The Boy

by Richard Williams

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  For my friend Giorgio Terruzzi

  ‘An automobile race in which Stirling Moss drives a car can have one of two endings. Either Moss wins, or Moss breaks down and someone else wins’

  —ALFRED WRIGHT, Sports Illustrated, 1959

  CHAPTER 1 THE LAST TROPHY

  Shepherd Market is a small village in the centre of London, on the edge of Mayfair, bounded by Curzon Street to the north and Piccadilly to the south, where for a couple of centuries the signs of discreet wealth and loose morals have happily co-existed. On a summer’s day in 2017 I walked up one of its narrow streets with a bag containing a silver statuette, about 18 inches tall: the figure of a racing driver from a bygone era, in helmet and overalls, goggles slung round his neck. I was on my way to deliver it to the house of the man on whom it had been modelled and who, long ago, was known to the newspapers and their readers as ‘The Boy’.

  A week earlier I’d been due to accompany Sir Stirling Moss and his wife, Lady Susie, on a trip back to Pescara, halfway down Italy’s Adriatic coast, for the sixtieth anniversary celebration of a famous victory. The race in 1957 had fascinated me ever since, barely ten years old, I read a report of it in my father’s daily newspaper. This was a world championship Grand Prix thrust into the calendar at the last minute, run over a 16-mile course on public roads, from a seaside resort up into the villages in the foothills of the Abruzzi mountains and back again. Moss drove a Vanwall, a British car, beating the powerful Italian teams on their own patch for the first time. Later I’d written a book about it, filled with stories and memories – including his – from a vanished age. After it was published, I was invited to Pescara to take part in a film about the history of racing in the city; now I’d been asked to return for the anniversary, accompanying the guests of honour.

  Sadly, Stirling couldn’t make the trip. Six months earlier he’d been taken ill on the way home from visiting Australia. What seemed at first like a straightforward respiratory infection had worsened and turned into something else. After several weeks in a Singapore hospital, he’d been brought back to London by a specially chartered medical aircraft. Now he was at home, receiving permanent twenty-four-hour nursing care. He was eighty-seven years old and, as it turned out, he would never be seen in public again.

  I was asked to go to Pescara anyway, suddenly promoted to stand in for a legend whose face was on the posters, the programmes, the VIP passes and the labels on the bottles of red wine produced in celebration by a local vineyard. Sadly, he missed out on the sort of reception normally accorded to royalty during a series of lunches, dinners and parades of old sports and racing cars – Maseratis, OSCAs, Alfas, Fiats – through the town and up into the hills, watched by delighted locals and holidaymakers. That welcome came my way instead, including a room at an elegant beachfront hotel, the Esplanade, where one could easily imagine the likes of Moss and his fellow drivers, the generation of Fangio, Hawthorn, Castellotti and Collins, sitting together in the bar on the night before a race. The disappointment at the absence of ‘Sir Moss’, a man whose reputation in Italy had been established in the days when he was still a teenage prodigy, was intense and widespread, although the organisers were more than generous to his designated substitute.

  During the farewell ceremony I was handed the specially commissioned statuette that was to have been presented to him as a permanent keepsake, and asked to take it back to London for him, along with a commemorative plaque and a couple of bottles of the special wine. Then I was shown to the car which had picked me up in Rome two days earlier and in which I was now to be driven back through the mountains to catch a direct flight home to London.

  During that four-hour journey across the centre of Italy, I couldn’t help reflecting that this was part of the route on which he had won one of his greatest triumphs: the epic Mille Miglia of 1955, thundering to victory in his silver Mercedes over unprotected public roads and through remote villages. Although some of them had since been smoothed out and bypassed, the scenery was still formidable in its remoteness. By the time he reached the Rome control, halfway around the thousand-mile course, he had a lead of seventy-five seconds and was about to defy an old maxim: ‘He who leads at Rome will never win the Mille Miglia.’

