Amherst Villiers: The Man Who Supercharged Everything

Charles Amherst Villiers is famous for one thing: designing the massive supercharger that hangs off the front of the Blower Bentley. A fine legacy, certainly, a piece of brutalist, industrial sculpture that defines one of the most iconic cars ever made. But to remember Villiers for only the Blower is like remembering Leonardo da Vinci for a single, particularly clever door hinge. Villiers was an aristocratic, pipe-smoking, tweed-clad figure who wandered through almost every significant technical field of the 20th century, leaving modified engines and occasional lawsuits in his wake. He was a Formula 1 consultant, a wartime pilot, an accomplished artist, and a rocket scientist for the American space program. He was also a close friend of Ian Fleming, who borrowed his supercharged Bentley for James Bond and his engineering expertise for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

The Gentleman Tuner

Born in 1900 to a world of late-Victorian privilege, Villiers was the son of a clergyman-turned-MP and the daughter of a wealthy industrialist baron. He was, through his mother, related to Winston Churchill, who later became godfather to his son. Useful for dinner party conversation, certainly, but more importantly meant that formal credentials were optional. When you could telephone Churchill if things became awkward, a Cambridge degree was merely decorative.

He was sent to Oundle and then Cambridge, but found the formal education on offer considerably less interesting than the high-speed socialising available outside it. He left Cambridge without a degree, having discovered his true passion: making other people's cars go faster.

His first partnership was with a fellow student, Raymond Mays. Villiers took Mays's new Speed Model Hillman, a car that could charitably manage 56 mph, and tinkered with it until it could do 80. A minor miracle, proving that with enough genius, even a Hillman could be made exciting. His work on their subsequent Brescia Bugattis was so effective that it attracted the attention of Ettore Bugatti himself, who invited the young man to Molsheim to discover, politely, what on earth he was doing to his cars.

The Supercharger Obsession

Villiers's early career was defined by a fascination with forced induction. His first attempt, on an AC engine, was disappointing. His second, assisting Malcolm Campbell with Blue Bird II, achieved more success but ended abruptly. Campbell, a famously difficult man who cycled through engineers with alarming frequency, and Villiers, an aristocratic amateur unaccustomed to taking direction from professionals, discovered they could not work together. The pattern would repeat throughout his career. Villiers had the engineering talent to contribute to almost any project but lacked the diplomatic skills to remain involved past the initial brilliance.

His third project truly revealed the extraordinary scope of his engineering imagination: the Jack Kruse Rolls-Royce. A wealthy businessman, Captain Kruse, had given Villiers his 1925 Rolls-Royce Phantom and, reportedly, a simple brief: "Do something exciting." Villiers took this as a licence for mechanical surrealism. Instead of extracting more power from the Rolls's vast 7.7-litre engine through conventional means, he decided to mount a second, 625cc engine on the left-hand running board. Its sole purpose was to drive a massive supercharger, which in turn force-fed the main engine. To counterbalance the extra weight, he added two spare wheels on the opposite running board. An astonishingly complex, £16,000 solution that propelled the 80mph Phantom to an unheard of 110mph. Deafeningly loud and utterly impractical by all accounts. The kind of engineering that occurs only to a man who has never had to worry about a budget. Years later, Villiers bought the car back for £250 and immediately removed the entire contraption.

The Blower and "Old Pussy Face"

When Tim Birkin, one of the Bentley Boys, decided the 4½ Litre needed supercharging, Villiers was the obvious choice. The project was an act of open defiance against W.O. Bentley, who loathed the idea of supercharging, famously calling it a "perversion" of his design. Birkin and Villiers set up their own workshops in Welwyn Garden City, a safe distance from W.O.'s disapproving eye. Villiers's creation, the Mark IV blower, was a masterpiece of brute force engineering, bolted to the front of the car because W.O. refused to have it "cluttering up his engine bay.”

Villiers had to re-engineer the engine's internals to handle the leap from 130 to 242 horsepower, strengthening connecting rods, redesigning pistons, and upgrading the valve train to survive the additional stress.

His involvement was short, lasting less than a year. Predictably, another feud ended it. When the cars were launched, Villiers's name was conspicuously absent from all publicity. He had to take out a legal injunction to force Bentley to fit the "Amherst Villiers Mark IV" nameplates to the superchargers.

