The mysterious disappearance of celebrity Minis

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There’s a strange thing going on with lavishly coachbuilt Minis that have been owned by former a-list celebrities, or so postwarcar.com contributor Jeroen Booij found out. He’s been looking for information on souped-up Mini Coopers and Cooper S-es, many of which were revamped into baby Rolls-Royces in the 1960s by companies such as Harold Radford and Wood & Pickett, that appear to have been vanished from this earth. How about Mike ‘Monkees’ Nesmith’s chocoloate brown Radford DeVille? Or John Lennon’s all-black example? Then there’s Enzo Ferrari’s Mini Cooper - probably modified by an Italian coachbuilder and missing for ages, plus James Garner’s sky blue Radford Cooper S. There’s more. The sumptuous 1967 Wood & Pickett Margrave Elite of Mick Jagger? Footballer George Best's white Radford DeVille? Comedian Laurence Harvey’s Wood & Pickett? This cannot be a coincidence, can it? Was the quality of these London coachbuilders so dramatically bad, or is there one wacky collector who amassed all of them?

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