Classic appeal

There’s a fascinating new book about a man with a passion for a house which he lost and regained, brick by red Jacobean brick. The house was Thrumpton in Nottinghamshire, its devotee the late George Seymour, a complex man whose daughter, novelist and biographer Miranda Seymour, tells all with elegance and insight in In My Father’s House (Simon & Schuster, £14.99). ‘All’ includes George’s later passion for motorbikes and a couple of the men who rode them.

Whenever I met him, we kept to safer subjects — cars, mainly Jaguars.  He had owned several and knew Sir William Lyons, who founded and ran the company. George’s penultimate period Jaguar was a Mark 2 3.8 litre, the fastest (though not by much) and now the most collectable of that bloodline. Pulling off the M1 one day with overheating problems — not for the first time — he rang Sir William himself.  Sir William sent his own car and driver to take George home while the Jaguar was recovered. Sir William’s was a 3.4 and George asked the driver why the boss didn’t have the top of his own range. ‘For the reason you have just discovered, sir. He says that 3.4 litres is the optimum size for this engine and that boring it out to 3.8 increases the risk of what has happened to yours.’

They bored it out again, to 4.2, before launching the XJ6 in 1968. I was later told that the 4.2 was withdrawn from the German market because the hammering it received on the autobahns exposed the weakness George had discovered (it was replaced by the more powerful and beautifully balanced XJ12). The XJ design was the last Jaguar signed off by Sir William, who had the kind of eye for cars that some people have for horses. It came closest to his ideal, and his influence lives on in the contemporary XJ 2.7