Topic: Puzzle #245 - Solved! Brooke Swan Car

[Otto Puzzell]

Know what it is?

Please, respond below and let us know the make and model designation of the car posted here.

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[MG]

Looks like a "black plate" California car, so must be connected with Hollyweird. Perhaps from the movie version of the children's game "Duck, Duck, Goose? I dunno. I'll have to take another gander at it later.....

[JR]

It looks like either an early Hyundai concept car or the 1910 Brooke 25/30hp Swan Car. I think it is more likely to be the Brooke.

JR

[Allan L]

Yes it's the Brooke: I hadn't noticed this one had moved from Rookie.

THE 1910 Brooke Swan Car was the brainchild of a wealthy British engineer, Robert Nicholl "Scotty" Matthewson, who lived at Swan Park, Calcutta, then the capital of British India. In 1909, Matthewson travelled to England to commission a truly eccentric motor car from the Brooke company of Lowestoft, Suffolk. Its wooden body was apparently built by Savage of Kings Lynn, Britain's most famous maker of steam-powered fairground rides. The swan's head and body, carved to create the effect of feathers, concealed the radiator and bonnet.

Matthewson's car arrived in Calcutta in April 1910. It had amber eyes that glowed eerily in the dark, a multi-note Gabriel exhaust horn with a keyboard in the rear of the car so that Scotty could play chords and bugle calls, and a hot water spray in the swan's beak that enabled the chauffeur to clear a passage through Calcutta's crowded streets.

It was in the fashionable Maidan Park, where Calcutta's elite promenaded in their carriages and cars every afternoon, that Scotty displayed the Swan Car's most outrageous feature. A dump valve inside the car dropped splats of whitewash on to the road from the Swan's rear end - just to make it more lifelike

[Otto Puzzell]

It looks like either an early Hyundai concept car or the 1910 Brooke 25/30hp Swan Car. I think it is more likely to be the Brooke.

JR

Correct, JR. Welcome to AutoPuzzles!

[MG]

a hot water spray in the swan's beak that enabled the chauffeur to clear a passage through Calcutta's crowded streets.

A feature that no doubt endeared the benevolent Britisher to the great unwashed who dared block his progress about the city.

Noblesse oblige, indeed!   

[Ray B.]

Matthewson was so fond of the car that he had a smaller model build in India, called the "Cygnet".

[Otto Puzzell]

The now-expected period pic. Caption reads:

The craftsmen of JW Brooke and Company who worked on the Swan Car, commissioned by Calcutta eccentric Robert Nicholl 'Scotty' Matthewson in 1910. He was said to have been very fond of swans.