The Things They Say...

“My secretary counted up my written invitations last year and there were 635—and a lot more by phone! I get letters inviting me for any day in 1976. I still find it amazing I can’t go anywhere in the World without being spotted. It took five years to find our period house in the country and when we first moved in our furniture was lost in it, it’s so vast.” —Graham Hill blowing his own trumpet in Radio Times, when about to introduce a Disney News programme.

“There are two ways of looking at the Rolls-Royce car. Both were summed up by letters written to Life magazine back in 1958 after it had published a study of the subject. One read—’Well done. The virtues of a precision instrument should be made known to all. However. . . I was shaken by your assemblyline picture showing a Rolls partially built. Gentlemen, I would have been no less shocked to have seen a picture of the Queen in her bath. The other read—’Even an Egyptian Pharaoh would have hesitated to pay 13,793 dollars for what appears to be a perambulating sarcophagus with a radiator like a chromeplated tombstone.'”—Maurice D. Hendry opening an attack on Rolls-Royce in the NZ Listener last year, in which he trots out all those old arguments which have no effect at all on Rolls-Royce sales or prestige!