Carrosserie Vanvooren

In addition to their production facilities on the edge of town, Vanvooren had a show room at 33 Rue Marbeuf in the exclusive 8th arrondissement of Paris.

The oldest surviving Vanvooren bodied car, dating from 1911, is a Mercedes 38/70HP, delivered to Samuel Colt, heir to his uncle's weaponry dynasty.

1929 saw another milestone when company boss Marius Daste, working in collaboration with his new business partner Romée de Prandières, developed and patented a flexible metal-reinforced car-body structure, employing the "Silentbloc" rubber anti-vibration mountings and joints manufactured by a neighbouring firm called "Repusseau and company" ("Repusseau et cie.").

Daste's car body building system became public at the Paris Motor Show in 1930 where it was identified as an important advance; more than 40 European carriage builders quickly acquired licenses to apply the Vanvooren/Daste patent.

In the same year at the London Motor Show the company's British agent, J. Smith & Co., exhibited three car bodies of this type constructed on Delage chassis, all three finished in an eye-catching two tone silver/black colour scheme, and which made a big impression.

In Britain patent marketing was handled by a company called "Silent Travel" and most of the major auto-makers purchased licenses.

In 1932 the collaborative nature of the relationship between the two businesses was further deepened when Marius Daste quit the top job at Vanvooren in order to take up an appointment as production direction with Hispano-Suiza.

This car was based on a design by Figoni & Falaschi intended originally for a Delahaye 165 chassis, and has a flamboyant style quite out of keeping with the restraint characteristic of Vanvooren's other work at this time.

Other French leading manufacturers of luxury cars, notably Delage and Delahaye, also supplied chassis to be equipped with Vanvooren bodies.

A project to move closer to the mass market sector by collaborating with Citroën collapsed after just a handful or prototypes had been built out of a planned minimum quota of 100 cars.

Again, commercial collaboration was underpinned by a personal relationship: Walter Sleator, who was in charge of "Franco-Britannic Autos", Rolls-Royce's French importer, had been Vanvooren's own sales director in their prestigious Rue Marbeuf Showroom back in the 1920s.

At the time when France fell, seven Mark V "Corniche" chassis had been delivered from Derby to Vanvooren's Paris factory, and of these four had already received their bodywork.

That never happened; meanwhile, the now fully repaired body from the crashed prototype was sent back to the Rolls-Royce Derby plant in order to be reconnected with its chassis.