In my part of the world, food trucks are made out of old step vans and such. I’m not sure exactly where SwissTea shot this, but it looks most likely to be in the Rolls Royce’s home country of Great Britain. Tasty. It rather reminds me of a RR station wagon I posted here in the early days; I’ll share it again.
This superb 1931 Rolls Royce station wagon once ferried passengers from the train station to the Schweizerhof Hotel in Interlaken during the fifties. Yes, that’s how the station wagon got its name, but you already knew that. What did it do before the fifties? It was originally a fashionable Sedanca bodied by Barker. Classics were often rebodied, but this is a bit out of the ordinary.
*VERY* nice ! .
When my Father was in England after The War , he saw many old 1920’s & 1930’s Rolls working in remote farms as pickup trucks after the body had been cut away….
That first photo looks to be a Funeral Coach body when new , nice indeed , I love my hearse .
-Nate
That almost looks like an old ambulance or hearse.
But how do the kids know its coming if the loudest sound the ice vendor’s truck makes is the clock? 🙂
Well, it IS still louder than a Ford LTD.
Here’s “S. Luca, Pure Ices”, the RR is for hire, originally a 1923 Hooper Limousine:
http://www.s-luca.co.uk/
I recall a late 1980s British classic car magazine article about a mid-1930s Rolls Royce “shooting brake” (station wagon to us Yanks) that described an evolution over time that may be comparable to what happened to these cars. It began as the “country” car of the founder of Castrol, who donated it to the British armed forces during the Second World War, after which it was sold off and saw use as a mere cheap old car before being rescued and restored.
Anyone who has read John D. MacDonald knows of “Miss Agnes”, Travis McGee’s converted Rolls pickup. I don’t recall the vintage, but always thought should I win one of the big lotteries, I’d try to create one and park it at Slip F-18 Bahia Mar marina, Fort Lauder-damn-dale, Florida, next to the Busted Flush and Munequita.
Wow, it looks so small for a Rolls, compared to the 2nd car that Paul provided, which looks like it has an 11 ft hood with a hundred slats in it.
Some of that is deceptive: on the ’31, the hood continues as one unbroken plane right to the cowl. On the older ’23, the hood stops well short of the cowl, and there is a transition. But the ’31 may be a larger chassis too.
I think the 31 car might be a Phantom, I’m used to seeing that size of big imposing 30’s vintage Rolls, like Goldfinger’s 1937 Phantom III. The 10 year difference also probably helps.
It is, a Phantom II, also called 40/50 hp chassis. 7.7 L straight six.
Dear Paul, do you have any informations about the “Schweizerhof”-RR? Where did it go after it left Switzerland? Who owned it? Any informations would be great. Thanks Nadia
I’m sorry, but I have no idea.
The ice cream car looks like an early 20hp with its shortish bonnet, prominent cowl and horizontal, enamelled radiator shutters. Three speed gearbox and rear wheel braking only, so rather Mr Luca than me! If he’d bought one three years younger he’d have had four speeds to play with and the world’s finest four wheel power-assisted brakes!
I took the photo at Musselburgh Racecourse, in Luca’s hometown in Scotland. Apparently they’ve owned it since 1937. They also have (or had) a 6 wheeler ice cream van built out of a Mini based kit car.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mysight/4897979577/
I believe at least one garage in Edinburgh in the 1950s used an RR converted to a tow truck – supposedly Rolls offered to buy it back as it was considered unseemly.
I’m from Edinburgh and I can remember in the late fifties and early sixties the amazing variety of old cars still being hauled out of suburban garages where they had rested undisturbed often for decades. The fate of unwanted old Silver Ghosts pre-war was to be re-commissioned as hearses or turned into wreck trucks. On balance this was probably a ‘good thing’ as it saved many from the scrapyard and some of these were duly restored years later, often with replica Edwardian or vintage coachwork. Regarding the possibility that RR offered to repurchase the old Ghost in order to protect their image, this is but one of many such urban myths about Rolls-Royce! My favourite is the (true) one about a 20hp Rolls purchased by a Mansfield pork butcher who was not unaverse to sticking the odd porker or two in the back for a trip to market. He supposedly received a pained letter from RR asking him to pack it in and promptly fired off a sharp one-liner in reply: “Pigs bought it. Pigs’ll ride in it!” I know this one to be more or less true, although I think it much more likely that it was the local dealership being snotty rather than RR themselves. I knew the dealer, Evinsons, who were Ford by the seventies, and the pork butcher’s family, who are still as far as I am aware turning out pies and sausages.
BTW, my fellow Scot, author and RR fan George Oliver reckoned that those old Silver Ghosts were bloody fast by the time you’d carved a ton or so of unwanted limousine body off them! Pip, pip!