  When I rang the bell at his house, a nurse came to the door. Susie sent her apologies. My visit coincided with a moment when she couldn’t leave his bedside. I handed over the trophy and walked away as the door closed on a house full of the memories of his 212 victories from 529 races between 1947 and 1962: the cups and shields, the models of his cars, the diaries recording the events of a racing career, the carefully compiled scrapbooks, and the bent steering wheels from his two biggest crashes, at Spa in 1960 and Goodwood in 1962, mounted and hung on the walls like stags’ heads, symbols of his courage in the face of danger. Now one more object had been added to the gallery. I had taken the Boy his last trophy.

  CHAPTER 2 UNSPOILT

  ‘Heroes were in short supply in 1947,’ a Derbyshire doctor wrote in a letter to the Guardian during the coronavirus spring of 2020, commenting on a nostalgic article about a season illuminated by the exploits of the cricketer Denis Compton, a dashing figure whose endless flow of runs kept the nation enthralled. As the long years of war began to recede, sport in Britain was getting moving again. Compton and the mesmerising footballer Stanley Matthews were in their pomp, playing to packed houses after picking up the threads of careers that had begun in the 1930s. But Stirling Moss was a fresh face.

  The Boy made his competition debut on 2 March 1947 in the Harrow Car Club Trial. He was seventeen years old, his shock of dark hair uncovered as he took the wheel of a BMW 328, a strikingly handsome two-seater sports car. Before the war, this had been a potent machine. Its two-litre straight-six engine had been powerful enough to carry it to a class win in the 1938 Mille Miglia. The car Stirling drove was a right-hand-drive model acquired by his father from a fellow dentist and amateur racer.

  In the late 1930s, German racing cars had become unbeatable. Curiously, only a year or two after the end of the war, there was no stigma attached to them among most British car enthusiasts, even though their manufacturers had also made engines for the Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs that did battle with the RAF’s Spitfires and Hurricanes – an attitude of reconciliation that would be underlined when Moss joined the Mercedes-Benz team a few years later. Now, in his BMW, Stirling won something called the Cullen Cup, which happened to have been donated by his mother.

  Compton had just finished punishing the South African bowling with a double century in the second Test, with thousands unable to get into a packed, sun-baked Lord’s, when Stirling entered the BMW in his third event. The Junior Car Club rally in Eastbourne included various forms of test – among them parking, steering and acceleration – on the resort’s seafront promenade. He was named first in class.

  Soon, while still in his teens, he would be winning trophies from Goodwood to Lake Garda and an eager nation would be applauding a prodigy. At twenty, he was presented to the King and Queen before the British Grand Prix. Too young to have served in and been scarred by the war, he was exhibiting the combination of skill, courage and panache celebrated in the generation that had fought in the air and on land and sea. Their youth had been stolen; his was new and unspoilt.

  He was the first of his contemporaries to stir the emotions, taking on the continentals in a very modern s
port, flying the flag for a country in recovery – material and spiritual – from the damage of war. He was a prodigy whose skills and energy held out the promise of a glorious future. Less obviously to his early fans, he was already taking a professional approach to the job of driving racing cars – and of turning himself into a public figure. ‘I was the first professional in England since the war,’ he said, ‘and the reason that I wanted to become professional was that I couldn’t afford to race all the time without making enough money.’

  But the romantic image was the one that prevailed. The public saw a young man who loved to fight, often from the underdog’s position. Once cast, the spell was never broken. And if he sometimes seemed obsessively restless, even exhaustingly hyperactive, it was explained by his motto: ‘Movement is tranquillity’.

  His popularity made him almost ubiquitous. It was Moss, rather than others with prominent roles in the rise of Britain in the post-war world of international motor racing, who was chosen for the cover of the men’s interest magazine Lilliput in the summer of 1951, at the age of twenty-one, and who was regularly featured in the Eagle, a comic for middle-class boys, alongside others – like Compton, Matthews and the cyclist Reg Harris – who acted as one-man emblems of their sport. When the Eagle’s cartoon detective Harris Tweed became entangled in a plot involving motor racing, the fictional driver was named ‘Merling Stoss’. In 1958, Peter Ustinov would affectionately parody him as ‘Girling Foss’ in his satirical recording The Grand Prix of Gibraltar.

