If King George VI had glanced out of the state coach and through the plate-glass window of coachbuilder Hooper’s showroom on the way home to Buckingham Palace from Westminster Abbey after his coronation on May 12, 1937, there’s a chance his eye might have been caught by the dramatic razor-edge styling of Steve Sherriff’s Rolls-Royce.
Sherriff, who’s owned the 25/30 Sports Saloon with its body by Hooper for almost two decades now, says his car had just been completed – with its fashionably edgy bodywork finished in Coronation Blue – but had not sold at the time of the coronation. And he has a souvenir program showing the procession passed Hooper’s establishment.
“I think the odds are good it was on display in the showroom. But I can’t prove it,” he says of the car’s possible coronation connection.
If it was on display, this classy Rolls would certainly have merited a look by the new King as he passed and will likely draw more than a few from the hoi polloi in the Toronto area this week as it joins other RR and Bentley automobiles taking part in the Rolls-Royce Owners Club’s week-long premier North American gathering.
The event is being staged at the Hilton Suites in Markham, Ont., and will include workshops, tours, a marketplace for rare bits and pieces and a Judging Day at which these grand cars will compete for concours honours (unfortunately not open to the public).
Sherriff, a career prosecutor for 38 years, is currently the “go-to guy for murder in Peel,” supervising and trying homicide cases in that region as a general counsel for the Ministry of the Attorney-General.
He grew up in Etobicoke and has enjoyed a “lifelong addiction to cars, particularly old ones” – owning dozens of all descriptions, starting with a 1956 Corvette and including one of every model of Ford Edsel produced. Nine, in case you were wondering.
Why the Edsels? “They were unusual and everybody hated them. My buddies and I found them eccentric, cheap and fast.”
His first car though was a brand-new 1965 Mustang, a gift from his parents on graduating high school and entering university, that was “fiendishly” rallied during his student days.
He recently made a return to motor sport as part of the Jagged Edge Motor Sports Team, which ran a 1984 Jaguar XJS in the recent ChumpCar event for $500 beaters at Shannonville Motorsport Park. His own concours award-winning 1988 V-12 XJS served as a much-needed parts donor car, cannibalized to keep the “racer” running.
Family, a succession of old and interesting automobiles and a law career apparently didn’t provide enough diversion for Sherriff, who’s also been heavily involved in aviation. He’s racked up about 4,000 hours in the air – holding an airline transport license and flying charters at one time – all in his “spare” time; he has flown everything from biplanes to a Lear jet.
But his “great adventure” was flying the Atlantic in the mid-1980s in his single-engined Mooney – both ways. “I owned the thing so I had to bring it back.”
The 1937 25/30 is actually his second Rolls-Royce. The first, a 1934 20/25, was purchased sight unseen from England with a student pal in 1972.
“We couldn’t afford to go and look at the thing so we took a chance,” he says. When it arrived on the docks in Montreal they soon realized their gamble hadn’t paid off.
