AN HISTORIC Rolls-Royce, bought new by Earl Mountbatten for £2,000 in the 1920s and then bought back more than 50 years later only a few months before he was assassinated by the IRA, has sold for more than a quarter of a million pounds at auction.

After changing hands at least four times, Lord Mountbatten’s 1924 Rolls-Royce 40/50 HP Silver Ghost Cabriolet (registration number XT 2522) ended up in the south of France, where in the 1960s it was discovered by an Oxford dental surgeon named Captain Ralph Symmons, who then brought the car back to England and restored it.

But it was only when Captain Symmons took a closer look at his newly-acquired Rolls-Royce that he discovered that the car’s original owner was Lord Mountbatten.

He recalled: “When I got it home, I took off the French number plates and found a London registration on the back. I sent five shillings (25p) to the Greater London Council to get a new logbook and found the car once belonged to Lord Louis Mountbatten.”

Now Lord Mountbatten’s Rolls-Royce has fetched £264,700 at Bonhams at Chichester, West Sussex, well above the estimate of £170,000-£230,000.

According to auctioneers Bonhams: “Captain Symmons restored the Rolls-Royce, which had survived in remarkably original condition and after its completion drove XT 2522 to Lord Mountbatten’s home at Broadlands, near Romsey, where its first owner was reintroduced to his old car.

“The reunion was filmed by Rediffusion Television for its series The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten: The March To Victory.”

A few years later Captain Symmons decided to sell the Rolls-Royce and gave Lord Mountbatten first refusal, which he accepted. Lord Mountbatten then arranged for the car to be bought by a friend, who was the seller, but who has not been named by Bonhams.

In a letter dated, November 9, 1978, the year before Lord Mountbatten was murdered by the IRA, the car’s present owner wrote: “Although Lord Mountbatten will be the legal owner of the car, it will in fact be on permanent loan to me until such time as my family and I are in a position to re-purchase it from him at the price he is paying for the car.”

Following its purchase by its present owner, the Rolls-Royce was restored in the workshops of the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu under the supervision of Russell Bampton.

Since its restoration,the car has been on display at Broadlands, the National Motor Museum and more recently, at the request of the Prince of Wales, at the Queen’s Norfolk home, Sandringham.

Now 92 years old, the car still has a MOT certificate.

It also has at least one unusual feature. When Lord Mountbatten bought the car in the 1920s, he asked Rolls-Royce – “much to the company’s chagrin” – to replace their trademark Spirit of Ecstasy mascot with the figure of a naval signaller, semaphoring the letter M.

And, after all these years, that treasured Mountbatten mascot is still on the car.