  He was the first racing driver to be the subject of This Is Your Life, to be interviewed on Face to Face, and, in 1956, to become a guest on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs. (His choices – clearly those of a man who liked a smooch – were Dave King’s ‘Memories Are Made of This’, ‘The Charleston’ by the Joe Daniels Jazz Group, Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable’, ‘You Talk Jus’ Like My Maw’ from the soundtrack of the musical Carmen Jones, Frank Sinatra’s ‘The Tender Trap’, Lorrae Desmond’s ‘Hold My Hand’ from the film Susan Slept Here, Glenn Miller’s ‘A String of Pearls’ and Eartha Kitt’s ‘Let’s Do It’.) Eventually he became the only racing driver in history whose manager, mechanic and personal secretary all published memoirs of their time with him.

  His emergence had been perfectly timed. As Britain shook off the memories of wartime austerity and rationing came to an end, the nation sought figures who could become emblematic of a revived optimism. Following the death of George VI in 1952, a new Elizabethan age was declared; to celebrate the coronation of the young Queen, a British-led expedition planted a Union Flag on the summit of Everest. A year later, on a cinder track in Oxford, a young English medical student, Roger Bannister – at twenty-five, Moss’s exact contemporary – became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. As car ownership spread, motor racing was revived as a sport whose appeal now broadened itself beyond those who had flocked to pre-war Brooklands: in a world where everything new, from jet airliners to fountain pens and kitchen appliances, reflected the fashion for streamlining, it had the excitement of modernity.

  In the first years of peacetime a young racing driver could take on the mantle recently worn by the figures who had emerged from the war, dead or alive, with the aura of the knights of old: men like the legless fighter ace Douglas Bader, a byword for mad courage; Guy Gibson, leader of the Dam Busters raid; or Pat Reid, a successful escapee from Colditz Castle, who later reflected: ‘I can think of no sport that is the peer of escape, where freedom, life and loved ones are the prize of victory, and death the possible though by no means inevitable price of failure.’ Moss was risking his life for his country – as some would see it – in a very different sphere of competition but exuding a similar air of courage and chivalry in the proportions that represented the British public-school ideal of sportsmanship.

  He was exactly a decade into his career when a British schoolboy sat down with the solemn intention of writing his life story. On the left-hand pages of a green notebook he recorded the significant events of the driver’s career to date – none of which he had actually seen, even on film: the apprenticeship, the growing international reputation, the increasingly important victories, all written out in blue-black ink with a slightly scratchy fountain pen. Opposite the words were photographs cut from the family copy of the Daily Telegraph and from editions of the weekly motoring magazines The Autocar and Motor, passed on by a neighbour. Stirling Moss in a Maserati, jousting with the Lancia-Ferraris in Buenos Aires; in a Vanwall, sharing victory in the British Grand Prix at Aintree with his teammate Tony Brooks; even emerging from a London church with his new bride in a cloud of confetti. And that, in 1957, was how this book began.

  CHAPTER 3 HAMISH MOSES

  Had his Scottish mother’s wish prevailed, he would have been called Hamish. Instead she was persuaded to name her son after her own birthplace, a historic town on the banks of the Forth in central Scotland, midway between Edinburgh and Glasgow, where William Wallace defeated the English at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. And it was thanks to a grandfather’s decision in the nineteenth century that his branch of the Moses family of Ashkenazi Jews, transplanted from Germany to London, became known as Moss.

  Hamish Moses. What kind of a name for a racing driver would that have been? ‘Stirling Moss’ was perfect: a crisp dot-dot-dash cadence, distinctive, resonant, memorable. Easy on the tongue and with a headline-friendly surname in the bold type of tabloid newspapers: ‘MOSS WINS AGAIN’, ‘MOSS IN A SPIN’, ‘JINX HITS MOSS’, ‘MOSS MORE THAN FRIEND, SAYS JUDY’.

