Rolls Royce silver and gold

 

I was really glad to have had a 280 Rolls Royce in silver in my collection so that I could be absolutely sure that the latest arrival here in the village was, indeed, not the same silver but gold!

Sure enough, the difference is very clear and this is a beautiful and scarce edition of the 280 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow (corrected!) finished in metallic gold. You do have to place models side by side, however, as photos simply don't do the colour justice when taken on its own.

As you'll be able to tell from the style of box shown below, this was a late issue, probably from 1976/7. Great Britain's Rolls Royce should, of course, always be represented by an impressive model and Corgi had tried hard, albeit at a time when production methods were not producing the same sort of quality as we had become used to in the 1960s. The first Rolls Royce was the 273 model, usually finished in creamy silver and chalky blue-grey, first issued in March 1970.

Only a few months later though, in October 1970, the Golden Jacks base is replaced by a Whizzwheels one and a fine, if a bit clunky, model is ruined. The dreadful wheels were the same terrible design used across the board at the time. (If you see one with red spot wheels that will be something someone has made afterwards as the wheels were very simple to change.)

The colours selected for the 280 Whizzwheels Rolls Royce were so much better, however, being a rich metallic blue and silver. If you're very lucky, you might find the 273 model in the same finish but these are almost as scarce as the gold 280!

Later in production it changes to an all metallic blue finish.

At some point the quarterlight disappears but the colour and wheels remain unchanged.

Finally, much later in its life, someone at Corgi decides that the model really should get better wheels. After all, they had been making reasonable alternatives to the awful black plastic things for other models for some time. Maybe someone from Derby made a call to the boss. Whatever the case, a metallic silver finish and much better wheels are on the last issue. For some reason best known to someone at Corgi the chrome was finished in gold rather than silver, with distinctly gold wheels too, on many silver issues so you'll find silver with silver or gold chromework.

I have also seen some metallic blue 280 models with the six-point star type of Whizzwheels. It looks awful but that's not the reason I mention it. The curious thing is that all the models I have seen with those wheels had a quarterlight. One would have thought that, having abandoned the quarterlight at some stage in the 'four crowns' style of wheel production it would not have returned. 

Whatever the order of things was in those strange days at Corgi, when shelves would have had the big 1:36 scale models sitting next to the last 1:43 scale ones, these Rolls Royce models prove themselves to be much more interesting than you might have thought. There are lots of 280s around and most only fetch a few pounds even in good condition.

It would appear that only the silver and gold finish models have the more realistic style of wheels and all the previous 280s have silver chromework.

I have always been a big fan of the 273 in the rare blue and silver, but this 280 in metallic gold, which was what started off this article, is quite a grand item to have on one's desk with a lot more presence than the silver one. Interestingly, mine has silver wheels rather than gold. Perhaps there are some all gold models out there too?