1936 Rolls-Royce Phantom III Sedanca de Ville

1936 Rolls-Royce Phantom III Sedanca de Ville Coachwork by Gurney Nutting

The Rolls-Royce Phantom III was, of course, an exclusively coachbuilt automobile. Most of the great British coachbuilding firms offered designs, many of them unique, on the Phantom III chassis. Some of the most widely admired were the work of J Gurney Nutting, a company associated with quality marques - Bentley in particular - from its earliest days and a supreme practitioner of the coachbuilding craft in the late 1930s. Founded in Croydon, Surrey in 1919, Gurney Nutting had bodied its first Bentley before moving to London's fashionable Chelsea district in 1924, and within a few years was established as the Cricklewood firm's foremost supplier of bodies after Vanden Plas.

Gurney Nutting's work had a sporting flavour from the outset and succeeded in attracting the attention of society's upper echelons; the Prince of Wales and Duke of York were clients, and the firm gained its Royal Warrant in the early 1930s. Daimler and Rolls-Royce had been added to the Gurney Nutting portfolio in the mid-1920s, and the fruitful association with the latter continued into the succeeding decade.

While most Phantom IIIs carried formal coachwork, '3CP62' is one of the very few bodied in streamlined 'Art Deco' style.

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