Money had nothing to do with his anger. Villiers had plenty of that. Recognition mattered considerably more. He was an amateur in the best and worst senses: brilliant enough to solve problems that defeated professionals, prickly enough to ensure nobody enjoyed working with him. He would privately refer to the famously stern W.O. Bentley as "Old Pussy Face" for years afterward, which suggests the grudge was both deep and satisfying.

The Bond and Chitty Connection

Villiers's circle of friends was as impressive as his engineering. He was a close friend of Ian Fleming. When Fleming sat down to write Casino Royale decades later, he needed a car for his new hero, something with pedigree, power, and a hint of the rogue about it. He picked a 4½-litre supercharged Bentley and specifically name-checked his engineer friend in the novel, giving Bond "the Amherst Villiers job."

His influence extended to Fleming's children's story, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The magical car's name and spirit came directly from Count Zborowski's legendary racing monsters, but when Fleming needed technical advice on how his fictional flying machine might actually work, he consulted Villiers. The engineer helped with the plausibility of the car's mechanics and contributed to its design. In 1962, Villiers painted a portrait of Fleming that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. A fitting exchange between two men who understood that the line between engineering and fantasy was thinner than most people imagined.

From Spitfires to Starships

The Blower, however, was just the opening act. When war broke out, Villiers joined the Air Transport Auxiliary, flying new, repaired, and damaged military aircraft around Britain, freeing up RAF pilots for combat. His voyage to a new post in Canada in 1942, aboard the RMS Queen Elizabeth, was nearly ended by a German U-boat. The U-704 fired four torpedoes at the ship off the west coast of Ireland on 9 November. One detonated prematurely, and the Queen Elizabeth's high speed carried it safely away from the rest. After the war, like many British engineers who had spent six years working on military projects, he discovered that Britain had no particular use for his skills in peacetime austerity. America did.

He moved to the United States in the late 1940s, where the aerospace industry was expanding rapidly and cared considerably less about formal qualifications than British firms did. An aristocratic amateur who had left Cambridge without a degree joined Grumman, Hamilton Standard, and Boeing. His role was extraordinary: studying captured German V2 rocket plans and contributing to the fledgling American space programme.

What made him valuable was his ability to understand propulsion systems across wildly different scales and applications. The principles that governed supercharging a Bentley engine translated surprisingly well to rocket turbopumps and high-altitude combustion. He worked on fuel injection systems, studied German jet engine designs, and applied his understanding of forced induction to problems that professional aerospace engineers, trained in more conventional paths, struggled to conceptualise. The man who had tuned Bugattis by ear in the 1920s was helping design rockets in the 1950s, which made perfect sense if your career had never followed conventional logic in the first place.

The Final, Tragic Battle

Villiers eventually returned to Britain in the late 1970s and 1980s, consulting for the BRM and Graham Hill's Embassy Hill Formula 1 teams during the sport's turbo era, where his decades of forced induction experience suddenly became relevant again. In his old age, he began one final project: a twin-turbocharged Rolls-Royce Phantom III V12 he had reputedly found mouldering in a field. A perfect bookend to his life, another absurdly ambitious Rolls modification. He struck a deal with Rolls-Royce to complete the work, but the company's management changed, the project stalled, and Villiers watched his final creation abandoned.

The final scene was one of pure, tragic theatre. In 1991, a frail, 90-year-old Villiers was brought to the High Court in London for his daughter's lawsuit against Rolls-Royce. Miss Villiers was suing for breach of agreement, loss of use, and the car's diminished value after the company failed to complete the conversion as promised. The unfinished Phantom had been delivered to the court for the jury to inspect. Villiers looked at it and called it "a bastardised thing, a sort of folly." Rolls-Royce's defence was that the project had been worthless from the start.

He died of cancer just months later, before the case concluded. An inglorious end to an extraordinary life, a man who had begun his career modifying a Rolls-Royce and ended it being wheeled into court to condemn one. His daughter eventually won, receiving damages and interest, though both sides considered appeals. A perfect, bitter conclusion: even in victory, the machine remained unfinished.