Buckley’s market matters
I’ve had the use of a really lovely, low-mileage Bentley Turbo lately, and it made me realise what truly great cars these are. With use it seems to have become ever more rapid, yet doesn’t have the thirst of earlier Bentleys and R-RS. If this, that or the other Mercedes, BMW or whatever of its period do certain things ‘better,’ I contest that nothing from the ’80s comes close to this saloon’s epic sense of occasion, with that glorious interior and those commanding views down its giant bonnet.
I used it to go to The Tank Museum in Dorset. As usual we got slightly lost (this was a Nick Kisch/neil Babbage outing) and ended up on a quiet but straight and clear bit of B-road where it would have been rude not to light up the rear tyres: the resulting smokescreen looked like an outof-control stubble-burning.
Later, I took the Turbo to see our friend Ernie Warrender in Herefordshire. This man could never fall in love with an ’80s car and can’t bring himself to buy any V8 R-R or Bentley because he is scared of the running costs. Ernie’s recently acquired Morris Minor Convertible my wife fell in love with on sight, but I only had eyes for the mid-’50s Park Ward Silver Wraith languishing in the corner of the garage. It is one of those alluring cars that looks as if two days spent with a rag and some T-cut would see it back on the road, although in reality it probably needs £15,000-plus spending to make it a safe runner.
These giant R-RS are a forgotten breed, graceful yet pompous. It is what Kisch refers to as a Top Cat Rolls (the opening credits of the cartoon of that name featured a representation of a Wraith), and I suspect worth quite a lot less than Nick just paid for his ’60s Mini Cooper.
You have to ask what you would do with a car so big and ponderous, but sometimes mere possession is enough; let’s face it, most Fiat 500s end up as the roadside ornaments of stylish metropolitan types who like the idea of owning such a tiny, ‘cute’ car but can’t cope with gardenmachinery driving characteristics.
I suspect, somewhere along the line, I will probably end up with a Fiat 500 (if only to cure my wife of the idea) and I get the same feeling when I see a Citroën DS. Talking of these, I had to smile when I heard that a rather earnest, Ds-owning associate became mildly upset lately when, having parked outside a junior school, the ankle-biters in the playground began to convulse with mirth at the site of his ‘weird’ old car. Makes you think.