For any restoration business, entering a car to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is a nerve-racking experience. You are there to say ‘here is our be work – now judge us against our peers’, so you must be confident. This often means that cars on the lawns of famous north Californian golf course verge on being over-restored in the eyes of some observers: things that were never chromed or nickel-plat are suddenly bright and shiny; pain that was once applied with a brush is now a glassy-smooth spray job.
What if you bucked the trend? What if you reached for the brush instead the spray gun, and didn’t mind fitting components with whatever finish the supplier would have used, rather than a uniform, immaculate re-plating? You’d need a good story to tell the judges, and indeed a good reason for doing it. Fortunately, William Medcalf had both.
He is the proprietor at Vintage Bentley in West Sussex and grew up around the cars. Well, one of them in particular – GJ 755, a 1930 Speed Six. When William’s father bought the car in 1981 it wore a replica Van den Plas four-seat tourer body, which it retained for the next 40-odd years as Mr Medcalf senior and the rest of the family enjoyed it on trips and tours all over the country and around the world. But it wasn’t always a tourer. Indeed, its early history reveals what an important car it is.
Chassis SB2761 was ordered in late 1929 by one Viscount Mandeville. Commander Alexander George Francis Drogo Montagu was something of a rake, it seems, or at least an unusually dashing driver with an impressive list of motoring mishaps on his record. He seems to have bought the car on his retirement from the Royal
