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restaurant and stay there. Parking is an inferior act best left to lesser motor cars. The following day, I drove SAE335 to The Hunt House, her maiden trip to home turf following years of use on the Continent. The “marriage” of SAE335 and me was seemingly inevitable since the day I’d first set eyes on her. When my mother died in 2011, I had asked Robert to come in his Silver Cloud and he had obliged. Unbeknown to me then, the car was already becoming part of my history or rather, perhaps, I was becoming part of its. I was co-opted onto the RREC Board of


Directors on 7 May 2013, and was appointed Deputy Chairman the following April. The rest is history … well, not quite. In 2014, I lined up for a drive in Mermie Karger’s 1913 Silver Ghost Saoutchik Tourer, 2442. It was an unbelievable experience. At more than 100 years of age, this car still felt so capable, so brilliant, so … modern. There really isn’t much that a modern car can hope to do better than a Silver Ghost. So, that was it as far as motoring highlights


go, or was it? One of the duties of the Chairman is to represent the RREC, and to be seen doing so. It involves (a lot of) handshaking and touring around. Courtesy of P&A Wood and Bentley Motors Limited, the Club still has exclusive use of SU13 and AX201 at its flagship events. This includes, first and foremost, the Annual Rally. Both cars remained with the factory when it was sold in 1998 and are therefore now the property of Bentley Motors Limited, which kindly allows P&A Wood to take them to important RREC events. The more so in 2016, of course, as it was the 110th anniversary of the 40/50 hp that was subsequently to be known as the Silver Ghost.


DRIVE OF A LIFETIME And so it happened that barely two years after driving 2442, I found myself again at the wheel of a Silver Ghost, or rather the Silver Ghost. The experience was the same as that of 1999, apart from the fact that I’d moved diagonally from the VIP seat in the back to the driver’s seat in the front. It felt like touching a holy shrine and handling a baby at the same time, very smooth and tender, obeying its chauffeur’s every wish with a smooth and surprisingly rapid response. You don’t put AX201 into gear, you gently convince her to slide into gear, and everything that follows thereafter is a pure delight. Meaningful coincidences – it is a somewhat


philosophical term that I picked up from a book many years ago. A lot of things happen to all of us in life, seemingly unrelated, coincidental. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, were they really? Why did I fail that one exam? Why did I choose to work for Toyota? Why did those lorry drivers live in Crewe? Why did they get AX201 out for me? Why did I take these courses in Crewe? Why was one of the first Club cars I drove SAE335? Why was I co-opted? Unlike the many people who from early


on in life seem to know what they want from it, I never told my parents that one day I would own a Rolls-Royce (although I came very close when I brought home a brand new Silver Seraph Last of Line one day and gave my parents the ride of a lifetime). Yet that is exactly what was meant to be. A coincidence, yes, but a meaningful one.


This article is dedicated to the memory of Celia Fitzhugh, Special Advisor to the RREC Board, who prompted me for more than a year to commit this story to paper.


THE ENTHUSIAST 67


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