Bill B. Coburn - a Rolls-Royce Legend Log Out | Topics | Search
Moderators | Register | Edit Profile

Australian RR Forums » General Discussion » Bill B. Coburn - a Rolls-Royce Legend « Previous Next »

Author Message
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message

David Gore
Moderator
Username: david_gore

Post Number: 3589
Registered: 04-2003
Posted on Wednesday, 19 February, 2020 - 21:24:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Many of you who live outside Australia will know of one of our esteemed Club Members from Canberra who has made significant contributions over the years to encouraging custodians to become more involved in the care and maintenance of their vehicles especially those made after World War 2. Bill Coburn and fellow Club member the late George Shores were instrumental in helping set up the ACT Self-Help Group mainly to support local Silver Shadow owners starting to become involved with the regular maintenance and upkeep of their vehicles.

A short time later, John Begg and myself with the help of this forum contacted Bill Coburn regarding the ACT Self-Help group with the outcome that we established a similar Group in the NSW Branch of the Club and both Groups shared knowledge and get-togethers to share our knowledge and encourage other owners to become more actively involved in the maintenance of their vehicles.

This collaboration then resulted in Bill Coburn beginning to publish an occasional newsletter posted to Group members and later archived in the Technical Library. I will leave the rest of the story to Bill as below:

"I created the title "Tee One Topics" to label a task I had set myself over twenty years ago, to unlock the ‘masonic’ cache of technical knowledge of Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars! David may have told you the stories of my travails in the past, but lest he hasn’t, I will tell you now.

My introduction to the marques was at the age of 12 (I am now 82!). The father-in-law of my father’s then Sales Manager in Tasmania (our only island state, shivering south of Eastern Australia), insisted on buying his married daughter a new MkVI Bentley. The price, for the record, was £4,300. The nearest agents for the cars then, 1950, were Kellow Falkiner in Melbourne and well I remember the immediate response to the wish to purchase, was an enquiry as to how will the car be serviced in Hobart, the intended garaging site!

This was solved by the nomination of a roadside family mechanic’s business in the local suburb, who also sold fuel. You could well be far too young to comprehend the purchase of fuel then, which involved hand-pumping about 4 gallons into a measuring receptacle atop the bowser, noting the reading, emptying it into the customer’s car and repeating the process until the tank was full! Kellow’s sent one of their mechanics to Hobart to ‘examine’ the service station owner/manager, apparently found him acceptable and arranged shipment.

The only significant freighter available for the task of crossing Bass Straight was the SS Taroona so this ‘awesome’ brand new Bentley was craned aboard, duly secured with the rest of the freight, dispatched to the island state and unloaded in Launceston, the northern ‘city' of the island. It was then driven South to its new home.

The new 'owners to be', were actually gardening at the front of their house dressed as gardeners should be, when the car arrived in their driveway. The driver/salesman/representative addressed the residents and eventually established that the lady gardener in particular was to be the new owner of the car! He then, having installed the car in the garage, instructed them to not start or drive the vehicle and he would return the next day (a Sunday) and explain the techniques of driving the vehicle!

I suppose I never got over that car which remained at that address and used daily with no embarrassing problems. It was so well received that the lady-owner’s brother, an eminent optician in Hobart, bought himself a companion car a pre-owned black Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn SDB94. The Bentley eventually finished up in Melbourne years later in a brothel, the headlining - the best West-of-London wool Worsted cloth apparently strategically and artistically ‘holed’ decoratively, was ‘lit’ from behind to fascinate clients who were picked up in the car to be transported to the area of pleasure! I seem to recall that car being later converted to a ‘racer’ and it was on that news my enthusiasm, I confess, dwindled.

Nearly 40 years later I was enjoying a posting to our Embassy in Washington DC, having settled into Arlington VA and bought a Nash Rambler. One Sunday morning sampling around the riverside area I ‘ran into’ a large group of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys gathering for a Club function. The hapless organiser was one Horton Schoelkopf who introduced me to another member, Philip Brooks whose wife co-incidentally is now Federal President of the American RROC! Phil recounted his experiences with his early MarkVI and passing over several conversations I finished up with his car in my garage in Arlington. The car was minus the gear box having suffered a common fault with a collapsed component. The disease I had fought off for all those years, suddenly consumed me and I was hooked.

