Car Show Classic: 1928 Rolls-Royce Twenty Phaeton by Barker – Once In A Blue Rolls

We started this little prewar escapade in a big beautiful British blue-blood coachbuilt in two-tones-of-blue, and we’ll end it that way. Only this superlative slab of British beef will be open-topped, as befits a summertime post, and a decade older (but closely related to) than the Bentley we saw three weeks ago. Almost a centenarian, in fact, though it doesn’t look a day over Twenty.

After the Great War, Henry Royce figured that his marque’s massive 7.4 litre Silver Ghost 40-50HP chassis would necessarily be in less demand. Times were changing and an clients increasingly wanted to drive their own cars. The answer was to launch a much smaller Rolls-Royce: with its brand-new 3.1 litre OHV straight-6, the 20HP (usually known as “Twenty”) would be a new kind of car for its maker.

The new small Rolls debuted in October 1922 and immediately attracted a lot of interest. As was the case for most high-end cars in those days, Rolls-Royce only sold the chassis. The client would then have that dispatched to any one of a couple dozen reputable coachbuilders to get a custom-made body.

 

And therein lay a bit of an issue. Of course, the client is always right and the chassis manufacturer would never presume to dictate anything about the bodywork. Henry Royce nevertheless did try to impress upon the people who were buying the Twenty that is was recommended to go for a lighter style, like a two-door cabriolet or a fabric saloon. Those were trendy in the ‘20s, so quite a number of 20HP chassis did get something in a lighter vein.

 

However, a Rolls is a Rolls. Even if the engine was a mere 3.1 litres (and the actual power undisclosed), the wheelbase was still a comfortable 327.5cm (129 in.), so a lot of buyers went for a full-fat Pullman limousine or something of that ilk – there were many appellations for luxurious body styles at the time: sedanca de ville, open-drive landaulet, all-weather saloon… This made for a much slower car and stressed the mechanicals, of course. But people who could afford a Rolls and super-deluxe coachwork could probably afford the extra costs associated with that.

Our particular model seems to be a happy medium between the ponderous but comfortable chauffeur-driven cars favoured by some and the more agile types seen on other 20HPs. It was made by Barker, one of the oldest and most renowned names in the business at the time.

Founded in 1710 by one of Queen Anne’s footmen, the Barker coachworks produced broughams and tilburies for the English aristocracy for almost two centuries before venturing into the horseless type of carriage circa 1900. By the mid-‘20s, Barker bodies were commonly seen on Rolls-Royces, but also on Daimlers and Bentleys, as well as the odd foreign chassis, such as Hispano-Suiza, Packard or Mercedes-Benz.

I don’t know how many Twenty chassis were given the Barker treatment, but it was a large enough number that they advertised specifically around this model. Our feature car then, in Barker terminology, wears a “torpedo” body. I called it phaeton in the title because that word is almost identical in meaning and is somewhat better known across the Pond. Calling a car a torpedo might sound odd to some in the Anglosphere, but that’s precisely the word used in French and Italian for this type of body – the naval weapon is called something else in those languages.

True to its ‘20s form, this phaeton / torpedo lacks side windows, which makes it that much lighter than, say, a limousine. They did include a folding windscreen for the rear passengers, which is a bare minimum. They likely paid for that car, after all.

The Twenty’s chassis was a pretty standard affair for the time: rigid axles, leaf springs, cable brakes. But said brakes were only fitted to the rear wheels initially – in 1925, the front wheels got drums as well, and a vacuum-operated servo was added to the system. The other big evolution was the gearbox: early cars have a centrally-mounted gear lever that actuated a 3-speed box, whereas post-1925 cars received a right-hand lever and a 4-speed.

Rolls-Royce sold almost 3000 Twenty chassis (2940, to be precise) between 1922 and 1929, making it their most successful model to date. That was surpassed by its successor, the 20/25, which was a very similar car with a larger 3.8 litre variant of the “small” six and a bit more wheelbase.

When this car was made in 1928, Barker & Co. still had a fair amount of the market for high-end bodies, but the firm began faltering in the ’30s, unable to provide lighter bodies like H.J. Mulliner or James Young. The firm went into receivership in 1938 and its assets were taken over by Hooper, which itself became a part of BSA-Daimler soon after. By contrast, our feature car’s chassis heralded the beginning of something: from the Twenty, Rolls developed an entire family of smaller, owner-driver cars that basically ran an unbroken line until the Silver Shadow, RR’s true postwar clean-sheet design.

The chassis was constantly improved over the generations of course, and accessories such as this horn would have looked out of place on a Silver Cloud, but the lineage is straightforward to trace. All the way to the dinosaurs, apparently.