Ask him about the intricate details of any of the multiple cars in his garage, either his own or being restored for an owner, and he will have your answers without missing a beat. Ask him when he first realised that he loved vintage and classic cars, and you’ll find him struggling to recall. And that tells you something about Shrivardhan’s passion for grand old ladies on wheels. While to the world outside, it’s not easily understood, this bug, this addiction to old cars and bikes, is actually quite the addiction. In Shrivardhan’s case, it’s a bug that was passed on from father to son.
“My father used to do a lot of restorations for himself and not commercially, and I used to accompany him to his workshop. I would come back and try to replicate what I would see in there on my toys at home,” he laughs. “I would see the cars all opened up at his workshop, and I would return home and dismantle my toy cars, scrape the paint off, and so on. In the process, I also ruined my set of toy cars.”
The graduation from toy cars to the business of restoration came years later, and through personal tragedy and loss. Shrivardhan’s father, late Shashi Kumar Kanoria, was a known figure in the world of historic vehicles. He collected many, and it was his passion to breathe life into the cars that would otherwise have been discarded and perhaps lost to history. With his untimely passing in 2010, Shrivardhan took up the responsibility of carrying on his father’s legacy, including the 1914 Wolseley Landaulette that had been part of the collection.
“The first time I drove the car was in 2003 when I was around 22 years old, and it’s not an easy car to drive. There are lots of levers on the steering wheel that need to be adjusted; the accelerator is in the middle, and I’m sure that had I been alone, I’d have given up. But my father ensured that I finish the drive and bring her home,” Shrivardhan remembers. But there was no mollycoddling involved where passing on knowledge was concerned. It was tough love. “My father taught me with discipline and rigour. He was like a military man driving his cadet to perfection. As a result, everything I am today is due to him and his lessons,” he says.
The beautiful Wolseley itself had been acquired sometime in the 1980s from an ashram in Dibrugarh, Assam. All the folks at the ashram could say was that it had been donated by ‘someone wealthy’. The car was acquired, transported to Kolkata, restored almost to its former glory, and went on to win the coveted Statesman Trophy at its first outing at the 1989 Statesman Vintage Car Rally. Its actual provenance, however, remained unknown to both father and son.
All that changed when Shrivardhan put up a sketch he had made of the car when he was still in his teens. This fairly accurate sketch from 1996 piqued the interest of the editor of the Wolseley Register page on Facebook. One thing led to another and eventually to the discovery of the car’s origin story. It had been imported from England in September 1917 as a rolling chassis (without the body) to Calcutta’s (Kolkata) Dykes & Co Limited. Dykes was a renowned coach builder who created the body on the rolling chassis for none other than His Excellency Laurence John Lumley Dundas, Earl of Ronaldshay, Governor of Bengal. Quite apart from the fact that it had once been the governor’s wheels, what made this Wolseley particularly unique is the fact that its body had been crafted in Kolkata in a style and to a detail that was indistinguishable from European coach builders of the time.
When the car was brought to Kolkata, however, it was a far cry from its glory days and needed a complete restoration by Shrivardhan’s father. Back then, however, the original wheels could not be sourced, and they settled for 20-inch wheels instead of the 25-inchers it was first shod with. Kanoria later ventured into the world of restoration, first restoring cars of his own or for close friends or members of the family, like his dad once did. He then got into the world of commercial restoration and worked on the Wolseley to a point where the earl, with no hesitation, jumped right in and went for a drive around the city.
In 2017, when he participated in the year’s Cartier Concours d’Elegance event with the freshly restored Wolseley, the gorgeous landaulette brought home not just the Best-in-Class trophy but also the prize for the Best of Show. “That recognition gave my business (of restoration) a big push,” says Shrivardhan, who has restored a total of 70-odd cars, including a dozen Rolls-Royces. In 2023, the car also went on to win the Best-in-Class trophy at the 21 Gun Salute Concours d’Elegance.
Although his own collection is added to and upgraded occasionally, with him replacing a car here and there, he is certain that the Wolseley will never leave the Kanoria garage. “Although I cannot pick favourites, there are three cars that are extremely special to me. One is a 1934 SS 1 Tourer that I acquired, which is very similar to the car that my dad owned at one point. One is our 1906 Renault Freres, and the other is this 1914 Wolseley Landaulette. You could say that the trio represents the identity of the Kanoria collection.”
