Spirit of Ecstasy Spotted in Leeds City Centre

I saw an old Roller parked in Leeds city centre down near the railway arches adjacent to The Calls and thought the mascot would be a nice picture.

I have never been a fan of the modern Rolls Royce for perhaps the same reasons I dislike recent Aston Martins, by recent I mean the models after the DB5.

The one thing I have always liked about Rolls Royce motors is the mascot on the front, the Spirit of Ecstasy. The design for the Spirit of Ecstasy was by Charles Robinson Sykes, he designed the original for the Rolls Royce owned by his friend John Walter Edward Scott-Montagu, (second Lord Montagu of Beaulieu). The model for the spirit was Eleanor Velasco Thornton the secretary and secret love of John Walter Scott-Montagu. The original version of the mascot was called The Whisper.

Later after many Rolls owners put their own mascots on the front of their cars, Rolls Royce decided perhaps they might produce something suitably dignified and graceful. Claude Johnson then MD of Rolls asked Charles Sykes, a young artist friend and a graduate of London's Royal College of Art to come up with somthing.

The first one was called the Spirit of Speed. Later, Charles Sykes called it "A graceful little goddess, the Spirit of Ecstasy, who has selected road travel as her supreme delight and alighted on the prow of a Rolls-Royce motor car to revel in the freshness of the air and the musical sound of her fluttering draperies." He presented the mascot to the company in February 1911.

So today if you see a Rolls with The Spirit of Ecstasy, also called "Emily", "Silver Lady" or "Flying Lady" on the front think of Eleanor Velasco Thornton the model and ispiration. It was a doomed love affair, she was poor, he was wealthy and aristocratic. His family persuaded him to marry another woman, Lady Cecil Victoria Constance.

On 30 December 1915, Thornton was drowned with hundreds of other passengers when the SS Persia, on which she was travelling with Beaulieu through the Mediterranean on the way to India, was torpedoed without warning off Crete by the German U-boat U-38, commanded by Max Valentiner. Eleanor Thornton was 35 at her death, but lives on in this little work of art.