The English Way - This outstanding article by Grzegorz Grątkowski is a fine example of the directive 'Only connect' by the renowned English writer E.M.Forster

At present we are drowning in so many horrendous events under a threatening umbrella - the immeasurable suffering of a brutal European war, the horrors in the Middle East, worldwide financial instability, technological private surveillance, famine, religious conflict. 

However, as a creative, cultural corrective to these dark shadows, do read this outstanding article recently written by the Polish CCC member Grzegorz Grątkowski. 

In the great days of the  Casual Car Club (CCC) over many years, we met for dinner to have classic car discussions, conviviality over a glass of wine and an informative  automotive lecture. This was featured in either the privacy of the  Moniuszko Salon or Słowacki Salon at the Bristol Hotel in Warsaw. Grzegorz occasionally gave exceptional lectures there. It is such a sad reflection on our commercially focused times, so insensitive to the establishment of traditions, that mounting such altruistic events has become so financially unfriendly.

The immortal English writer E.M.Forster wrote a directive of profound depth

'Only connect'

This writer accomplishes this suggestion in a cultured, artistic and instructive manner. Do read !

Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire, England

The English Way              

Grzegorz Grątkowski

In life there are things known and things unknown

William Blake

There are, in the world of motoring, things rare and exotic and there are things astounding with their sheer cost or technological prowess. However, there aren’t many that you could label as having no equivalent at all. One of their kind in an absolute way. Such as Rolls-Royce’ radiator cowl.

Innate landscape genius

Englishmen have worked diligently and long so that many among their products or solutions can hardly be mentioned without irony, at least beyond almost endless borders of the past Empire. Like monetary system with pound divided into 20 shilling, the latter into 12 pence (remembering that 5 shilling equaled one crown, and a pound plus one shilling equaled a guinea – trivial, isn’t it?). Cold and hot water taps lurking at each other from opposite corners of a washbasin. Knobs placed centrally on doors. Guillotine windows with just a single sheet of thin glass. Well, practicality is one thing, but British talent has gone to great lengths to also excel in the area of amenities meant to be pleasurable. Such as sweaters of Shetland wool (you’d rather get scratched by a wild cat), cuisine specialties including porridge’, marmite or puddings, or the looks of a Leyland Princess.

Stourhead. The best of England: the art of landscape gardening

And yet, there has been a field where Britons, supported by their peculiar climate, history and habits, have achieved serious greatness. It is the art of gardening, the Capability Brown of composing landscape parks and shaping the landscape in general. Enjoying an opportunity to have agricultural goods brought from overseas, they never had to chop their pastoral province into thickly cut potato ridges. They were free to make green Kent and sunny Surrey, picturesque Wiltshire and undulating Somerset resemble one vast landscape garden. And boy, have they done it! Local pathways curl jacketed with hedgerows and field stone walls, and even when they needn’t be curvy due to land sculpture, curvy they are all the same, as dictated by confines of estates, much older than any span of tarmac. So you venture along, looking at clumps of trees as they fluidly arrange into background farther and farther afield, while herds of horses and white-bleached corral fences suggest you can drive from Reading to Chester and beyond through one never-ending stud. And about the only barriers dividing that total garden into smaller stretches are rivers – just as curvy, hemmed in greenery and so atmospheric that you’d eagerly swap your car for a canoe to cover what remains of your distance along their steady, tranquil current.

Power – sufficient

A habitat like that had to influence a character of vehicles engineered around, including motor cars. One of apt responses to the British B-roads were powerful, convertible Austin Healey, where no tin box isolated you from the live nature passed by. Featherlike, nimble Lotus were another, as were unmistakably English Triumphs; low-silhouette Jaguars with their impressive braking abilities and gallant DOHC inline-sixes, as well as raw and wild-natured TVR defying their drivers with “beware or die” challenge. All very well, however, was there ever any car that matched the scenery taken directly from John Constable’s paintings better than Rolls-Royce? Just look as it glides along at leisurely pace, raised like a ship above the edge of shrubbery, dignifiedly swaying on road bumps, if any – as it does every Sunday upon its way from the mansion to a golf course, every Wednesday to a club in Westminster; in an alleyway, under an arched gate, next to a belfry overgrown with ivy.

Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud

It’s perfectly relevant that an engine power of such a vehicle, rather than with a specific HP figure, was just referred to as sufficient, with the top speed figures also being ignored. It was never about any limits – instead, it was about reserves. It was meant to roll along stately, proud and assured of its capabilities. Should it only chose so, he could stand perfectly still and still achieve the same effect, as then England would start slowly moving back around it, as if dragged with screeching harbour ropes from far-away foggy Plymouth.

Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire, England

And it was that environment where its owner used to be born and raised. An English garden – such as Kew and Stowe and Stourhead, Blenheim and Chiswick, Croome and Wilton, dozens if not hundreds of other ones – was tame and obvious scenery for a gentleman; the image of what the country had most precious and beautiful to offer. That reality was both present and important in culture: because the English landscape garden used to influence estate parks all over Europe – in terms of the concept and even specific themes and motifs, it was copied in Munich’s Nymphenburg and in Wörlitz; in Czech Lednice and Hluboka, in Polish Arkadia or Łazienki, in Russian Peterhof and Tsarskoye Selo, to name only few. Along with its integral component: a Greek temple, diminished to a scale and a role of a park pavilion. An eye-catcher to diversify nature with an accent of small architecture, placed in a carefully selected spot where shapes of greenery, curtains of trees, surfaces of meadows and shimmering ponds could be perfectly pinned together, as if with a brooch, by a four- or six column portico, crowned with a triangular pediment. That, however, was not directly borrowed from Ancient Greece – rather than that, it came filtered through late Renaissance Italy, via 16^th Century Palladian architecture, well known to the British dilettanti, travelling in Veneto to visit one villa after another.

Villa da Porto Pedrotti near Vicenza, by Andrea Palladio, 1554

And so, that’s where the motif comes from. That is, albeit as a concise and simplified summary of an intricate, picturesque story, both the source of the form and, at the same time, an origin of the idea of Rolls-Royce radiator grill. The shape which hardly evolved for over a hundred years since 1906, and even today remains recognizable, despite having been tilted from perfectly vertical and having obtained rounded edges in 2013 Wraith model. When a Rolls-Royce, a gentleman’s car par excellence, floats ahead at a stately pace, as indeed it should, what it carries high in the front is – perhaps not a temple portico, because there isn’t any religious context therein – but of course a true visual emblem of its native country: a park pavilion straight from an English landscape garden.

Here are links to two excellent and engaging dinner lectures given by Grzegorz at the Bristol Hotel, Warsaw. There are many others by other members buried in the historic record of the CCC that fuel nostalgia. Do scroll though www.casualcars.blogspot.com as I have resuscitated much recently. 

Does entropy apply even to car clubs ?

https://casualcars.blogspot.com/2018/01/ccc-christmas-dinner-bristol-hotel.html

https://casualcars.blogspot.com/2013/12/dinner-at-bristol-hotel-warsaw-monday.html