Not only was Brian Sewell, who died earlier this year, the best known, bluntest, funniest and most outrageous art critic in the UK, but he was also a great animal and car lover. We know about the animals from Sleeping with Dogs (2013) and the charming book The White Umbrella (2014), and now we have an equally charming small book about the creation of the Rolls Royce.
His publishers have deliberately made it look like a nice children’s book of the 1950s, with full-page narrative illustrations by the car illustrator Stefan Marjoram to accompany the once-upon-a-time style: “All over England on 27 March 1903 it was a dark and stormy night…. and Mr Frederick Royce (who hated to be called Fred) was muttering dark oaths between clenched teeth”.
But the story is all there: the ambition to make a silent car; its origins in the crane factory of Royce; the part contributed by the young aristocrat Charles Stewart Rolls—no playboy but a passionate engineer in love with invention and modernity—who died too young demonstrating his prowess at flying; the fact that you bought the basic chassis, wheels and engine and had the rest coach (a word that comes from Koc in Hungary, we learn) built to your own specifications; the modeling of the famous radiator on a classical façade such as the British Museum’s.
As a tiny study in how an outstanding new product is created, this little book could not be bettered. Not just for Rolls owners.
Brian Sewell, with illustrations by Stefan Marjoram The Man Who Built the Best Car in the World, Quartet Books, 59pp, £11.99