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‘You look at a Bentley, but you look inside a Rolls-Royce’, says American TV chat show host and committed petrolhead Jay Leno. He may have a point but if you asked and car loving primary school child of the Sixties or Seventies to draw a Rolls-Royce, there’s a very good chance they’d produce something that resembles the Silver Cloud.
This is the car that catapulted Rolls-Royce to world-wide fame and success. The Cloud replaced a thoroughly outdated car - the Silver Dawn - which came out after WWII, when there wasn’t much good steel around and no money to invest in new design and technology, which meant that not only did it look like it came out in 1936, it also didn’t have an automatic gearbox. So the Americans weren’t interested.
The Silver Cloud, on the other hand, had power-steering and electric windows (with nylon gears to make them silent), an automatic the Americans themselves had engineered (it was built by GM), and a sweeping design that was quintessentially, beautifully 1950s English. The Cloud was released in 1955 and sold until 1966 over three generations, the I, II, and III. As you’d expect, the final Mark III example was the most refined, after almost a decade of incremental improvements had been made to the model.
The beauty of the Silver Cloud series was its versatility. They were built as body on chassis construction which allowed coachbuilders to create highly bespoke vehicles of distinction. Clouds have stressed steel bodies fitted with aluminium doors, bonnet and boot lids.
The engine was initially a 4.9-litre straight-six that channelled its 155bhp to the rear wheels via a four-speed automatic gearbox. Contemporary reports state its performance was leisurely with a top speed that just about capped the magic ton after passing 60mph in 13.5 seconds. However, many aficionados believe that this, the six-cylinder engine, is the smoothest of all of the Silver Cloud engines that were offered.
Inside the Cloud opulence abounded. Hand-polished wood veneers accented the dash and door capping rails. It took at least eight invisibly joined slivers of wood to make the veneers. The craftsmen spent hours carefully building the veneers, then created a pattern that no two cars shared. It then took hours of hand-polishing following the lacquer that makes the wood shine like glass. The veneers were mirror-matched to reflect the opposite side of the cabin. (A piece of the veneer is kept on file in the event the original is damaged.)
It took up to 10 perfectly matched Connolly Brothers hides to create the upholstery for a Silver Cloud, and the same leather was used to pipe the carpets. Hand-cutting, hand-stitching and finishing was done painstakingly slowly. Underfoot were carpets most people couldn’t afford for their homes, let alone in a car – hand tufted Wilton wool.
The Silver Cloud has a stately demeanour associated with its exterior design. Every curve, and each contour is done completely by hand and eye. It took anywhere from six to eight months to build just one car. Before the bodyshell received its first coat of primer, a craftsman did nothing but study the surface by hand. Then, after the first coat of primer was applied, a different craftsman would hand rub the body, circling imperfections with a grease pen. It took over 55 hours just to prepare the naked steel body for painting.
The classic radiator grille was built completely by hand using the same technique as was used to build the Parthenon in ancient Greece. A process called entasis was used to make each line in the grille look perfectly straight, when in reality each is actually slightly bowed. It took one man almost an entire day to solder the almost invisible joints between each of the eleven pieces of hand formed stainless steel that form the main structure of the grille, after which the assembly was polished for up to five hours.
