Dauphin’s life story
Thank you for Martin Buckley’s article on my erstwhile Daimler, the Lanchester in disguise (C&SC, April). Both the car and the article gave me great pleasure.
I bought OVC 444 for £750 (c£11,750 today) on 7 March 1970, from a teacher at Bedales, and sold it in 1985 for £6000 (c£18,400 today) to one Henry Pietersen of Cape Town, who selected Le Manoir aux Quat’saisons for the handover. I replaced it with a Daimler Empress II, because my children had grown too big for the Dauphin. Mr Pietersen had OVC resprayed in two-tone green, fitted whitewall tyres and drove it for a few months in Cannes. His last letter reported unspecified engine trouble, that the car was garaged in Marseilles and would be transported to England for shipping to South Africa. I believe that the South African import duty clearance he had been given was withdrawn or invalid, so he left the car in England, which is more or less where Buckley’s story started.
The write-up in Motor of 14 October 1953 fired my early teenage imagination. It was described as: ‘A car for the man (or woman) who wants a smallish two-door car for quick personal journeys, but who wishes at the same time the best and most comfortable carriagework.’ It was only when I arrived home, cleaned the chassis plate and saw an ‘L’ instead of ‘D’ prefix, that I realised I had bought the car of my teenage dreams.
It was mine at the 1970 DLOC meet mentioned by Buckley. The other (real) Dauphin at that meet was owned by Francis Huttonstott, whose collection was reputed to include one example of every Lanchester made. He offered me the loan of his radiator shell, so I could have a copy made to restore OVC 444 to its proper identity.
When our firstborn child was still a baby, we combined returning our Italian au pair to her home with a self-catering week in Switzerland. With one of the rear tip-up seats removed, there was room for William’s carrycot on one side and Lucetta, who was quite small, on the remaining seat. Not quite by coincidence, the Swiss Daimler club’s annual meet fell in that week. Our arrival at the event caused minor embarrassment, because the organisers had already inscribed the longest-distance prize when this English family arrived, having driven further in Switzerland alone than the supposed winner – not to mention the journey over from England via Italy.
May I please express my sadness at some of the observations made by Buckley, a man who is old and knowledgeable enough to have known better? The likes of Mulliners and Park Ward are the ones who remained ‘old, stuffy and pompous’, while in the Dauphin, Hooper demonstrated that modern, bright, clean and elegant lines could be combined with the highest-quality coachwork.
Also, no-one driving an old car that is shod with sensibly sized tyres, who drives intelligently, needs power-assisted steering. If in my late 70s I have no need for it in my 1956 Conquest Coupé or my ‘modern’ daily car (a 1986 Landrover), so a relative youngster such as Buckley should have no need to complain on this score.
Although I do admit that the acceleration of the Lanchester 10 and the Empress was leisurely – I like ‘unobtrusive’ – that accusation cannot fairly be made against the Dauphin. Sure, it does not compare well against the stopwatch, but in the real world it does fine indeed.
And thank you, too, to your photographer and picture editor for admiring my choice of Mini Countryman tail-lights, which are an acceptable modernisation. Roderick Ramage
Stafford