Armstrong Siddeley engined specials

[geo]

I nearly purchased a surviving one in the late 1970s that was owned by a friend's father, Julian Lugrin. He used it as daily transport when he worked at AP Films doing the 'supermarionation' of the likes of Lady Penelope!

When I was about to purchase the car, it was finished in that silvery-green (R-R?) colour and in excellent condition. Lugrin was a fairly eccentric fellow and, whilst he was happy for me to spend ages viewing and playing with the car, the one thing I was most interested in I was not allowed to see at that stage — the engine!! Eventually (after about a year), our negotiations did not progress beyond admiring the car and I acquired a 408 and gave up trying to persuade Lugrin that he really did want to sell it.

This was not the end of the tale, however, when I was looking for another Bristol in the mid-90s, his daughter again told me that he was really intending to sell it this time as it had spent the last fifteen or so years sitting in a lock-up garage in Acton, West London.

This time I did not see the car as Lugrin reported that when he went to tart it up a bit he allegedly discovered that parts had been removed and it was in a terrible state. His daughter suspected that although he claimed to have been too attached to the car to part with it in the 70s, she thought he had not seen it since he had mothballed it in one of his lock-up garages, some miles from where he lived in Isleworth.

I was never entirely confident of the authenticity of the tales that Lugrin told about the car, but his version of events was that it had not been scrapped by the company when the Star Sapphire project came to nought as it had been rescued and used by the White family (with whom he was acquainted). The engine and automatic gearbox was supposedly identical to its use in the final Armstrongs — I can testify that it was very smooth in operation and the unrevealed engine certainly sounded like a smooth 6-cylinder.

I tried Lugrin's tale out on LJKS at the time when I thought I was purchasing the car and he confirmed that as far as he knew, the essentials of the story sounded correct.

George