Twelve-year-old John Blatchley spent most of his teenage life confined to his bed due to rheumatic fever; however, not all of the time he spent inside was wasted. Even as a child John had a fascination with automobiles and so he would spend his afternoons drafting sketches and building models of his fantasy car designs.
Later he attended the Chelsea School of Engineering and upon completion was quickly hired at Gurney Nutting, the leading London Coachbuilder, in 1936.
At Gurney, Blatchley was asked to create the beginning sketches for the bodies on customer’s bespoke vehicles. They would then be materialized on an actual car.
Blatchley narrowly escaped the draft of WWII in 1940 because of a lingering heart murmur from his stint with rheumatic fever and was instead sent to Rolls-Royce Nottinghamshire Factory to design metal aero engine cowlings which he found to be “intensely boring”.
Lucky for him, it wasn’t long before plans to create a post-war, factory supplied Rolls-Royce arose to which they needed to assign a primary stylist—Blatchley happily took the job.
And so the Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn was born, the first Standard-Steel Rolls, which was accountable for most of Rolls-Royce’s success after the war.
Because of the decreasing popularity of the use of a chauffeur, the vehicle had to be designed around the driving man’s wishes: lower, narrower, shorter, and with more luggage space and visibility. It was a sophisticated vehicle that glided over the open road with style and finesse.
