The tragic love affair of Lord John Douglas-Scott-Montagu of Beaulieu and his beloved mistress Eleanor Velasco Thornton is likely to be the “Downton Abbey”-ish drama that will propel the Rolls-Royce movie “Silver Ghost.” Variety reported yesterday that Martin Scorsese will co-produce the movie with the 88-year-old Lord Richard Attenborough and his producer partner Anthony Haas.
Miss Thornton (known as “Thorn”) was the woman who posed (“in her nightie,” it is said) for the luxury car’s “Spirit of Ecstasy” mascot designed by the sculptor Charles Robinson Sykes. On December 30, 1915, she and Montagu were traveling from Marseilles to India on SS Persia when it was sunk south of Crete by a German U-boat. Montagu was rescued, but Miss Thornton, 35, who had been his secretary and mistress since 1902, was one of 334 people lost.
The couple’s daughter Joan, born in 1903 and immediately given up for adoption to avoid a scandal, met occasionally at the Ritz with her father, who died in 1929; his son Edward Douglas-Scott-Montague from his second marriage would also meet her there. She married a surgeon commander in the Royal Navy and one of their two sons coincidentally worked for Rolls-Royce. The story of the affair was told by the Daily Mail when the film was first announced in 20o8.
Edward, the third baron, a Conservative politician and founder of the National Motor Museum, endorses the movie, which will also embrace the founding of Rolls-Royce by Charles Rolls (1877-1910), the aviation and motoring pioneer, and Henry Royce (1863-1933). The latter, a brilliant engineer who had previously manufactured dynamos and electric cranes, began developing cars around 1902.
The wealthy Rolls was introduced to Royce in 1904 and was sufficiently impressed by his two-cylinder “Royce” to order a range of two-to-six cylinder versions for his London car showroom. Their first model, the Rolls-Royce 10 hp, was exhibited at the Paris Salon in December 1904. They formed their company in 1906, the same year in which they produced their first six-cylinder (30 hp) model.
On June 2, 1910, Rolls became the first aeronaut to make a non-stop double-crossing of the English Channel, a feat he accomplished in 95 minutes. Forty days later, he was killed when the tail of his Wright Flyer broke during an aeronautical display at Bournemouth. He was the first British airman to be killed flying a powered plane. Royce, who had hitherto resisted building aircraft engines, produced his first one, the 12-cylinder Eagle, for the Admiralty and War Office following the outbreak of war in 1914.
It’s no surprise that “Silver Ghost” appeals to Scorsese since it contains elements of “Hugo” (in terms of mechanical pioneering) and “The Aviator” – as well as the automotive vision of his old friend Francis Ford Coppola’s “Tucker: The Man and His Dream.” The script for the movie was written by Jeffrey Caine and Sharman Macdonald, the mother of Keira Knightley – who would disgrace neither a Rolls-Royce nor a nightie were she to play Miss Thornton.