Bentley has for years been one of the world’s top manufacturers of ridiculously expensive luxury cars. But the company is actually based on trains, motorcycles, and their original product: racing cars.
Walter Own Bentley was born September 16, 1888 in London. His family was well off, although not wealthy, so although he attended a private school, he left at 16 to become an apprentice in the Great Northern Railway. It was a “premium” apprenticeship that his father paid 75 pounds for (pretty expensive in 1904), and Bentley learned everything from metal casting to how to shovel coal into a steam locomotive. He reportedly loved working on the railroad, but decided that they didn’t offer enough to make a whole career out of.
About the time he left the Great Northern Railway he started competing in motorcycle races. He was pretty good at it, and was hired onto the Indian Motorcycles factory racing team in 1910. But that wasn’t where he wanted to spend his career either, so he quit racing to study engineering at King’s College London. After that he got a job overseeing the maintenance of 250 taxicabs for the National Motor Cab Company.
The cab company experience convinced him that automobiles were the wave of the future, so in 1912 he and one of his brothers formed the “Bentley and Bentley” company and sold cars. Specifically they sold DFP cars, a French brand. Thinking back to his motorcycle racing experience, he thought he could sell more cars if they started winning races. The DFPs were not fast enough to do that, though, so he used his knowledge of metal casting to create new aluminum pistons for one. WIth a few other modifications, Bentley’s DFP set several racing records in 1913 and 1914.
At that point the Great War broke out, and Bentley worked with the Royal Naval Air Service to share with British engine builders his knowledge of aluminum pistons and increasing motor performance. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his work. Looking for a new venture after the war, Bentley founded Bentley Motors Limited in London, and delivered his first car in 1921. The company’s motto was “To build a good car, a fast car, the best in class.” In those days Bentleys were performance cars, not luxury cars. They were very powerful and reliable, but also big and heavy. They won races, but a rival designer, Ettore Bugatti, called them “the fastest trucks in the world.” Bentley designed another large car, the “8 Litre,” that did begin to be used as the basis for luxury limos.
Then the Great Depression intervened and Bentley Motors Limited went bankrupt. It was bought by Rolls Royce, which had noticed the success of the luxury-oriented 8 Litre model. Bentley endured some difficult months in 1931; he had no source of income and his wife left him. They even made him give back his company car, a Bentley 8 Liter. Luckily, though, he was asked to come back to work for Rolls Royce, and became a designer again. He stayed for four years, then joined the Lagonda company as Technical Director. Lagonda was another luxury car maker — and still is, in the form of Aston Martin Lagonda. Then another war intervened, and Bentley worked on designing weapons, still for Lagonda. He also, though, designed a new, smaller engine they anticipated would be needed for their cars after the war.
Lagonda and Aston Martin got connected in the late 1940s when David Brown, the founder of Aston Martin, bought the whole Lagonda company. He said later that he bought Lagonda mostly because of Bentley’s expertise. But Bentley didn’t stay at Lagonda; he moved to another company, Armstrong Siddeley, where he once again designed engines. He stated at Armstrong Siddeley until he retired, in the late 1950s. All the while, wealthy people were buying “Bentleys,” even though Bentley himself hadn’t had a single thing to do with those cars for decades. Among automobile enthusiasts, there are TWO kinds of Bentley cars — the early ones actually designed by Bentley (these are ones they want) and then all the others (which they aren’t so keen on).