  The homophone of Stirling was a word with two related meanings. ‘Sterling’, with origins in Old English, Old French, Medieval Latin and Middle English, was a term for the silver penny of the Norman dynasty; later it was applied to British money in general, and in particular – via ‘a pound of sterlings’ – to the pound itself. In the seventeenth century it was adapted to become a term of approval, meaning ‘thoroughly excellent, capable of standing every test’: sterling character, sterling principles, sterling qualities.

  His full name was Stirling Craufurd Moss: the middle name also came from his mother, the former Aileen Craufurd, who had married his father, Alfred, in 1927. Following Stirling’s birth on 17 September 1929 at 10 Westbourne Grove Terrace, in Bayswater, his parents took him to live in Thames Ditton, Surrey. His father, having given up an early venture into co-owning a garage in south London, had established a chain of dental practices around the city; its success enabled them to move to a farm called Long White Cloud outside Bray in Berkshire, with a handsome half-timbered main house, where Stirling was joined by a sister, Pat. From his fifth year onwards, Stirling was encouraged by his father to pursue a physical fitness regime that involved boxing, rope-climbing, gymnastics, swimming and rowing, under the supervision of an instructor. For both children, the advantage of living on a farm was the scope for keeping pets of all shapes and sizes, for riding ponies and horses – under the supervision of their mother, an expert horsewoman – and eventually in Stirling’s case for learning to drive at the age of nine or ten away from public roads, in an old Austin 7 bought by his father for £15 and modified for use as a kind of pickup truck on the farm.

  By that time he was already winning trophies in pony club gymkhanas, soon emulated by his sister. Stirling and Pat inherited their competitive instinct from both parents, who had met at Brooklands, where Alfred was a regular competitor. While studying dentistry in Indianapolis, he became the first British driver to enter the 500 Miles race, finished fourteenth in a Frontenac-Ford in 1924, and went on to compete in dirt-track racing, a world in which an Englishman was something of a novelty and a crowd-puller. But he was back in England, trying to make the garage business work, when he met Aileen in 1926; a keen showjumper, she switched to motor sport and would go on to compete in trials and rallies in Squire and Marendaz sports cars with considerable success, becoming the English ladies’ trials champion.

  With their parents’ encouragement, Stirling and Pat began a
massing an enormous collection of cups and rosettes from their showjumping victories. But Stirling’s real interest, from the start, was in cars. He was five years old when his father drove him around Brooklands, and the outbuildings at Long White Cloud were full of interesting vehicles: a supercharged Alfa Romeo, a V12 Lagonda, an old Rolls-Royce, two Lancia Aprilias for daily use, one for each parent, and several machines, mostly Marendazes, driven in trials by both of them.

  Stirling’s early schooldays were spent at Shrewsbury House primary in Surbiton and at Clewer Manor, a prep school linked to the Imperial Service College. By the time he was ready for secondary education, at the age of thirteen, the ISC was being merged with Haileybury College, a public school set in 500 acres of Hertfordshire countryside. His predecessors at the school included the artist Rex Whistler, killed by a mortar round soon after the D-Day landings in 1944, and Clement Attlee, a future prime minister. He enjoyed games – he ran and boxed and played rugby (on the wing), although he hated cricket, which was too slow for his taste – but his academic success was limited and his years there were by no means happy ones. Various illnesses – scarlet fever, appendicitis, chronic earache and, most serious, nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys – cost him, he later estimated, several terms’ worth of education, leading to a failure to pass his matriculation exam. And he was frequently caned by his housemaster, one Major Nicholls, for minor infractions and insubordination.

  It was also at Haileybury that he became aware of anti-Semitism and first heard the term ‘Yid’, employed as a casual insult by his schoolmates. ‘Catch the Yid,’ they would shout as he flew down the wing in a rugby match, which only encouraged him to run faster. In later years his British rival Mike Hawthorn would sometimes refer to him as ‘Moses’, the sort of joshing that was deemed acceptable in the 1950s but, whether intentional or otherwise, necessarily contained a darker undertone.