Back to the lady in Hobart with the 1950 MkVI Bentley. Her brother the ophthalmologist I have mentioned, bought a 1951 Silver Dawn. He apparently sold this car to someone in Canberra, This latter location by now was employing me in Defence and I was driving a very nice Holden Station wagon, consoling a wife and practising hatching children! Separately, our postman in conversation about cars generally mentioned a doctor who had a Rolls-Royce in pieces in another suburb and that there seemed to be no move to re-assemble it!

Long story short, I bought it, enlarged the garage in my first new house and completely dismantled it (the car not the house!). During an unguarded moment I suddenly found myself administering the political needs of the now late Malcolm Fraser, then Minister for Army [and later Prime Minister of Australia] so time for Rolls-Royce reconstruction was, you will appreciate, simply not available. Malcolm, by the way, sensing my interests took great delight directed at me denigrating the Marque which was a good way to start an argument. Malcom’s father apparently had a MkVI on the family farm when his son was at school and was one of the casualties of wool-wealthy farmers that drove State agents for the marque, mad with repairs.

The existence of this raft of problems was fairly well buried at the time and the cars’ survival was a credit to all concerned. On top of the parent Company’s survival of the demands of WW2 and the extraordinary confidence to sell a very luxurious car when fuel rationing was just being eased. The Bentley retailed as I remember for £4,300. For comparison, my father bought a brand new 1948 Chevrolet for £840!

Malcom’s father having taken delivery and driving home from the dealers, at a traffic stop there was a tap on the driver’s window and some man offered him £2,500 cash for the car, on-the-spot (as we used to say)! I think the Bentley at the time was £4,300!!!

I apologise for all this reminiscing. Eventually having got SDB94, extended my garage, dismantled the car and rebuilt it, I found a growing coterie of would-be enthusiasts, some with cars and others seeing the possibility of owning a post-war model of the marque, but avoiding bankruptcy, ceased to be a fantasy! There was also a coterie of past mechanics who had worked at dealer level and a few who wrote many words about the Marque. The former group with a very few exceptions were quite helpful in sharing their knowledge.

Most owners knew enough about a motor car to know what questions to ask as well as when to and where. We also quickly identified the few well versed former as well as then current maintenance practitioners who adroitly side stepped questions about ‘fixing' the vehicles!

Harking back to my posting to Washington and my meeting with Phil Brooks, one day he casually mentioned he had a three volume set of spares information sheets published by the Factory at the time of his cars’ manufacture!!!!! Needless to say they were very quickly copied! If you wrote to the Factory and asked a technical question involving repairing your Rolls you would always get a precise reply, formal and detailed but written with the assumption that the recipient was indeed a well experienced trained automotive mechanic!

I was fortunate, gaining not only what ever I could from the Factory by correspondence, but I also had a small coterie of qualified mechanics who had survived WW2 and had to resurrect all manner of cars from the thirties including examples from factories in Europe that by then resembled little more than bombed rubbish dumps! This latter environment and an almost complete dearth of basic instructions for repair and maintenance of surviving cars did not help the would-be enthusiast bent on resurrecting a beloved antique! One impetus of which few people were aware, was an apparent initiative by the American Congress of the day, to enact requirements that vehicle manufacturers, if they sold their wares in the US, had to provide for public consumption, instructions as to how to maintain their product.

This requirement I understand, still applies at least for cars with a reasonable sales achievement in the United States. Of course where large numbers of new cars came on the market the impetus for entrepreneurial workshop manuals was a marketable product!

Back to SDB94 in my extended garage and I immediately recall my 'yet to be teens' daughter and son, cleaning the bare chassis frame of my Rolls-Royce. I should mention this was necessary because the documented stories of sheep farmers who bought these cars, showed that comfort was not an unreasonable expectation when rounding up the sheep. In the vast open paddocks, Australia enjoyed so many of these cars. Chassis cracking while negotiating troughs and hillocks in paddocks while chasing valuable wool carriers became a known problem to owner and dealer alike.

