Not the model that many of us owned, obviously, but the real, actual car with its YU 3250 number plate. Automotive iconography gets no better than this, especially when behind it in the picture is AX 201, the original 1907 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost that, when new, drove from London to Glasgow many times to demonstrate its reliability.
This is automotive royalty. A few weekends ago I visited P&A Wood at its base in Great Easton, just north of Great Dunmow in Essex. It was a guided tour with friends from the Singer Owners' Club, although only two crews actually arrived in Singer cars: a pre-war 1½-litre sports tourer and a 1960s Gazelle. I drove there in my Sunbeam Stiletto, a close relative of some Rootes Singers and by far the smallest car on the P&A Wood site that day.
Twin brothers Paul and Andrew Wood set up as specialists in mature Rolls-Royces and Bentleys in 1967. They began in Moreton, Essex, with Paul doing the coachwork and handling sales, Andrew in charge of the engineering side. In 1970 the growing business moved to Great Bardfield, grew some more and in 1988 landed on the current site. The Wood brothers built a new engineering workshop and in 1995 added a new, but period-looking, two-level showroom.
Today P&A Wood employs 65 people, the brothers continue to do what they enjoy the most and Paul's daughter Georgina is the company's managing director (and a Brooklands trustee). The place is full of very valuable Rolls-Royces and Bentleys of impeccable provenance, considerable age and frequent uniqueness, but I'm pleased to see a surprising number of Silver Shadows and their descendants awaiting attention, too. These are not greatly valuable nowadays, and indeed some have descended into something approaching bangerdom, but not those at P&A Wood. Here, they are administered to in the way their maker always intended.
One of the long-serving craftsmen, Keith Potter, takes us round the various buildings. We begin in a storage area which had been the coachworks, and which is soon to be converted into a service bay for recent Bentleys with a machine shop behind. Andrew Wood's Merlin V12 aeroplane engine sits in here, never flown. Upstairs, where engines are built, is a machine for testing lever-arm suspension dampers so they can be calibrated (by changing shims within) before fitting to the car. 'We rescued it from a skip,' says Keith. 'It's the only one left in the world.'