STAFF CARS SHADOW PROJECT
MEET OUR
BLENHEIM BARN FIND Off the road for 35 years, a non-runner with no record of why it was retired? You’d be mad to buy something like that… WORDS: NIGEL BOOTHMAN
I
wasn’t planning to buy a RollsRoyce, much less a project car, but sometimes these things just happen. I was visiting classic and vintage car specialist Hightone Restorations in Oxfordshire last October. There, in the car park, was a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow looking a bit sorry for itself. It was dark brown, with a cloudy, matt-finish bloom on the paint that reminded me of milk chocolate that’s been in a cupboard for a year. All bar one shiny door. I asked Hightone’s boss, Gregg Alvarez, what it was in for. He told me an intriguing story. The car came to them from the Duke of Marlborough. It had belonged to the previous Duke, who died in 2014, but it had been off the road for much longer than that. Hightone had examined it
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PHOTOS: NIGEL BOOTHMAN, WILLIAM BOOTHMAN
and found it would need some labourintensive recommissioning to make it roadworthy, which would come at a significant cost. The Duke was considering what to do, but it seemed the Shadow might soon be for sale. I went to crawl round it, expecting the usual crusty sills and bubbling arches. But I couldn’t find any rust, which made me think I wasn’t looking hard enough. ‘No, there isn’t any,’ said Gregg. ‘We’ve had it on our ramp and it really is that solid. I think it’s been in a nice, dry garage at Blenheim Palace all these years.’ But the paint…a full respray on a Shadow soon gets costly, even if there’s no metalwork to do. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Gregg. ‘Give it a rub with a cloth, and it comes
up all shiny.’ I tried, and it did. To a remarkable extent.
THAT CONDOR MOMENT… I thought about the car a lot on the long drive home to Scotland. About that rather exciting ownership, and the service book full of stamps from Broughton’s of Cheltenham. I grew up in Cheltenham and once or twice pressed my nose to Broughton’s window when they were still at No 1 the High Street. Maybe I’d seen this car. So a couple of days later, I asked my pal John Wyatt if he felt like sharing the risk and going halves with me. To my surprise he agreed, and I found myself making an offer. And here I must cut a J U LY/AU G U S T 2 0 2 2 R R & B D
