ROLLS-ROYCE SILVER CLOUD AND BENTLEY S-SERIES

History

Around 13,000 Rolls-Royce Silver Clouds and its sister S-series Bentleys were built between 1955 and 1965. This compares well with the 5201 MkVI Bentleys, 2320 Bentley R-Types and 761 Rolls Royce Silver Dawns that were spun off one platform and built variously between 1949 and 1955, but falls some way short of the later RR Silver Shadow and T-series Bentleys which racked up over 40,000 sales.

The Silver Cloud still has an old-school separate chassis, and relatively old-fashioned styling. Designer David Blatchley was asked for a traditional yet modern design, an entirely contradictory brief. His early designs were rejected, but a quick sketch more or less drawn in a corridor outside a board meeting and taken back into that same meeting got the thumbs up.

This was possibly an emotional rather than a logical decision, because if you look functionally at the body, the back doors are too short for a limousine. The body shape is actually that of a huge sports car, which is why it is such a beauty and why it looks even better as a two-door.

The 1955 Silver Cloud was the first car to have both its body and its chassis manufactured by Rolls-Royce, although there were still a good few coachbuilt cars assembled on the Cloud chassis. The Silver Clouds and Bentley S are the same car other than badging and radiator grille treatments, as are all Rolls/Bentleys from 1946