Harold Orlans, in his book T.E. Lawrence: Biography of a Broken Hero, reports that in October 1918 an exhausted Lawrence entered Damascus in the passenger seat of “a desert-dirtied Rolls.” The war was over, but Lawrence’s military escapades were not. He enlisted in the British Tank Corps under the name Thomas Edward Shaw and subsequently scored 93 percent on the Rolls-Royce armored car course, the “highest mark ever given.”

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When queried by the journalist Lowell Thomas after the war as to what he might most value, Lawrence replied, “Perhaps it is childish, but I should like my own Rolls-Royce car with enough tires and petrol to last me all my life.”

The armored Rolls-Royces were called up again when the Irish Civil War broke out in 1922. The Free State government was equipped with 13 examples to help break the back of the Irish Republican Army. The Irish called the cars “Whippets.” In July 1922, Free State General Eoin O’Duffy went after the IRA in Limerick with a Whippet, two Lancia armored cars, 10 Lewis machine guns and an 18-pound cannon. In three days of fighting, he forced the rebels from the city. Another Free State column routed the Republicans from Waterford, again with the help of cannon and four armored cars.

The Republicans built their own improvised armored cars, bearing such monikers as Queen of the West and The River Lee. (Free State cars included Tom Keogh, Sliabh na mBan, The Fighting 2nd, The Big Fellow and The Baby.) One celebrated car the Republicans requisitioned was a yellow Silver Ghost tourer owned by the Clarke family of tobacconists in County Cork. It ended up as The Moon Car in IRA hands, covered in steel plates and equipped with twin Lewis machine guns. In 1924 it reportedly took part in a daring raid on Queenstown, killing or wounding nearly two dozen British soldiers. Fearing reprisal, the IRA burned the car and buried its charred remains in a bog. In the 1980s, a local historian located and raised the badly decayed hulk.

The Silver Ghosts in British service received updates in 1920 and 1924. A 1922 letter by Lt. Col. C.D.V. Cary-Barnard describes a trip from Jerusalem to Baghdad and back with three of the Vickers-equipped cars. The convoy, he noted, included “some other makes, over which [the Rolls-Royces] demonstrated only too often their vast superiority.” Thirteen back axles broke on the accompanying vehicles, but the Ghosts (which ended up towing some of the other vehicles) returned unscathed.

The armored Rolls-Royce followed the flag of the British Empire into India, Burma, Iran and elsewhere. Some of the Ghosts, modernized with antitank rifles, .303-inch Bren machine guns and smoke grenade launchers, even saw limited service during World War II. Until at least 1941, they worked alongside much heavier Humber armored cars in the North African campaigns.

After World War II, most remaining military Ghosts were decommissioned, scrapped or rebodied as civilian vehicles. There are just two complete original survivors, one being the Tank Museum model, which has led an adventurous life. The car was issued in 1921 to the British No. 5 Armored Car Squadron and served during the Irish Civil War. In 1927 it shipped out with the company to Shanghai as part of a British League of Nations contingent to protect European nationals after conflict broke out between nationalist and communist forces. From 1929 to 1938 it served in Egypt. It returned to England the following year to participate in anti-invasion patrols along the northeast coast. The Tank Museum acquired it in 1946.

The other survivor, Sliabh na mBan (“Mountain of the Women,” named for the Tipperary landmark), belongs to the Irish army. The car was accompanying IRA organizer-turned-Free State general Michael Collins on Aug. 22, 1922, when IRA gunmen ambushed his convoy. Sliabh might actually have saved his life, had its machine gun not jammed. Republicans later stole the Rolls, using it in forays against government outposts until it was recovered on a tip. Retired in 1945, it appeared in all its glory in the 1959 James Cagney film Shake Hands With the Devil. When not on parade, Sliabh na mBan is on display at the Defense Forces Training Centre in Curragh.

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