A lot is made of the Special Relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States, and outside the worlds of politics and finance, some of the greatest automotive collaborations have also been trans-Atlantic affairs. From the AC Cobra to the Allard J2, the fusion of British and American styling and engineering has led to some truly incredible machines—few more special than the sole Bentley 8-Litre bodied by Murphy.
Not many cars symbolise the British ingenuity in the pre-war era quite as robustly as the Bentley 8-Litre. Built on the firm’s largest rolling chassis, it was Bentley’s full-blooded assault on a luxury market then led by Rolls-Royce. At its heart was an advanced version of the six-cylinder engine first introduced in 1925. Then in 6.6-litre form, it carried on the firm’s novel features (such as dry sump lubrication and single-cast cylinder block and head) and would form the basis of its Speed Six incarnation, which led to three Le Mans 24 Hours victories on the trot.
Despite this competition success, the company was always struggling for money, with mining heir and driver Woolf Barnato pumping a steady stream of cash into the firm. In order to lift itself from the mire, an idea was hatched to create a refined yet powerful rolling chassis that would have broader appeal for the moneyed elite—and thus a bigger profit margin.
As befits the name, the engine was bored out to 8 litres and used a Bentley-patented ‘three-throw drive’ system of triple connecting rods to drive an overhead camshaft. Like its predecessors, it used a one-piece iron block and cylinder head, with a magnesium alloy crankcase. In keeping with Bentley’s technologically advanced thinking, it featured four valves per cylinder and twin-spark ignition. This mighty engine was marshalled to the road via a brand-new four-speed gearbox, with a hypoid bevel final drive linking it to the rear axle.
Though the 8-Litre was designed for comfort—the engine and gearbox were mounted on rubber to avoid vibration—its ladder frame used downswept tubular steel crossmembers from both axles, angled towards the middle, to keep the centre of gravity low and optimise handling. Long semi-elliptic leaf springs and double-acting dampers (friction up front and hydraulic out back) kept the ride smooth, and 15.7-inch vacuum-servo-assisted drum brakes provided the stopping power.
The Autocar was suitably enthused: “This car can be driven really softly on its high top-gear, as slowly as a man walks, and can accelerate from that without snatch and without difficulty, and the whole time the engine, being well within its power, is silent and smooth. In fact, it is only rarely apparent that there is a big engine working under the bonnet at all, and that such a high top-ratio is used, when the machine is accelerated from a crawl. For all practical purposes, therefore, the machine does its work on the one gear.”
It was all set up for success, but then the Great Depression hit. As a result, this 220-brake-horsepower machine found only 100 buyers before Bentley folded, with the 8-Litre’s huge development costs said to be a primary reason for its abrupt implosion. Of that number, 35 were crafted on the 144-inch wheelbase, three on the 138-inch wheelbase, and the remainder on a 156-inch wheelbase; fewer than 25 were finished as open-top cars.
The 8-Litre may have played a large part in the firm’s failure, but Bentley must have been on to something, as Rolls-Royce quickly swooped up to purchase the remnants of the company in November 1931—and promptly threw away all the car’s spare parts.
Most of the original limousine and saloon bodies fitted by coachbuilders such as Vanden Plas, Gurney Nutting, and Barker have since been replaced by replica tourer bodies, which makes any original 8-Litre very rare and very special. Though perhaps not quite as special as the car you see before you, chassis YR5085.
This car is one of just two vintage Bentley chassis known to have been exported to the USA as a bare chassis, and then bodied by an American coachbuilder. The man behind the commission was Conrad H Matthiessen Jr, an heir to one of the three brothers behind “the Sugar Trust,” which at one time controlled 98 percent of the American sugar market. His great-uncle, Franz Otto, had come from Schleswig-Holstein, then part of Denmark, and had made his fortune refining sugar.
Conrad Jr’s grandfather, Erard, was a sugar refiner and banker, while his other great-uncle was a pioneer in the US zinc industry, and later turned around the bankrupt Western Clock Manufacturing Company, which later became Westclox. His father, Conrad, would serve as president of the Chicago Sugar Refining Co and Chicago’s Glucose Sugar Refining Co as well as the Corn Products Refining Co in Jersey City. At the time, the family lived on the Long Meadow estate west of North Broadway between the Hudson River and the Old Croton Aqueduct; in more recent times it was home to Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
However, by the time of the Bentley’s acquisition, Conrad H Jr had become a partner in AO Slaughter Anderson & Fox, an investment firm that was part of the New York Stock Exchange and was heading up the Los Angeles branch from Hollywood’s Equitable Building.
Perhaps Conrad H Jr’s penchant for British machinery was informed by the time he spent in the UK during World War I; after graduating from MIT’s School of Military Aeronautics, he was forced to retrain at Oxford’s School of Military Aeronautics. Following spells at various training locations across the UK, he eventually entered service combatting reconnaissance planes and scouts east of the Second Army front around Ypres. Though he would only see action for little more than a couple of months before the cessation of hostilities, he stayed in the UK for some time after the war. He returned to the USA in 1919—possibly having developed his own special relationship with the UK’s automotive creations.
Conrad H Jr grew up in Pasadena, and he didn’t go far to source the body for his Bentley. A relatively new enterprise, Walter Montgomery Murphy had founded the Walter M Murphy Company in 1920, and initially set about selling vehicles from Simplex, Lincoln, and Duesenberg.
He soon discovered that his glitzy clientele found the Lincolns he was selling a little on the boring side, so he decided to set up a coachbuilding firm on the side. Murphy soon became known for its clever designs, most famously the Disappearing-Top Convertible Coupe body that had been created by George R Fredericks and Charles Gerry. Though Murphy bodied everything from Bugattis to Cadillacs, and Mercedes-Benzes to Rolls-Royces, the company really became known for its Duesenberg designs.
