Background
Alvis was one of the great names of the British motor industry.
Engineer T G John founded the Alvis company in 1919 when he acquired the rights to an automobile engine and with it the brand name of its aluminium pistons: Alvis.
The Coventry firm always maintained a reputation for quality and a unique market niche: more dashing than any Armstrong-Siddeley or Rover; less expensive and opulent than a Bentley or a Bristol; not so overtly sporting as a Jaguar.
But always a thoroughbred - no borrowed engines or badge engineering with other marques.
Alvis were innovators, too. They introduced a front-wheel drive production car in 1928, six years before the Citroën Traction Avant.
They offered the first all-syncromesh gearbox in 1933 and, later the same year, the first British car with independent front suspension.
In the post-war era Alvis only developed two chassis; the four-cylinder TA14 and the six-cylinder, three-litre TA21. The three-litre began as a Mulliner saloon and Tickford-built drophead variant, and was later rebodied entirely as a more modern looking two-door saloon and drophead, put into production by Park Ward.
The first production Alvis to be styled by the Swiss Carrosserie Graber appeared at the Paris Motor Show in October 1955. Based on the existing TC21 Grey Lady chassis, the newcomer brought a much-needed injection of Continental style and modernity to the Coventry manufacturer's range.
Lighter, stiffer and with a much smaller frontal area than the traditionally styled Grey Lady, the Graber Alvis enjoyed much improved handling and a higher maximum speed in excess of 100mph. The first Graber-styled model - the TC108G - was built by coachbuilders Willowbrook before production switched to Rolls-Royce's in-house coachbuilder Park Ward on the introduction of the restyled TD21 for 1959.
The TD21 retained Alvis's torquey, 3.0-litre, overhead-valve six, which in up-rated form (from March 1959 onwards) produced 120bhp courtesy of a redesigned cylinder head. With its increased power, this under-stressed engine proved capable of propelling the TD21 to a top speed of 103mph while turning over at a lazy 5,000 revs.
Now then.
In this preliminary section we normally only discuss one model of car.
Today is different because what we’ve got here is a 1958 Alvis TD21 that a previous owner has seen fit to morph into at least some of the shape and character of the rather earlier Alvis Speed Twenty-Five.
Pre-war development of the six-cylinder Alvis, the first of which had been introduced in 1927, culminated in the announcement of two new models for 1937: the 4.3-litre and the 3.6-litre Speed Twenty-Five, both powered by new seven-bearing, overhead-valve engines.
On test with Autocar, the Speed Twenty-Five demonstrated remarkable top-gear flexibility combined with a maximum speed of 95mph and was found to possess qualities of, ‘quiet running and general refinement in a striking degree’.
The Speed Twenty-Five's initial chassis-only price of £775 meant that ownership was necessarily confined to wealthy connoisseurs. To put that figure into meaningful context, the average UK house price in 1937 was £540.
Alvis built 391 Speed Twenty-Five chassis, a sturdy platform upon which numerous coachbuilders expressed their creative visions through a variety of fixed-head and drop-head iterations.
