For sale: Bugatti Type 57S. Ex-Earl Howe. Only £2000...

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We think you may have seen this picture before but, if you haven’t, isn’t it just wonderful? Not too long after the Second World War, Continental Cars Ltd. was doing good business with sports and racing cars and knew how to attract the right customers. Based in Chobham and later in Send, this was the place to go if you lived in London or Surrey and you were in the market for an HRG, Healey or Alfa Romeo. Or a Bugatti – they had no shortage of them.

This picture is dated 1948, when Continental Cars was located on the Portsmouth road in Send. There are no fewer than nine Bugattis outside, some especially rare and important ones among them. Feel free to add whatever you know about any of these specific examples – some are quite special!

Curious as to how these cars would have been priced at the time, we got lost among some old magazines for far too long looking at old advertisements. Oddly, we couldn’t find any actually mentioning prices. One of the lovely pieces of trivia we discovered included the fact that ex-Bugatti apprentice Louis Giron worked for Continental’s directors Rodney Clarke and Leonard Potter. The garage famously later became home to Connaught Engineering later on, in the early 1950s.

Another snippet came from Bonhams and was about the mysterious Type 57S Atalante coupé discovered in a Newcastle garage in 2008: ‘The precise movements of 57502 were not recorded but correspondence on file suggested that it passed via Car Mart Ltd. of Euston Road, London, to Continental Cars Ltd. of Send, Surrey.’

However, on 1st January 2009 - as a result of media exposure - Bonhams was contacted by a Mr R. M. Oliver, who wrote in e-mail correspondence, “Having been the director of Continental Cars who dealt with the purchase and subsequent re-sale of EWS 73, I was interested to discover that it has re-appeared. Earl Howe sold it to the London dealer, Car-Mart. When I went to see it in their showroom I was told that the only alteration which had been made to the car was the colour. Howe’s cars always incorporated his light blue, sometimes referred to as “Howe blue”. It was a condition of the sale to Car-Mart that it must not be sold in that colour, so they had the blue painted maroon/dark red. I took the car for a short trial run and bought it on behalf of Continental Cars Ltd. I drove the car a number of times before selling to John P. Tingay, an architect. When he came to collect it from us at Send he brought his wife with him, and I was under strict instructions not to let her know how much he had paid for it! About £2,000 or a bit more I think as that is what 57Ss were making – a considerable amount of money in those days.”

With average weekly wages being six or seven pounds in the late 1940s, there’s no doubt about that. Still, it’s nice to reminisce. How much Bugatti could you buy for £2,000 today? And which of these nine cars would you go for?

Words: Jeroen Booij; picture: Klemantaski Collection
 

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