The man behind chassis YR5085’s distinctive look was the youthful designer Franklin Q Hershey. But for the intervention of his mother’s financial advisor, he might not have joined Murphy, come up with some of the firm’s magnificent designs, nor gone on to create iconic designs for Ford. Frank Spring, who worked as an overseeing designer at Murphy, wasn’t too taken with the teenage Hershey’s designs. However, at the insistence of the financial advisor, Walter Murphy was inclined to give Spring orders to employ him part-time.
Spring, after all, was more of a mechanical engineer than a designer, and was preoccupied with gadgets more than pure aesthetics. Hershey was the opposite, crafting sensuous designs with simple touches—you can see this in chassis YR5085, with its sweeping, rounded wings with beaded edges. It was a style Hershey also employed on the famous Peerless V-16 prototype—a spectacular blend of a fully custom bonnet, an extravagantly raked windscreen, and a beltline that curves up to meet the cowl, neatly hiding the cut lines for the windows. Such design cues are perhaps more readily known for being used by Raymond Dietrich on Individual Custom Packards. It is truly an enchanting combination, neatly blending the sporting panache of the racing Bentleys that had forged the company’s legend on the pockmarked roads of Le Mans with the swinging style of America’s West Coast.
It’s easy to imagine such a suave vehicle pulling up outside the only recently completed Equitable Building, located on 6253 West Hollywood Boulevard (now known as The Lofts at Hollywood and Vine). Though the retail space on the ground floor was finished in 1929, it took until 1931 for the office space above, measuring 12 storeys, to be finished.
In many ways it was the perfect setting for Conrad H Jr’s bespoke Bentley—Alex Curlett’s architectural nous blended Art Deco with Gothic Revival, and was instantly occupied by the leading lights in Hollywood’s finance and entertainment world. After the Bank of Hollywood moved in, the infamous talent agent Myron Selznick followed—after all, not only was this the largest office building in Hollywood at the time, but it had a solarium and squash court on the roof.
It was the epicentre of the modern world, where the relatively novel concepts of modern advertising, television, commerce, and radio saw powerbrokers and stars traverse its doors on a daily basis—and this Bentley would have been at the heart of it all.
It’s not hard to imagine the double-takes and stares this scintillating one-off design would have received, marking as it did a step change in the way Bentleys were bodied.
This spectacular design came at a time when Murphy’s engineers were moving away from composite wood frame/aluminum skin construction and started to use a stamped-body structure; the wood was now only for upholstery and trim. As such, chassis YR5085 is notable for being the first all-metal bodied Bentley.
Sadly, by the time this chassis was ready to be delivered to Conrad H Jr, the Great Depression was taking its toll on Murphy too. It had started to build ‘bodies in white’ for West Coast Packard distributor Earl C Anthony, and Franklin's Los Angeles distributor, Ralph Hamlin. It had also farmed out the construction of its designs to the American Body Co (Lincoln), Biddle & Smart (Hudson), the Limousine Body Co (Auburn), and Murray (Lincoln). However, little more than six months after this grand Bentley was delivered, Walter Murphy realised the writing was on the wall. In 1932 he sold out to Kenneth McKay, but not before torching the company’s photographs, body drafts, shop records, and negatives. Possibly as a result, McKay only lasted another six months before going out of business.
The fate of chassis YR5085 is less certain after delivery—there are no records detailing how long Conrad H used it for. At some point it had been acquired by a Scandinavian mining engineer and was brought to the silver town of Zacatecas, Mexico, where it was found by Bill Rivas in 1948. Abandoned in a hotel garage after its owner left without paying the bill, Rivas acquired the car and shipped it to Mexico City, setting to work on its restoration.
After several years and little progress, he sold it to Ignacio Cuenca in 1958. The engine problems that had plagued Rivas prompted Cuenca to fit a Diamond T truck engine, though the Bentley original was retained. The car (and its engine) was then passed to Porfirio Diaz, who kept the Bentley until 1971.
Don Weber then took stewardship (having negotiated its sale over two years), and dispatched it to the British restoration firm of Hofmann & Mountfort, who set about a four-year restoration that included it being reunited with its original engine. Though the original front crossmember had been removed, a new one was recreated. One of the original hammered silver door handles had gone missing too, but Weber tracked down Murphy’s former assistant shop foreman, who recast the handle in brass and hand-textured it—using the same hammer used for the original handles in 1931.
After winning its class and Best Vintage Bentley at the Bentley Drivers Club Concours at Kensington Gardens upon its 1976 completion, it was sold to the USA via Norman Herstein of Seattle. It then passed through several collectors before being displayed at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in 2007.
The current owner acquired the car in 2012 and set about a complete restoration via RC Moss of Bedford, England. Every component was rebuilt to factory specifications, with the body returned to its original livery. It returned to Pebble Beach in 2019, finishing second in class. The car that beat it went on to take the top gong.
This is a truly special Bentley—even aside from it being one of only two American-bodied Bentleys, it represents two ailing giants in their respective industries, on two sides of the Atlantic, in their final days.
For Bentley, the 8-Litre would be the last completely new car it would launch before the company collapsed in May 1931. For Murphy, a great name that had bodied many of the world’s finest chassis, it would be all over within a year. Each went out with a bang rather than a whimper.
Today, this spectacular and utterly unique 8-Litre remains a striking reminder of the Golden Era of British motoring, the dizzying heights of 1920s Hollywood glamour, and the greatness that could come from Anglo-American collaboration.
A hugely significant piece of both British and American automotive culture, this special Full Classic will mark a serious opportunity for collectors when it crosses the block at RM Sotheby’s Arizona sale.
