TG’s guide to coachbuilders: Mulliner

It strikes us that we’ve been featuring nothing but Italian coachbuilders. And that makes sense; if you hear hooves, you think cavalli, after all.

But as rightly renowned as the big names from the boot-shaped country are, they’re not the only skin in the game. And the phrase ‘skin in the game’ is just the kind of phrase that would be wholly shunned by our featured coachbuilder today – Mulliner.

But that’s a bit of a tricky one. See, Mulliner could refer to any one of a number of companies throughout England, each bearing the Mulliner name and each started by a member of the same family. We’re assuming the one Mulliner that became a physician was looked down at at Mulliner family Christmas parties.

The one we’re mostly referring to here is H.J. Mulliner & Co, a car coachbuilder that started way back at the turn of the 20th Century, but even that was an extension of the Mulliner’s carriage-building businesses of the 1700s.

Originally, H.J. Mulliner (the man, not the company) set up shop in Mayfair, befitting what the car was at the turn of the 19th Century: a luxury item, exclusively for the monied elite.
 
But, like so many coachbuilders the world over, independence seems to be simply a matter of time. Various members of the Mulliner family had started coachbuilding houses all over England, as well as buying and selling locations among the family. However, with the 20th Century being (among other things) the time of mergers, conglomerations and massive concentrations of industrial might, H.J. Mulliner was bought and sold a few times by people who weren’t even members of the family. Eventually, Mulliner sold to Bentley, while it was under the stewardship of Rolls-Royce. Rolls also owned another coachbuilder, Park Ward. That’s why you’ll hear about cars like the Rolls-Royce Phantom Mulliner Park Ward and Bentley Continental Mulliner Park Ward. Same company, same people, same basic idea about cars and car-building.

What this long-winded answer to a very simple question is arriving at is that Mulliner spent time in Chiswick and Willesden before eventually moving to Crewe, along with the rest of Bentley production. Phew. Got there in the end, didn’t we?

If you assumed ‘mostly Rolls-Royces and Bentleys’, you wouldn’t be far off the mark. Mulliner has been pretty exclusively a coachbuilder of top-tier British cars. Notice how we said ‘top-tier’ and not ‘low-volume’, because that’d encompass half the British car industry.

Yes indeedy – as we said earlier, Mulliner did a fine trade in horse-drawn carriages back when that was the best way to get around, before a few enterprising souls in the Mulliner family branched out into the new-fangled world of horseless carriages.

A couple of branches of the Mulliner family built actual coaches and buses, but – being website writers and not tweed-jacketed historians – we didn’t find any instances of H.J. Mulliner building anything other than cars. Unless you count Royal limousines, which could be argued are less cars and more mobile pageantry devices.

Yes. Yes we can. That award goes to none other than the Bentley S1 R-Type Continental fastback coupe, which, apart from being the fastest four-seater car in the world back in the 1950s, also takes the staid and stolid nature of British upper-crust car manufacturing and turns it on its head. Bentleys had been press-ganged into sporting service before; now, Bentley itself would embrace performance and build a sports car for minted playboys.

The big B picked then-independent Mulliner over Park Ward (its in-house builder since the Thirties) because of Mulliner’s more advanced abilities with aerodynamics and lightweight steel construction. And you’d have to say that the results speak for themselves. What also speaks for them is the fact that Bentley bought Mulliner lock, stock and hand-chamfered barrel a few years later.

When you’re talking about a coachbuilder that, after the 1930s, pretty much exclusively bodied Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, it’s going to be pretty difficult to pick a bad one. More so when, after 1959, it unequivocally bodied the uppermost echelon of British motoring.

But worst we must find, and find we did. The wooden spoon can only be claimed by the Camargue, which was the easiest way to tell whether an arriviste had bought a Rolls-Royce and just how little taste they had. Old money and those with even a passing ken for tradition (and traditional beauty) bought the Corniche – which was a Mulliner Park Ward build and a Mulliner design, based on Mulliner’s two-door version of the Silver Shadow.

The Camargue, on the other hand, was a Pininfarina design (and one would have to admit not its best), but still dutifully built by Mulliner. We’re not in the camp that calls it one of the ugliest ever – the Mulliner Park Ward S3 Continental takes that dubious honour. But that’s not letting the Carmargue off the hook just yet.

The Camargue committed a far worse sin than mere ugliness. It just didn’t look solid, like a Rolls should. Its designers were from a school of thought (and, arguably, a country) whose idea of perfect styling is svelte, clean and free from heft. But heft is what makes a Roller, a feeling of largeness that can only come from a largesse with bodywork and adornments.

The saying goes that victory has many parents but failure is an orphan. In this case, failure had two parents – Pininfarina and Mulliner. Call it the exception to the rule.

You know how we said Mulliner was building carriages in the 1700s? That business was actually a descendant of the original Mulliner saddlery from 1559. Yup, Mulliner was in business in the Elizabethan era, which is just insane.

More than 450 years in business, with more than 250 of those as a coachbuilder. Just let that sink in for a bit. Frankly, unless we unearth some kind of druid carrozzeria, we’re unlikely to find anything with a longer history than Mulliner.

Under the auspices of Bentley, Mulliner’s purview has split into three discrete metiers. And yes, that is about the Bentley-est way we could put that sentence.

So, there’s Bentley Mulliner Collections, which is responsible for exclusive, ultra-luxe versions of its parent company’s production cars, as well as customisation of leather, trim, paint and so on in the ‘regular’ cars.

Then there’s Bentley Mulliner Coachbuilding, which is coachbuilding in the original sense of the word, of the kind that you’d expect from Touring Superleggera or Zagato. The Baccalar is probably the best example of Mulliner Coachbuilding’s modern work – a hand-built, limited run and neck-tweakingly gorgeous creation, based on the 12-cylinder Continental GT’s underpinnings.

Finally, there’s Bentley Mulliner Classic, which is kind of like an Antiques Roadshow division of Mulliner, concerned with the very oldest and most vaunted Bentleys of all time. And building continuations of them. Such as the 12 brand-new Bentley Blowers, each a perfect replica of the 1929 original. So Mulliner’s now set up to provide the perfect Bentley, regardless of which sort you want. Unless it’s a standard Bentley, of course. Then go join the rest of the hoi polloi in a (shudder) dealership. How gauche.