Make some noise for this Royce
It may seem strange that, at a time when one looks ahead with the new year careening around the corner in a few hours, we choose to look back. Yet, does celebrating our past ever need a reason or a season? Mrinal Kapadia (in pic), Cumballa Hill resident, history buff, collector and researcher leaves us with this nostalgic nugget in the neighbourhood’s newsletter.
The old Rolls Royce showroom at Kemp’s Corner
“Kemp’s Corner, now an upscale residential and commercial locality nestled between Cumballa and Malabar Hills, evolved from a thick forest into a suburb of Bombay before its slow rise into urban gentrification. Named so after an early 20th-century chemist and druggist, Kemp & Co., that existed well into the 1970s. A building that is today known for housing the chic Italian restaurant Gustoso as well as a Starbucks outlet and the iconic Chinese Room for decades past, was a showroom for Rolls Royce cars a century ago,” Kapadia writes in his piece in the newsletter.
The piece is accompanied by an image all the way back from 1921, showing a Rolls Royce arriving at the ‘depot’ in Bombay on ‘six bullock power, with a maximum speed of two miles an hour’—a nice way of saying that the luxury car was towed to the showroom by three bullock carts.
