BOOKS, GEAR, MODELS
PETER MOSS & RICHARD ROBERTS, Dalton Watson, £95, ISBN 978 1 85443 310 7
For reading, using and ogling
As someone who has dabbled in vintage motoring advertising for more than four decades, this reviewer’s golden rule is that if you see a piece promoting RollsRoyce, it’s almost certainly a fake. The company didn’t need to hawk its wares to Joe Public, and yet its name is so well-known that it’s long been a target for less scrupulous traders in ‘antiques’.
It’s surprising, then, to discover how assiduously Rolls-Royce did advertise its products – in print, at least – thanks to this beautiful 464-page hardback. Dedicated to Rolls-Royce promotion from the very earliest days up to and including World War Two, it’s a fabulous compendium of magazine covers, advertisements, brochures and more. Yes, there’s accompanying text to put all this into context and guide you through the story, but it’s the artwork and ephemera that pull you in and keep you wanting to turn over just one more page to see what’s next.
While there’s plenty of best-car-in-the-world pomposity in these old ads, there are also flashes of humour – and even of scandal. An intriguing pamphlet that was published in October 1908, entitled The Cost of Maintaining a Motor Car, stated that no make, manufacturer or dealer was mentioned inside – but that curious readers could write to 37 South Molton Street in London’s Mayfair if they wanted to know more. No visits were allowed, however, because the author’s time ‘is very fully occupied’. The truth is that the initials of the author, credited only as ‘E.M.M.’ on the cover, belonged to Evelyn Maud Mill, the mistress of Rolls-Royce’s managing director Claude Johnson. He was married and Evelyn was working as a barmaid when he met her; the South Molton Street premises were merely a forwarding office for correspondence.
While the print adverts of the 1920s and ’30s carry some gloriously evocative Brideshead Revisited-style images of what it was like to be rich and carefree in pre-war Britain, their US equivalents are by far the most entertaining. A typical ad reads: ‘Now, after years of struggle… you own a beautiful home and a yacht… But you’ve wavered on the other dream, that finest car in the world – Rolls-Royce. Did your friends criticise you when you added those extra acres to your estate, or took a suite on the ocean liner?…’ And so on. Your heart positively bleeds or the tragically put-upon plutocrat.
Covering each Rolls-Royce model of the pre-war years, from pioneering 1904 10hp to late-30s Wraith – plus the Merlin aero engine – this gives as much insight into the firm as many a marque history, so it’s less niche than it might at first appear. Handsomely printed on quality paper, it’s good value, too.