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SCMP Reporter

ASK Keith Bowley what is so special about the Rolls-Royce and one only needs to sit back and watch him slip into overdrive.

  Words like 'excellence' and 'class' come easy as he eulogises about his life-long love affair with the Silver Lady.

  It is this devotion to unarguably the world's most famous automobile that brought Bowley to Hong Kong from England on a brief visit.

  There he runs a successful vintage car restoration service for an international clientele with a taste for this expensive hobby - including Hong Kong hotel magnate Michael Kadoorie and garment millionaire William Connor.

  And it is for Kadoorie that Bowley has painstakingly restored a 1934 Rolls-Royce Phantom II, a task he carried out in his Ashton Keynes workshop in the west of England.

  The car, one of only two ever built in that model (the other is in England), was discovered sitting neglected in a garage on the west coast of the United States.

  Kadoorie bought it and commissioned Bowley to restore it to its former glory. That was three years ago. The breathtakingly classy car is now parked in the Peninsula's basement where it enjoys the reputation of being Hong Kong's most pampered vehicle with its own air-conditioned garage - and liveried minder.

  That's Ringo Chan, the most envied chauffeur in the Pen's fleet, who was flown by Kadoorie to Bowley's place in England where he was given a crash (and we use the word advisedly!) course through the country lanes of Wiltshire on handling the vintage car.

    Since the Rolls will be used in Hong Kong and hired out by the hotel, Bowley has added some creature comforts - like air-conditioning, telephone and CD player.

  And incidentally, the pre-digital boast of Rolls-Royce that the only sound one hears in their cars is the ticking of the clock still holds in this car.

  Exulted Bowley: 'I have professionally restored cars of all kinds. But this gave me the greatest challenge and pleasure.

  'Michael was a great help, too. A lot of the work I did on it was based on thoughts filtering in from Michael.'   As for its value on the market? 'You just can't put a price on it,' he said.



Bowley bowled over by a special lady