Fortunes and the French collection

Press, 30 April 1981, Page 17

Fortunes and the French collection

By

PAUL WEBSTER

“Observer,” London

Nearly 'five years ago the workers at a bankrupt textile mill in 'eastern France slid back the door of a red brick warehouse to reveal a fabulous industrial treasure — more than .400 veteran cars in perfect condition.. The cars had been the secret passion of two factory owners,. Kans and Josef Schlumpf,. who had fled to Switzerland, leaving behind them a priceless collection painstakingly built up over 60 years. The brothers’ estimate of the value of the cars, including the world’s most comprehensive range of Bugattis, was put at $6O million. However. under French Government pressure and trade union protest they have been forced by a tribunal to sell them to the local authorities for a bargain $9 million — just enough to clear the debts they left in France. While the bewhiskered brothers, both in their seventies, continue to claim from their hotel room in Basle that they have been robbed, the nearby French industrial city of Mulhouse is preparing an" international publicity programme for the unique motor museum it has inherited. Mulhouse, which already has France's best-known locomotive exhibition, has joined -with the Haut-Rhin department of Alsace, eastern France, the French Automobile Club, and the Panhard company to preserve the collection and open it up to the world.

In doing so, they cut directly across the secretive spirit of the Schlumpf brothers, whose personal fortune was once assessed as

the sixth largest in France. From the time their domineering mother bought them pedal cars when they were boys, the two bachelor brothers became obsessed with cars.' They raced Bugattis — built by the Italian, Ettore Bugatti, in Alsace — but their obsession with collecting was a private affair. They spent millions of dollars buying up the cream of Bugatti’s output, as well as importing cars from all over the world. Teams of workers hired from companies like RollsRoyce and Mercedes were brought to the Mulhouse warehouse to put the veteran cars in impeccable condition. All had to be as roadworthy as the day they were built. Employees at the Schlumpfs’ textile factory were forbidden even to look at the collection. The brothers kept up a constant guard cycling around the factory and when one worker was caught looking inside he was fined $lOO and suspended for a week. Once a train-load of veteran cars was seen arriving — all covered by tarpaulins. As was discovered later, the brothers acquired more than 120 Bugattis, including two Bugatti Royales, among the most magnificent cars ever built. One of these handconstructed models, more than 30 feet long, was once owned by the Belgian royal family. They had also collected a complete history of the

Rolls-Royce and bought up most of the original Renaults in what the big French company itself describes as “a better collection than we have.”

the warehouse in Mulhouse was converted with long red brick roadways and hundreds of Second Empire street lamps worth more than $2OOO each. Up till then, the brothers had invited only car-makers to the exhibition — described by Rene Gordini as “the Louvre of car museums” — but they intended to widen their invitations and even built a threestar restaurant for their guests. When they suddenly sold off their bankrupt factory for a symbolic franc and fled to Switzerland, ’ leaving 1800 workmen without jobs, the trade unions occupied the warehouse and ' opened a ‘workers’ museum.” It attracted 700,000 visitors in the two years before the authorities closed it down while they were sorting out the dispute with the Schlumpf brothers.

Many of the workers were kept on to guard the cars as the legal wrangle continued, while the Government stepped in to sign a preservation order stopping pressure, particularly from the United States, to auction the cars, individually. Now, the chances are that on the fifth anniversary of “their discovery” on June 28, 1976, the cars will be back on display for an awestruck public.—Copyright, London Observer Service.