One of the Great things about Jaguar, is the company's history.......

I had a visit from a fellow Jaguar enthusiast the other day, he had a box with him and a bundle of papers. In the box was a rough sand cast Jaguar leaper. It was found in a Jaguar he purchased a long time ago. The Jaguar was owned first by a chap called Sir William Lyons, the man who founded Jaguar, in a shed in Blackpool before WW2. Back then the company was called Swallow cars, they went about re-bodying Austin 7's. A few years later he moved the business to Coventry (SS Cars) and so Jaguar Cars was born.

There is a tale to this leaper.....the initial Jaguar emblem was designed by a lady, but later (1937/38) a design brief fell to artist and sculptor F Gordon Crosby. Crosby had 5 cast by a foundry in London, keeping one on his SS saloon, one is to be auctioned this year and advertised as the only remaining example, it's said the rest went back to the foundry to be destroyed and the phosphor bronze reused.

The one my friend showed me was found under the back seat of the Jaguar, it had obviously fallen down there when someone either sat on it, or Sir William cleared his office of clutter and stacked the rear, so the leaper fell out of view.

It's in an old oily Lucas box, wrapped in grease proof paper.

Now the provenance sounds good......but I put it to him that anyone with a bit of metal working knowhow could cast something identical today. Bronze will look like it does 1000 years from now if looked after. Seeing as the last remaining, albeit polished and finished, is being valued at £30,000 it would make it even more possible to remake one!
http://www.jaguarautomobilia.com/jac_2010preview.php

He spoke to the Jaguar Heritage and was told Lyons would have had one, but they don't have it.....

No one can argue about the ownership of the Jaguar and it's link to the leaper, and how it was found.
My question is what effect would my friends leaper do to the other "known" leaper's value?

The nice thing was to hold and assess it, just as the man himself did all those years ago, by the way he didn't like it with a comment "looks like a cat shot off a fence'.

 

That is really cool!

 

what a find! that is extremely cool

 

Wow....great story and super cool find

 

I looked at the two photos side by side and yours looks more primitively made, and I don't just mean the rough surface. It could either be an early sample, or a fake, who knows. Only way would be a spectrograph test from shavings of both metals.

 

Nice story , it rather has a different design even though you can still figure out of which car it belongs to lol

 

Yes this was something we also talked about, to compare the metal on both to confirm if they are related. I did this once on an Alfa Romeo 2300 8C chassis with the help of the Engineering faculty at the University of Liverpool

I don't understand your comment about "more primitively made", it's an unfinished sand casting, (the best way of casting) straight from the foundry, as such it will finish as it should, but here's the issue, surely it's more valuable (if real) in this virgin state?

You've got to see it in the flesh, it is a very nice thing! but it isn't mine and I wish it was.....