and buy SRH 4038S at a heavily discounted price on November 5, 1980, almost a year after the chaps at Crewe received instruction from Jack Barclay to get busy building the Silver Shadow II that I’d go on to buy thirty-five years and one month later.
By 1982, the car was being used by Nazmudin Virani, Zul’s older brother, a joint owner of the Ecclestone Hotel and one of the figures implicated in the collapse of Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a scandal cited as one of the biggest frauds in banking history. According to reports in ‘ The Telegraph’, falsified documents signed by Nazmudin encouraged the Bank of England to renew BCCI’s banking licence after it had run up billions of pounds worth of losses. Prosecutors in the case alleged Nazmudin was granted huge loans by BCCI and given cash payments in exchange for his assistance. It’s claimed his chauffeur visited BCCI to collect £ 204,000 in cash stuffed into a suitcase. The newspaper reported that the package was then taken to Nazmudin, “who was waiting in his Rolls- Royce.”
As a completist, information outlining my car’s early history is a wonderful accompaniment to the exhaustive collection of old V5s and MoT certificates I’ve been able to get hold of, not to mention my lever arch file bursting with SRH4038S’s service and maintenance history. It’s a collection of documents I’ve been enthusiastically adding to as work to bring the car back to life has progressed.
Regular readers will recall my last project update, where the final work required for an MoT test was carried out prior to the car being awarded a clean bill of health and legally allowed to return to the road. Not that I hopped into the driving seat and started adding miles straightaway. The team at leading independent Rolls- Royce and Bentley service, sales and repair centre, Colbrook Specialists, still had work to do, including servicing of the car’s transmission, the installation of new Bilstein B6 heavy duty rear dampers, an overhaul of the back end’s self-levelling hydraulic rams and the rebuild and recharging of the system’s accumulator spheres with nitrogen, a task the firm’s talented team carry out in-house. This wasn’t work required for the MoT test, but it made sense to continue overhauling the chassis before I brought the car home with me. I’m now looking forward to experiencing plenty of smiles to the mile. I’ll report back with an update on my adventures in next month’s issue of Classics Monthly. Subscribe at bit. ly/subscribeclassics