MAINTAINING THE BEST

“It was all my dad’s fault,” smile William Medcalf, as we relax on the leather sofas in the stylish showroom of Vintage Bentley, surrounded by several million pounds worth of glorious machinery from the 1920s, an array of cars representing the finest automotive engineering of almost a century ago. “When I was a child, his idea of a family holiday was spending nine months driving our Bentley 3,4½ Litre around the USA an Canada. We did that twice, covering about 14,000 miles each time.”

Enjoying such exciting experience at such a young age, it was perhaps inevitable that William would go on to share his father’s passion for Bentleys of the 1920s. And he also inherited the same fascination for engineering, a subject that he went on to study at college. What William really wanted to do, however, was somehow build his Bentley knowledge and expertise into a proper business, something that he began to achieve at just eighteen years of age.

“This year marks our company’s 26th anniversary,” explains William, “and we’ve obviously expanded