Rich relics


A Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost? Reposted from secretoscuba.cultureforum.net
   ALSO FROM the then-and-now file, how about this Rolls-Royce photographed many decades ago in Havana's Cathedral Square?
   Could it be the same Rolls-Royce now on display in the Depósito del Automóvil just a few blocks south of the cathedral?
   Certainly, there are differences. The car in the square has low-mounted, drum-shaped headlamps. The depository car's lamps are higher and cone-shaped. One car has louvred engine side covers; the other does not. Still, such items could have been changed over the years.
   Closer examination, however, leads me to suspect the Rolls above is a late model from the 1906-to-1926 Silver Ghost series. (And, perhaps a Pall Mall Tourer from the Springfield, Massachusetts, factory operated by Rolls-Royce from 1921 to 1931 – though given the variations between bodies supplied by the various coachbuilders working with Rolls-Royce in that era, such precise identifications may be better left to the experts.)
   The depository Rolls, said to have been abandoned in Cuba by a fleeing owner after the revolution, has been identified, by experts, as a 1926 New Phantom (also called the Phantom I) from the series that followed the Silver Ghost. Its coachwork has been recognized as the handiwork of Letourneur and Marchand of Paris.
   This means the cathedral car, photographed with its crew of uniformed servants, is not the car at the depository.
  It also means that somewhere on the island, a grand Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost may yet exist as one more relic from Cuba's rich past.

The pride of Havana's Depósito del Automóvil.








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