Background
‘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 The Cloud replaced a thoroughly outdated car, the Silver Dawn, which came out after WWII, when there wasn’t much good steel around and no money to invest in new design and technology, which meant that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 first cars came with a 155bhp 4.9-litre straight-six which always struggled to lug a 2.3 ton car around, and the need for a new engine was recognised by Rolls in the early 1950s – its development began in 1952. The result was a series of V8 engines known as the L series, more specifically the L410, for its bore size of 4.1 inches.
Introduced in 1959 the Rolls-Royce/Bentley V8 was rumoured to be an American engine design licence-built, but it was in fact developed in-house by Rolls-Royce and Bentley engineers. This can be seen in its design characteristics, with features such as an aluminium alloy cylinder block with wet liners, gear-driven camshaft, (initially) outboard spark plugs and porting inspired by the Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 aircraft engine, of Spitfire and Lancaster fame.
Initially fitted in the Silver Cloud II, it was improved when the Mk III version was released in 1963, with a raft of upgrades including a nitrided crankshaft (there were issues with early Series II models breaking cranks), better SU carburettors, a higher compression ratio (9.0:1), and a weight reduction of over 100 kilograms (220 lbs).
As a result of these changes this model was the fastest of the Silver Clouds – Rolls-Royce famously never listed horsepower figures for their cars, deeming it crass, but they did note that the Silver Cloud III was 7% more powerful than the preceding model.
Aside from the impressive engine, the Silver Cloud III included additional refinements from the previous two series, including the instantly recognisable quad headlamps, and a slightly lower bonnet and radiator grille.
Inside the Mk III 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 III 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.
There were 2,044 Silver Cloud IIIs built as standard saloons, 206 long wheelbase variants, and 328 coach built versions. These custom-crafted coach built cars consisted of coupés, convertibles, hearses and limousines.
