I’m always on the look out for postcards from the French-Italian border post at Menton. They often yield interesting cars and I am fascinated by that huge white triangle on the cliff face.

I bought one a while ago that had an unusual Rolls-Royce in it. A Rolls-Royce I could not identify. Then a couple of weeks ago another postcard came up for sale and it showed the same Rolls-Royce. I had to have it of course! The photographs were obviously taken in quick succession by the same camera and used for different postcards. I was already fascinated as I have hundreds of postcards and have never seen this before.

The second postcard was also a great find because the message on the back relates to the subject of the postcard. So often the message has nothing to do with what we are looking at, but here ‘John’ writes the perfect message to “All at Silvergates” in Hessle, East Yorkshire.

Well [?] here we are at the Italian frontier waiting our turn to go thro! It seems a long time as there are a lot of cars. Everything is going OK and we are having a grand time. Stopped last night in Monte (Menton?) John.

(The black splodge is because someone had stuck it into an album. How I wish people would not do that!)

The postcard was posted on 5 August 1959. My first postcard was unposted.

But things were about to get much more interesting. In the second postcard you can make out the registration number of the Roller. LPD 2. It’s British! And what’s more it’s a very special Rolls-Royce. In fact it is a one-off. Caught on two of my postcards! What are the chances? It’s a 1947 Silver Wraith with a sedanca body built by the Paris coachbuilders Saoutchik.

A sedanca body is one with the driver exposed to the elements and the rear seat passengers under cover.

OK, so knowing the registration number it is not too difficult to find out who owned this sort of car when it was new. In this case a John Gaul, sometimes referred to as Sir John Gaul (though I think not a real baronet), often referred to as a millionaire property tycoon (when a million meant something).

He was so rich in fact that also in 1947 he bought a ten year old Rolls-Royce Phantom III with a limousine body and sent it to Freestone & Webb for new bodywork and requested a flamboyant use of copper on it. This car became known as the ‘Copper Kettle’.

When Gaul bought the Silver Wraith he was going to get Freestone & Webb to do the bodywork on that too but changed his mind and sent the car to Saoutchik in Paris. The two cars are very different in many respects but the use of rattan (if that is what it is) on the rear doors is the same. It must have appealed to him. I want a sedanca body, copper radiator and wings and I think some rattan on the rear doors. Will look the business!

Gaul’s business must have been doing pretty well because when he sent the Roller to Saoutchik he also sent a Delahaye 175 rolling chassis and commissioned an extravagant roadster body for the French car. These cars were obviously not daily runabouts or even executive transport for a successful businessman, they were one-off pieces of engineering sculpture and John Gaul would take them around the Concours d’Elegance in Europe and win many awards with them.

Here he is in 1949 with the Saoutchik Delahaye 175 S

In 1954 Gaul sold the Delahaye to Diana Dors. She did not have a licence but her manager thought the curves of the car would complement hers and provide her with good publicity, which it did quite nicely. Can you imagine parallel parking that?

So who was Sir John Gaul?

He was born in about 1910 and died in 1989. He had businesses in London’s Soho and owned the Coronet Club there. He secured a long lease on a Maltese island called Comino and built a hotel complex there. He was married five times and loved extravagant cars. He lived for many years in Rio De Janeiro after some unpleasantness in the UK and later in Malta from whence the UK tried unsuccessfully to extradite him. However, this blog is about postcards and cars so I will not go into all that, you can google it yourself if you wish.

If the postcard photo was taken in the mid to late fifties John Gaul would have been in his mid to late forties. Do we see him in the photo? I’d like to think so but I don’t know when he sold that car and can’t really make out the people near the car or the driver sitting behind the wheel. As is so often the case, more information often presents itself later.

In the post HRX990 I mentioned that Rob van der Klugt had discovered that a model of the Bentley in that postcard had been produced and was for sale by VV Model. I don’t know much about models but was amazed to find that the model was available with the same registration number as the car in my postcard. I have now discovered that the 1947 Saoutchik Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, registration number LPD 2 is also available as a model by Ilario Chiera and sold by Mafma. Here it is… LPD2!

So, our postcard led us to three ultra rare cars. What became of them? Well, they all still exist.

Here’s John Gaul’s Silver Wraith with body by Saoutchik, our postcard car.

And below is John Gaul’s Copper Kettle Phantom III.

And below is John Gaul’s Delahaye Saoutchik.

They are all multi-million dollar cars now, fully restored and appreciated as much for their investment value as they are for their engineering and for being works of art. I wonder whether the present owner of LPD 2 knows his or her car was caught unawares while waiting to go through the passport and customs check at Menton in the fifties and that pictures of it were posted around the world.

Oh, I must go to Menton myself! I love it! If you do too, check out my other postcards from Menton showing cars beneath the big white triangle between France and Italy.