A Royal Display

Sir,

In your photo report of the Goodwood Festival of Speed (p58, September issue) you captioned one picture as “1924 Silver Ghost owned by Sirdar Aly Aziz”. While Sirdar Aly Aziz did very generously lend his Silver Ghost for the occasion (it was Louis Mountbatten’s car while he was Viceroy of India), the car you picture is a 1924 Rolls-Royce 20 ordered by the Maharajah of Bharatpur; it was equipped very much to his own specification, which led RollsRoyce to decline to offer a warranty on the grounds of excessive weight. The Duke of Edinburgh travelled in this car during the Royal visit to India in 1965; it was lent for the display by Peter Vacher.

The “eclectic mix” (to use your words) of vehicles with the theme of Royal Travel was brought together by the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust and received full support from the Royal Household. The Transport Trust assisted in finding some of the more remote cars and the Royal Train. Such a gathering is unlikely to be repeated, and the amount of interest shown at Goodwood seemed to suggest that the public sensed this.

Stuart Wilkinson, Chairman, Transport Trust