1930 Bentley 4½ Litre

This car, Lot 5, sold for $756,337 (£539,000), including buyer’s premium, at Gooding & Company’s European Sporting & Historic Collection online auction on February 5, 2021.

If I were told to choose one car to do everything with — daily driver, hillclimbs, going on holiday — for the rest of my life, this would not be my first choice. That would be a Porsche Carrera RS 2.7. But a W.O. Bentley would be next. They’ve got the prod to keep up with modern traffic and pretty good brakes for an old car.

As Bentleys go, this one is very original, still sporting the engine, gearbox, axles and steering column with which it left Cricklewood. It’s also still wearing its first Vanden Plas body, number 1646, though, as ever with W.O. Bentleys, there’s a twist, as it has a replacement chassis frame. The second owner bought it from the first, Sir Henry Darlington, when the car was four years old, and in June 1935 it was involved in a road accident. As documented in the Bentley Motors service record, repair work included reconditioning of various original numbered components and fitting a new chassis frame.

This would have been standard Bentley practice at the time, and according to Bentley expert Dr. Clare Hay, who inspected AD3668 in 2013, it would have most likely been new, unnumbered old stock. Cost to the owner then was £37 10s.

A long lineage

In October 1937, about a year after the rebuild, it was sold via well-known London dealer Jack Barclay Ltd. Through the next decade-and-a-half, it passed through a succession of English owners before going to the U.S. in 1951, to a Bill Spear of Southport, CT. He sold it to George H. Waterman Jr., Rhode Island-based co-founder of the Veteran Motor Car Club of America, in 1956. Next, the Bentley went through the hands of well-known dealer Charles Howard and returned to the U.K. After passing through several more British owners, it was sold to Robert Isler of Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1977. In 1996, Clinton Bourke, a U.K.-based Bentley Drivers Club member, purchased the car from Bentley specialist Stanley Mann and retained it in his collection for more than a decade until 2013, when it was sold to the consignor.

The most original Vintage Bentleys tend to have been in single ownership for long periods, sometimes of five decades or more. Remarkably, having been though such a long roll-call of owners and the trade, AD3668 retains its original bodywork and bonnet as well as all major components except the frame. It presented very sharply under the lights, displaying a nice patina with now just a few small chips in the paint, some cracking to the seat leather and good, even nickel plating to the undented radiator shell.

It’s obviously undergone some restoration and titivation work at some point. It currently wears painted headlights as original, whereas when pictured in the U.S., the rims were plated, by which time the wheels and brake drums had changed color to green or black. They were still cream when it was last pictured (undated) at Mallory Park on vintagebentleys.org, when it still had its full weather gear. No mention of the sidescreens is made in the catalog, so we must assume they have been lost.

Originality is hard to come by

That notwithstanding, it’s rare to find an original Vanden Plas tourer body, as their flexible construction meant that most didn’t last long, and in any case, these cars were often rebodied at a few years old to give them a more fashionable appearance. Many, of course, would originally have been bodied as saloons, which was the reason for the 4½ coming into existence — the extra grunt needed to offset the weight of the increasingly popular sedan bodies. Ironically, most of these have been rebodied in the style of the car here, or even made into replica “Blowers,” with superchargers added. This car would have been a prime candidate, being already fitted with the heavy-crank engine.

Though mixing and matching of components is a fact of life in the Vintage Bentley world, and was even done by the factory in-period (often to expedite repair work), a very original car still flags up interest and usually sells for a premium.

Here this 4½ sold strongly, as expected, though like several of the other cars in this collection sale, well short of its estimate, in this case £650,000–£900,000. That looked rather overstated, at the very least, or wildly ambitious depending on your level of cynicism, as that sort of coin is Blower replica money.

Purely on the achieved price, this looks like it was quite well sold, but factor in the originality and it looks more like a fair deal. I think what we have here is a good compromise by a realistic vendor prepared to let it go for a sensible offer. Given that this is precisely the function of the auction process, to coax seller and buyer together on mutually agreeable ground, I’d say neither party ought to be unhappy. ♦

(Introductory description courtesy of Gooding & Co.)