Bentley Boys head for Knysna

By Stuart Johnston

 

The Bentley Drivers Club of South Africa will stage a special display at the Knysna Motor Show on April 28. And the South African connection to Bentley runs very, very deep,

The sound of an original W.O-era Bentley at full chat is enough to send shock waves through any respectable upper-crust suburb. Those early Bentleys, built in the era when the company was still under direction of its founder, Walter Owen (W.O) Bentley, had huge engines in their massive chassis. They were often clad in minimalist, stripped-down bodywork more suitable for the likes of the Brooklands or Le Mans race tracks. Which not co-incidentally, is where they made the Bentley name the stuff of many a schoolboy’s fantasy.

The classic Bentley Era

Pivotal to Bentley’s motorsport success in the 1920s was a great bull of a man who had strong connections to South Africa. Woolf “Babe” Barnato was the man who bailed out the financially-challenged W.O Bentley in 1925, giving it a major cash injection and reviving a deep   motorsport culture at the Bentley “works” in Cricklewood, north London.

Woolf Barnato was the son and heir to Randlord diamond and gold mining magnet Barney Barnato, who made his fortune in the Highveld goldfields and the diamond fields of Kimberley in the late 1900s, before dying prematurely in a drowning incident off the coastline of Madeira in 1897.

The jury is still out on whether Barney Barnato jumped overboard in a fit of paranoia, or was deliberately pushed. What is certain is that Woolf Barnato, at the age of four, inherited a huge chunk of his father’s fortune. And by the mid-‘20s, having established himself as one of the premier playboys in Roaring-Twenties London, Babe Barnato was the right man at the right time to save the Bentley car company. He became Chairman of Bentley Motors in 1926.

The Bentley Boys

Barnato and his many wealthy friends, known as The Bentley Boys,  raced their huge sports cars in the UK and at Le Mans, and after hours used to hang out in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, more often than not setting unofficial lap times around the genteel London suburb in their monster machines. But financial trouble was on the horizon, and after the great stock market crash at the end of the 1920s, Bentley was taken over by Rolls-Royce in 1931

The cars then produced, before World War II, were known as the  “Silent Sports Cars” and featured more refined bodywork and were a different kettle of fish to the raucous “flying lorries” of the earlier era (as Etore Bugatti so famously dubbed them).

Bentley Brigade to Storm Knysna

A large contingent of vintage and classic Bentleys domiciled in South Africa  will arrive en masse  at the Knysna Motor Show on April 28, 2019.

The occasion will be the Bentley Centenary, and to celebrate this huge milestone, The Bentley Drivers Club of South Africa has scheduled the Knysna Motor Show as the first stop of its special commemorative 2019 rally.

At present, some 20 Bentleys are confirmed for the Knysna Motor Show, which will once again be held at the Knysna High School Sports Grounds on Waterfront Drive.

“The Cape branch of the club is scheduled to gather at Arniston, from there we drive to Knysna, where we will take part in the wonderful  Knysna Motor Show,” confirmed Bentley Drivers Club of the Western Cape Chairman, John White.

A magnificent Bentley 4½-litre

Mr White and his wife  Frederike will be arriving in his magnificent Bentley 4½-litre, perhaps the most famous Bentley model  of all in its 100-year history. However, The Bentley Drivers Club will be show-casing  a whole range of iconic Bentleys, ranging from at least five 3-litre models built between 1922 to 1928, through to much more modern classics, such as the 1998 Bentley Continental T owned by Robert and Maryke Middelmann, and Shaun Rai’s 1998 Bentley Azure convertible.

The Drivers Club’s  mustering for Knysna, and their post-motor show foray into the mountain passes  in and around Oudtshoorn, will include cars from the most important periods of the 100-year Bentley history. These will include the so-called “Silent Cars” built between 1932 and  1939, and the beautiful post-World War Two models which number some of the most elegant motor cars ever made.

Post war the Mk VI Bentleys were produced at Crewe, England, and later came the famous R-Type and S-Series of the 1950s. Rolls-Royce ownership continued until 1970, when it was bought out by the Vickers Group. And from 1998, the Bentley nameplate has been under ownership of the Volkswagen Group.

Apart from the vintage and classic-era Bentleys on display, it is expected that there will be a significant presence of the latest Bentley models, including the new Bentayga SUV. For a review on the latest Bentley Bentayga click here.

Bentley Drivers Club Rallies in South Africa.

Bentley Drivers Club local Chairman John White’s motoring life has encompassed Bentleys since 1959, when he bought his first, a 3-litre model, for the princely sum of 225 pounds (the equivalent of about R3 800 at current exchange rates).

“I have only owned Vintage Bentleys, the cars produced in the W.O. Bentley era between 1920 and 1931. I currently own a 4½-litre with a Van den Plas body, which will be on display.

“Driving these vintage cars is a whole different experience. If you do 400 km in a 1928 car, in the heat or the rain, stopping to fix things, it’s an adventure!”

John White has helped organise many Vintage Bentley rallies in South Africa, starting in 1983, and many of them have been international events with owners shipping their cars out from around the world.

The cars that will be on this rally belong to Bentley owners who have known each other for decades, and these include club treasurer Stuart Maxwell, who will be driving one of the oldest cars on the event, a 1922 model 3-litre, with his wife Cindie.

 Other  3-litre models will be driven by Richard and Phillippa Middelmann, Rudy Greyvensteyn, Pieter and Phea Fonternal, and Karl and Tilly Reitz. Karl Reitz has been around vintage Bentleys his entire life, as his late father was an avid Bentley driver.

The rally that takes in the Knysna Motor Show on April 28 is not run to time schedules, but a social event. The South African “Bentley Boys and Girls” will take in the Robertson Pass and challenging gravel Swartberg Pass and also Meiringspoort, these roads providing some of the most spectacular scenery in South Africa. Scenery set to be made only more spectacular by the huge presence of vintage and classic Bentleys!

It is not known at this stage which Bentleys of the modern era will be at Knysna, but the marque has been very active in South Africa in recent years. For a track review on the Bentley Continental GT3-R in Cape Town, click here.

About the Knysna Motor Show

This year’s Knysna Motor Show, sponsored by Sanlam Private Wealth, is the eighth event , and since 2011 it has achieved the status of being one of the best-organised events on the classic-vintage car show calendar, with the highest quality of entries. Since its inception, the organisers have donated hundreds of thousands of rand to charities in the area, and the event itself has grown to accommodate up to 400 cars and classic motorcycles, that are present on the lawns of the Knysna High School Sports Grounds by invitation only.

Apart from the special Bentley display there will be a plethora of vintage and classic car marques gracing the beautiful setting on Knysna’s Waterfront Drive.

“The invitation-only policy enables us to keep the standard of the event very high, and also to vary the display each year, so even for enthusiasts who have been to all of our previous seven shows, there will be something new,” says Peter Pretorius, Chairman of the Garden Route Motor Club, which organises the event.