The interior, with Reutter reclining front chairs, was largely standard, with full-sized rear seats and one of the best-looking Crewe Bentley dashboards, complete with a rev counter.
It also had electric front windows: McLeod was evidently softening his views on weight-saving and superfluous luxury, but he remained insistent on the light-giving Perspex roof panel.
Chassis BC106AR went into the trade some time in the 1970s and has only had one registered keeper since 1978 (when the logbooks were computerised), after a Jack Barclay rebuild in 1973-’74, having been sold via the now long-defunct Clarendon Carriage Company.
This Bentley S2 Continental was originally painted matt black
It had its first outing since the late 1980s when it turned up at an H&H Duxford auction in 2023, painted silver and with various minor modifications; the front indicator units, for instance, are from a Silver Cloud III/S3.
Approaching obliquely from the side you don’t notice the lack of rear overhang at first, but there is no escaping the fact that the out-of-balance side elevation is all kinds of wrong.
Panelcraft did its best with the rear wing and bootlid treatment, but the overall effect is unavoidably freakish and stunted: worse, in many ways, than McLeod’s early attempts, which at least had the amateurish charm that is part of the Bentley ‘Special’ tradition.
FLM Panelcraft of Battersea created this reworked Bentley
The last of these strange confections, based on an S3 Continental, possibly lent itself to the McLeod approach a little more sympathetically.
Once again FLM Panelcraft was commissioned to perform the necessary modifications on chassis BC38XC, sweeping the bootlid down from the rear window in a semi-fastback style between curtailed rear fins that retained the same general architecture of the standard design.
As with the S2, the Bentley’s big rear overriders were dispensed with, the ‘H1’ numberplate was attached directly to the bootlid (with no surround) and filling up required that the boot – which looked as if it had been pinched from a BMC 1100 – be raised on its somewhat incongruous-looking outside hinges.
From the rear three-quarter view, the effect of the Bentley’s tail chop is less obvious
Design 2023/F was ordered with sliding front seats, McLeod’s trademark second ‘dummy’ exhaust tailpipe and the batteries moved to the centre of the boot floor.
Perhaps the most intriguing fact about this final one-off is that it was bought by singer Engelbert Humperdinck in 1979; he sold it through Bonhams in 2018.
One of the many useful things about having near-bottomless pockets is that you can have pretty much whatever you want, pretty much whenever you want it.
The notion that just because something can be done, does not mean that it should, is not a concept that would resonate with the kind of tycoon who was determined to have something different and hang the expense.
Images: Max Edleston
Thanks to: Telchristie Car Sales; Nubes Argentea Books; Klaus-Josef Rossfeldt; The Real Car Co
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Martin Buckley
Senior Contributor, Classic & Sports Car