Quiz Archive

Beware of Flying Lady Replica's ...

When developing Quiz nr. 100 we decided it should be a special one. Not a straight, run of the mill, mission impossible thing. First of all we decided it should be a Rolls-Royce as it is the RR Centennial. But how to do a "What is it?" with a car that everybody will recognise from two miles distance? We looked for all kinds of weird Rollses, but most of them are much too well known. The answer dropped into our mailbox less than three weeks ago. An armoured Rolls-Royce in the desert! ("A Rolls in the desert was above rubies." - Lawrence of Arabia) Yet, even the armoured cars are well known in RR circles. After carefully re-reading of Rick Ford's letter, we suddenly got it. The photos he had sent us were made during the Lawrence of Arabia movie shoot in Spain, 1962. This was not one of the real 1915 (!)Armoured Cars as built by the Royal Naval Air Service, it was a 1962 replica made from scrap and the 1924 (?) Silver Ghost 82EM. You could & should have known from several facts. Very little colour photography was done during WW I..., nor in WW II when the armoured car was still in use occasionally. Then of course the licence plate EE5220 should have made a few insiders frown. Jury members Bob Swanson and Henk Visscher -both not eligible to win- had it all right. Henk added: "...the early (Grimsby) registration EE5220 suggests a non-military history of the pictured Rolls-Royce armoured car." Let's take it from there and see another Rick Ford shot (clic) of EE 5220(!!!). The final winners were in this case frequent contributors Rutger Booy and Bas de Voogd who operated as a team and shared their knowledge and databases. The team spent the best part of last Sunday on analysing and deducing to come up with the one and only really perfect answer: 1.Make: Rolls-Royce 2. Type: Silver Ghost 3. Coachwork: probably started as a Hooper or Barker which was converted in 1962 into a replica RR Armoured Car to serve during the shoot of 'Lawrence of Arabia'. Applause for a great piece of detective work!!! >>>> STOP PRESS <<<< Additional circumstantial evidence came in shortly. A heavily damaged clipping of 35 MM film (clic) (photographer R.Ford spotted at 'the crime scene' with a Plaubel-Makina (clac) around his neck near yet another replica Armoured Car, the former 68RM...). An interesting read by Frank Canvin about the original armoured cars is to be found at Rolls-Royce Club of Australia.

Thursday, 26 February 2004