Also in my garage: wooden propellers, butterflies and moths

By Martin Buckley

| 31 Oct 2025

Classic & Sports Car – Also in my garage: wooden propellers and butterflies

“If people ask what I do,” says Cotswolds-based retired inventor Richard Gray, “I’m tempted to say ‘the management of decay’ because the house is falling down, the cars are always going wrong and my body is falling apart!”

Richard’s eclectic fleet includes a 1954 R-type Bentley, a Jaguar XK120 he’s owned for 20 years and a toolroom C-type rep built for Frazer Nash guru Werner Oswald.

A Citroën Light 15 is his only non-UK classic, but the Riley Pathfinder is a more recent acquisition that appears at odds with the rest: “I bought it because of the late-’50s TV series No Hiding Place – the opening credits showed a Pathfinder [or a Wolseley 6/90] exiting Scotland Yard… I just always wanted one.”

This canvas-wrapped British propeller was used for Wolseley Viper and Hispano-Suiza engines

After taking a degree in political philosophy, Richard, now 76, worked in various business-development roles: “I was a one-man think tank, but resigned after having a nightmare that I was being dug out of the Egyptian desert by archaeologists, only to be labelled as an example of ‘corporate man’.”

Taking this as a sign, Richard forged out on his own, producing gizmos that would change behaviours at work: the self-scrolling menu-pricing display board he developed in 1988 was taken up by 38 car manufacturers’ service departments: “I paid off the mortgage and produced other things – I had 24 patents in the end.

“But I reached the point where the more money I made, the more miserable I got, so I bought this old farmhouse 22 years ago and now spend my days messing about with old cars, butterflies and moths.”

This German-made airscrew hangs over the mantlepiece

The latter have been a lifelong passion: “There are 59 species of British butterflies and moths, and I’ve got 26 or 27 here; my motto is ‘success through neglect’.

“In other words, by doing nothing, and seeing what happens, I attract hundreds of butterflies. I do butterfly walks to raise money for the local hospice.”

Sticking with the flight theme, Richard also has a small collection of early 20th-century wooden propellers.

“My father was in the air force,” he explains, “and when he died I found two propellers – or airscrews – in the loft.”

Classic car enthusiast Richard Gray’s other love is for butterflies and moths

“One had a letter with it from the Imperial War Museum, explaining that it was from a WW1 mid-altitude, single-engined SE5A fighter,” he explains. “The other is a mean-looking German one marked ‘Axial Berlin’ [the manufacturer] and the word drück (pressure).

“I thought it was a Zeppelin prop, but it’s from a Friedrichshafen GIII, one of the world’s first bombers and likely from an aircraft that was shot down.

“I’ve got it hanging in the dining room, with the British one in my little snug where I watch the telly.

“The SE5A prop is laminated walnut with a canvas coating, which was an early attempt at mitigating against icing up [it didn’t really work]. The German one is mahogany and walnut.”

This Friedrichshafen GIII wooden propeller probably belonged to a German bomber that was shot down

Richard’s history with spoils of war doesn’t end there.

When he was at university in the early ’70s, he had an MG TC and remembers: “One of the girls on my course said to me one day, ‘My father has a car a bit like this except it’s larger, with big exhaust pipes coming out of the bonnet.’

“It turned out to be an ex-German Embassy Mercedes-Benz 500K Cabriolet B that had been sold at a post-war auction.

“Her father drove it into his garden shed in East Molesey in 1949 and it was still there in ’72 with the roof collapsed on top of it.”

Richard pestered the owner for two years to sell it to him: “Eventually he gave it to me; two years later I had it running and I drove it for 20 years. I even used to go to work in it, but it was horrible to drive!”

Images: Jack Harrison

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