Osian's Auction Catalogue Automobilia The Art of the Historical Vehicle | October 2018

OSIAN’s – Connoisseurs of Art 20 wanted one for his European holidays. Though Invicta actually only provided a rolling chassis to their customers and a choice of either a Byfleet Drophead Coupe or a Wentworth saloon body, the Maharaja of Mysore chose to have his Invicta bodied by Airflow Streamlines of Northampton, in a style very similar to the Byfleet Drophead Coupe. The maharaja’s Black Prince rolled out of the Invicta factory on the 30th of June 1948. First time out on the road the maharaja found driving an automatic a dream, but the car just wouldn’t reverse. No way could the maharaja take the car for his tour of Europe – instead he had it shipped out to India, to Bangalore, and he had no choice but to buy another car, a Bentley, for his European holiday. Barely 16 to 18 Black Princes had been made, before word got around and potential buyers disappeared. By 1950, Invicta was bankrupt. Of the 16-odd cars, 13 are currently accounted for around the world, of which a bare half a dozen are dropheads, one of them being the car on these pages, the car that the Maharaja of Mysore had bought. In May 1952, Jayachamaraja Wodeyar sold this ‘non-working’ Invicta to Shivrajsinhji, the younger son of Maharaja Bhojirajsinhji Bhagvatsinhji of Gondal, who, after using for some years, sold it to a certain Fredrick John Vickery of Bombay, who couldn’t make the car work either. Vickery, in turn, sold it to the Gamadia family a few months later, and the family has owned this Invicta Black Prince since 1961. Replacing the Brockhouse transmission with a Borg-Warner automatic, the third generation of the Gamadia family has been enjoying this rare car, using it every other weekend when the car is taken for a serene early morning drive through South Mumbai. 1949 Cadillac Series 62 Sedan When, on the 27th of January, 1939, the very first prototype Lockheed P-38 Lightning took to the skies, it signalled a new era in pursuit fighters with its very distinctive design: twin boom housing the two turboprops, with a central nacelle in-between for the cockpit. General Motors design headHarley Earl and his closest assistants BillMitchell, Frank Hershey and Art Ross were one of the early outsiders who had been shown the then-secret P-38 Lightning. They were completely taken up by the twin-boom rear and the curved windshield, both of which in stylistic terms found their way to the design of the Cadillac range from 1948. GM designer Bill Mitchell was quoted as saying: “From a design stand point the fins gave definition to the rear of the car for the first time. They made the back end as interesting as the front, and established a long-standing Cadillac styling hallmark.” With the resounding success of the 1948 Cadillac, for model year ’49, America’s leading prestige car manufacturer decided to retain the same styling. But under the skin was another veritable revolution, Cadillac’s new engine, which was the American industry’s first overhead valve V8, more powerful, yet lighter and smaller than the preceding generation’s. Though almost 38,000 of the Series 62 sedans rolled out in 1949, not very many made it to India, and even fewer survive; the car on these pages is one rare survivor. In fact, this car’s survival is a tale by itself. The Darbhanga zamindari family, which was fairly entrepreneurial, had invested, in the late 1940s, in various ventures, such as sugar factories, paper mills, newspapers and an automobile dealer network called Walfords. Years later, in the mid-1980s, when Walfords needed to be liquidated, the new buyers found some 50-odd cars, mostly American, abandoned in various Walfords garages – the perfect barn find! This writer remembers seeing at least two dozen dust-covered Buicks, Cadillacs, Chevrolets and Pontiacs from the late 1940s in the abandoned Walford garage in Calcutta. As none of these cars had proper papers, most were scrapped. Fortunately, a couple of cars were rescued and this is one of them. One of Kolkata’s long-time restorer and collector, Sanjay Ghosh, picked up this Cadillac. This was in 1994. In an utterly wretched condition, the Cadillac had many of its parts stolen, several glasses were broken, seat frames had been destroyed, even the instruments and the steering wheel were gone. After a comprehensive restoration, this magnificent milestone design was back on the road, and remains one of Sanjay Ghosh’s most important automotive treasures. 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 Skyliner Coupé-convertibles with retractable hardtops are all the rage today. But the idea is hardly new, as it dates back to more than eight decades. What’s more fascinating is that the one who invented the concept was a… dental technician (and a dentist, later)! Frenchman Georges Paulin, a full time dental technician and part- time automotive designer patented the retractable roof concept in 1931. An attempt at developing the first prototype with Hotchkiss, in 1933, ended in a financial disagreement. But after Paulin developed a prototype based on a Peugeot 301 with French coachbuilder Marcel Pourtout, the project finally took off with Peugeot’s Paris dealer Emile Darl’mat ordering a series of coupe-convertibles (called Eclipse) based on Peugeot’s 301, 401, 402 and the 601 chassis. But, as these handcrafted cars were very expensive, very few were made, and even fewer survive. It would be another two decades before the idea would be revisited once again. But this time, by the world’s second largest carmaker, as Ford unveiled the Fairlane 500 Skyliner, a coupé-convertible version of the Fairlane series, in 1957. Launched as a sister model to the Ford Fairlane Sunliner convertible, whichwas still offeredwith a normal soft top, the Skyliner was designed to appeal to customers who wanted all the enjoyments that a soft top could offer, without missing out on the comfort of a steel roof. Visually, the Fairlane 500 Skyliner was almost identical to the Fairlane family, but it did have some obvious