a best-seller. At the beginning of 1931 Nuttings received a Royal Warrant appointing the firm Motor Body Builders to His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales. The end of Weymann bodies A 1929 show car, a Bentley Speed Six Sportsman's coupé, used a specially polished fabric material to look as if it were an old-fashioned coachbuilt body. The economic crisis hit. Noting how the older Weymann bodies showed their age the customers, those still able to buy, began to choose glossy cellulose-finished more rounded and traditionally coachbuilt bodies. Metal panels replaced fabric on some Weymann bodies but the time of Weymann flexible coachwork was over by 1932. On 4 September 1930, Gurney Nutting moved, less than a mile, to more spacious premises in Lacland Place. A few weeks later they showed at Olympia a metal panelled Weymann Bentley Sportsman's coupé beside another Bentley of traditional construction for the first time exhibiting Nutting's trademark, a deep chrome-plated beading strip running from the grille to above the rear mudguards and emphasising the sweeping new lines of the car. J Gurney Nutting built the body for Malcolm Campbell's 1931 Blue Bird world speed record car. 1930s The 1930s were the firm's greatest years. Bodies were built to order on other chassis but mostly these were the years of the Rolls-Royce and Bentley saloons, coupés de ville and sedancas de ville. Near the end of the decade Jack Barclay tempted A. F. McNeil to James Young Limited and his place was taken by'John Blatchley (1913–2008), still in his early twenties. Blatchley was a graduate of the Chelsea College of Aeronautical and Automobile Engineering and Regent Street Polytechnic recruited by McNeil. After the war he was appointed chief stylist of Rolls-Royce and Bentley and he retired from there in 1969. McNeil remained John Blatchley's teacher mentor and friend for many years. In 1940 a straight-eight Daimler limousine was produced at Lacland Place, the curves replaced by razor edges. The Daimler had been given square-cornered windows, a flat waistline and a raked but square-edged tail. It was greeted as "very very handsome, in a totally new idiom", but there was a war on. Closure With the outbreak of World War II all coachbuilding work was suspended. During the war Gurney Nutting built boats, from lifeboats to patrol boats. In 1945 the business was renamed Gurney Nutting Ltd, styling themselves as "coachbuilders and engineers" and became part