Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Pinin Farina

Chassis 10EM is a 1923 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost originally delivered with an Enclosed Drive Landaulette body by Hooper. The car was supplied new to Lieutenant Colonel Sir Courtauld-Thomson—later Lord Courtauld-Thomson—an influential British businessman and public servant. He was the son of Robert William Thomson of Edinburgh, noted for inventing the pneumatic tyre. The chassis and its first body were not originally paired with long-term intent. In 1926, the Hooper body was removed, and the chassis was re-bodied in Turin by the coachbuilder Stabilimenti Farina. Farina had already produced, in the same year, a Berline on a Rolls-Royce 20 HP chassis, and the Silver Ghost Limousine Coupé de Ville followed similar construction principles. The new Farina body featured the firm’s typical restrained surfaces, upright greenhouse, and careful proportioning between the bonnet height and the passenger compartment. The design combined open-drive chauffeur accommodation with an enclosed rear compartment, a configuration that reflected contemporary European ceremonial usage. The body was constructed using period-correct methods, including a wood framework and paneling consistent with Italian coachbuilding practice of the mid-1920s. It replaced Hooper’s more conservative Landaulette architecture with a cleaner, more rectilinear profile. The car retained the Silver Ghost’s mechanical specification: a 7.4-litre inline-six engine, a robust ladder chassis, and cantilever rear suspension. The characteristic Rolls-Royce frontal arrangement—tall radiator, drum headlamps, and cycle-type front wings—was preserved, but the remainder of the coachwork bore clear Farina signatures. The car is currently known under Dutch registration FS-36-ZJ and appears in archival material and event photography, including its participation in the Rolls-Royce Alpine Trial Celebration. The combination of a British chassis and a Turin-built body makes 10EM a rare example of Giovanni Farina coachwork on a Silver Ghost, and one of the few surviving instances of the firm’s work on Rolls-Royce platforms in the interwar period.