Bill Hamilton

Sir,
Your column “A Remarkable Bentley” in the January issue is a misnomer. It should be “A Remarkable Man” because Bill Hamilton is just that.

Your concluding paragraph is, I am quite sure, wrong. The Hamilton Bentley was around these parts throughout the 1930s and was easily identified when on the road (shingle, of course), so the legend has it, as a black blurred object preceding a vast cloud of dust by a good half-mile. Your informant about a 4 1/2 coming here after the war must have confused the Hamilton car with Lieutenant-Commander Tunnicliffe’s much later model 4 1/2 which was around Auckland in the late 1940s and had the dubious distinction of demolishing a row of verandah posts on a very wet night with but superficial damage to itself.

I enclose a photo of the Hamilton car taken by its present owner some 13 years ago in the company of the former DPA-231, the Light Sports Railton which has been in New Zealand since 1950.

R.B. Shand.
S. Canterbury, NZ.

[See later “Cars In Books” for present whereabouts of the Hamilton Bentley—Ed].