The Factory was alerted and predictably redesigned the basic structure of the chassis frame to cure the ‘weakness’! So the chassis of SDB94 was cleaned by my children and carted to a well-practised welding establishment where during one day the frame was modified in accordance with Factory drawings and to this day there are experienced users of these vehicles who claim that this dear old relic feels as rigid as an original specimen!

With the registration of my car and the emergence in the greater Canberra area of more revivable chassis, a slowly growing coterie of owners grew until we were invited and eventually recognised as a new Branch of the Rolls-Royce Owners' Club of Australia! An undercurrent of concern started to grow that owners were being encouraged to take an interest in the workings of their cars as well as the traditional gossip relating to leather tonics, tyre pressures and sunroof rattles!

Group rallies of cars usually on a theme became popular, inhibited in Canberra by hapless municipal operators who dreaded cars being displayed on their pristine green swards looking marvellous but afterwards dotted by glistening circles of leaked oil from ancient chassis! Drip trays and well sealed tarpaulins usually quelled these well-understood problems. But one fine Saturday as a pure whim I persuaded one of our RR owners to jack up their car laterally as high as was safe to remove the wheels and lay a tarpaulin on the ground beneath.

There was much scepticism and our traditional enthusiasts likened the display to a perverse vein of exhibitionism. The public reaction was amazing! The sight of enthusiasts of all shapes and sizes laying of their backs, slithering under the car and having interminable arguments about design and maintenance was a reward we could not have expected!

It was then that Tee One Topics germinated!

The gestation location was a very inconspicuous small hall in Canberra with a couple of dozen club members and a few ‘invitees’ curious to hear our accounts at the ritual monthly meeting. After the usual obligatory reports and votes the floor was open and comments invited. Up stood a person, a stranger to all attending, who reacted to an invitation from the meeting chairman, to tell us about his car. Public speaking was, fairly speaking, not in the speaker’s immediately obvious talents. Notwithstanding, this guest commenced ‘well I’ve bought this here Tee One Bentley and’, before another word was uttered he was interrupted by a more knowledgeable member of the meeting, correcting his choice of words and effectively berating him for his ignorance. The gist of the interruption was the use of 'Tee One' implying that this was factory nomenclature. The hapless aspiring member apparently stopped speaking and left shortly after, never to be seen or heard of again!

Tee One as the material seems to be known these days is literally read all over the world. They are my ramblings about Rolls-Royce as I see them; they are not authoritative unless marked as such but are offered in good faith. So far I have not had a remonstrance about any ‘Topics’ but I have been delighted to see casual comments in our Club's Open Forum, lauding the comments usually in a vein that their existence is comforting!"
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message

Alan Dibley
Frequent User
Username: alsdibley

Post Number: 226
Registered: 10-2009
Posted on Thursday, 20 February, 2020 - 18:18:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Wonderful.

Alan D.
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message

richard george yeaman
Prolific User
Username: richyrich

Post Number: 1141
Registered: 04-2012
Posted on Thursday, 20 February, 2020 - 20:22:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

If you havent read them,its time you did they are a wealth of knowledge and humour.

Richard.
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message

Larry Kavanagh
Frequent User
Username: shadow_11

Post Number: 577
Registered: 05-2016
Posted on Friday, 21 February, 2020 - 09:50:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Tee One Topics are a treasure trove and I've been most grateful on many an occasion for the time and effort put into compiling them. The alphabetical index has made the publications more user friendly and the entertaining manner in which many of the subjects are approached adds to the enjoyment while studying them. Hats off to all involved.
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message

Trevor Pickering
Experienced User
Username: commander1

Post Number: 118
Registered: 06-2012
Posted on Friday, 21 February, 2020 - 21:43:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Bill's Tee One Topics are a legend and his wealth of knowledge and humor are an inspiration.

I have referred to them countless times and will carry on doing so.

Thank you Bill
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message

David Gore
Moderator
Username: david_gore

Post Number: 3708
Registered: 04-2003
Posted on Tuesday, 02 June, 2020 - 15:06:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Bill recently sent me some more details which I am including below:

"I apologise for the delay in replying to your extraordinary email. As an excuse, yesterday afternoon I was returning home to Kambah from Fyshwick and was suddenly confronted with the heaviest rain storm I have ever seen. Fortunately I was right near our only gaol and was able to seek shelter, without confinement!!! The rest of the day and a lot of the night was spent avoiding statutory flooding!!!I have since decided it was probably a divine decision to switch off the recent hazards of fire, visiting pestilence and other topical hazards! All this to apologise for my tardiness in replying.

