A ROLLS-ROYCE from the collection of the Afghan royal family that was thought to have been lost during years of war and Taliban rule has been found and renovated by a British businessman.

The 1932 Drophead Coupé will go on display next weekend at the annual Rolls-Royce show in Northamptonshire. Its recovery is the culmination of 20 years’ detective work by Richard Raynsford, a barrister turned political risk consultant, who has spent £500,000 and admits that the car and its history “became a complete obsession”.

Like many of the maharajas of nearby India, the Afghan monarchy regarded the Rolls-Royce as its vehicle of choice. Between 1910 and 1938, five Afghan kings ordered 13 Rolls-Royces. In 1929, when King Amanullah was forced to abdicate amid protests against his modernisation programme, he fled to Kandahar in his Rolls.

The cars were believed by the Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts’ Club to have been lost in the fighting of the past three decades or destroyed by the Taliban. But a derelict Rolls tracked down by Raynsford in Seattle turned out to have belonged to Prince Shah Wali Khan, brother of King Nadir Shah.

Known as the Liberator of Kabul for his military exploits, the prince had been stationed in Europe from 1929 to 1945 as minister-plenipotentiary and apparently enjoyed driving around Fascist Rome in his gas-guzzling “enemy” car.

Part of the car’s rarity stems from the fact that it was given a new body in 1937 by Hermann Graber, a master coachbuilder from Switzerland, making it one of only two examples of a prewar Graber. The other is in the Swiss National Transport Museum in Lucerne.

But what makes it particularly special is its history. When Raynsford first started looking for GRW 59, he was simply looking for his father-in-law’s old car and had no idea of its Afghan owner.

His search began in 1987 after his mother-in-law began reminiscing about the Rolls her late husband, Major Tom Evill, had bought after the war. She said she believed it had been owned by a Yugoslav prince, and Raynsford’s imagination was fired. “I always had a yen for this Boy’s Own adventure kind of thing,” he said. “Little did I know I was setting off on a 20-year odyssey.” Rolls-Royce keeps a register of all its cars and at first he thought the task would be easy. The Rolls-Royce Association’s president, a former army officer, said he remembered seeing it in Austria after the war.

Then the trail went cold. After 10 years of writing letters, Raynsford had almost given up when he spotted an American advertisement for a sports Rolls in Rolls-Royce Magazine. Although the photograph was of a wreck, he recognised the car. He flew to Seattle, where it had languished for more than 30 years, and handed over £17,000 in cash.

In February 1998, he shipped it back to England and commissioned its restoration by Fiennes of Oxfordshire. He then began researching its history.

Raynsford discovered it had been acquired in Rome in 1945 for £550 (around £30,000 today) by the Reverend George Irving for the Church of Scot-land. Irving was serving in Italy and Klagenfurt, southern Austria, and was director of British Troops Welfare in Austria.

Although Irving was dead, his wife Maybell was still alive and had fond memories of using the car to take tea and buns to the troops and to tour Italy and Austria on her honeymoon in 1946. She told Raynsford her husband had acquired the car from a “Prince Ali Walli of Abyssinia”.

“That set me off on a completely false trail for years,” he said. “Eventually I went to see the crown prince of Abyssinia, who now lives in Frankfurt, and he said, ‘You’re crazy. All my family were locked up by Mussolini so whoever was driving a black Drophead Rolls in Rome in 1945 was not one of us’.”

One of those Raynsford recruited to the search was his old friend John Shipman, who headed the Horn of Africa section in the Foreign Office. It was he who suggested that the owner could be Afghan because there had been a Prince Wali Khan and Afghanistan had maintained a legation in Rome in the war.

However, no information was forthcoming. Even though it was her old family car, Raynsford’s wife Rosemary began suggesting that he was flogging a dead horse. “We’d spent £200,000 with nothing to show except a pile of tin,” he said, “and we needed to commit another £200,000 to complete, knowing that even when finished GRW 59 would most likely be worth only £40,000 on a good day.”

Then, just before last Christmas, a brown envelope arrived from the private Swiss Car Register. Inside was a newspaper photograph of the car being pulled from Lake Leman in Switzerland in July 1939. The caption described the driver as the prince of Afghanistan, brother of the late king, who had overshot the bend and plunged 20 metres into the lake, “taking an unwelcome bath”.

The mystery was solved. “I was delighted,” said Raynsford. “I even had my own Afghan royal connection, as I used to serve with the mounted Life Guards and was commanding the first division when King Zahir Shah visited England in 1971 and had to escort his carriage from Victoria station to Buckingham Palace.”

Prince Wali Khan was the uncle of Zahir Shah, Afghanistan’s last king, and in 1929 led the battle that brought his elder brother, Nadir Khan, to the throne, only for him to be assassinated four years later.

“Presumably the prince had gone for a good lunch the day he drove the car into the lake,” said Raynsford.

“Ironically, now we’ve done all this work and uncovered her history, we can’t really drive the car because it’s too valuable. But my son is dying to get his hands on her.”

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