Firstly, thank you for the compliments regarding my Club efforts, specifically referring to the splendid ‘Key Fobs’.

My obsession with cars started when I was about 14 years old living in Hobart with my parents. My father at the time was getting ready to resign from life having just helped steer a large commercial enterprise through the last World War. I, an ‘only child’ and devoid of ‘supportive’ relatives, found automotive mechanics to be the main attraction since TV, personal telecom gadgetry, codified sexual practices and self medication had yet to be marketed!

My father died when I was 15 and attending the Newtown Technical High School in Hobart. A spell there saw me in school cadets and so imbued with the possibilities of an interesting life, managed to be admitted to RMC Duntroon leaving my widowed mother to fend for herself! The academic discipline along with my well-tempered ‘military conditioning’ as a school cadet was apparently quite beyond any ambitions I may have had so after nearly two years in Canberra, I found myself back in Hobart in a job with Cadbury's, an income and some determination, prompting me to oversee the building of a house and settling there to plan my fate!

My first car was a 1949 4 door Rover Sports Saloon, which had died in a Hobart used car lot as I remember! Somehow I managed to completely overhaul the mechanics of the engine, gearbox and brakes, repainted the body and graduate to using it as a daily transport! My surviving parent, my mother, then decided to move to Sydney to live with relatives. The Rover, I traded for a Triumph TR3A sports car and a rented flat, admission to the Department of the Army in Hobart, admission to the then Citizen Military Forces as a Gunner and the discovery of the woman to be my wife and mother of my children! The advent of the latter saw the trade of the TR3A on a 1949 Vanguard, arguably one of the cheapest, most reliable and easiest to maintain cars I have ever owned! The gear change lever was on the right hand side of the steering column and upside down in configuration!!!

I don’t apologise for the foregoing trivia detailing my early life, but you made the mistake of showing an interest in my jottings and very firmly determined me to fill in a few sagging gaps in my memory.

Of course if you have use of my words, you are welcome and I am flattered! Having read them again, I have tidied up a few details, the punctuation and layout. I have to tell you that your ‘request’ triggered memories and motivation which I had discarded, respecting my age and motivations. Nevertheless and notwithstanding (love that injunction) I have gone through and tidied up the initial ramble and if it is still of use to you I shall continue to be flattered!


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message

Trevor Hodgekinson
Experienced User
Username: wm20

Post Number: 179
Registered: 11-2006
Posted on Tuesday, 09 June, 2020 - 13:01:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Bill has my eternal grattitude
I had high hopes of becoming involed with his "service Schools" which of course never eventuated.
However his writings allowed a humble motorcycle fanatic to become an almost passable RR mechanic and able to keep the fleet of 5 cars on the load long enough to wrestle ownership of them back from the bank, just in time to have the Carr Government legislate me out of business.
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message

David Gore
Moderator
Username: david_gore

Post Number: 3824
Registered: 04-2003
Posted on Thursday, 22 October, 2020 - 09:18:   Edit PostDelete PostView Post/Check IP

Continuing the story - Bill Coburn played a major role in prompting my involvement in the RROC particularly in regard to this forum and to encouraging owners to actively get involved with maintaining late-model vehicles often regarded as "no-go-there" vehicles for maintenance purposes.

I wrote the following article for the RROCA Federal Journal Praeclarum in 2003 which covers my reasons for being involved in this forum since its inception:

application/pdfPraeclarum
Praeclarum Self-Help Group Article.pdf (2701.6 k)


Add Your Message Here
Post:
Bold text Italics Underline Create a hyperlink Insert a clipart image

Username: Posting Information:
This is a public posting area. Enter your username and password if you have an account. Otherwise, enter your full name as your username and leave the password blank. Your e-mail address is optional.
Please quote Chassis Numbers for all vehicles mentioned.
Password:
E-mail:
Action: