The Boy

by Richard Williams

  When the war came, according to the family legend, Alfred Moss invented an indoor air-raid shelter: a tent-like structure made from steel and wire mesh, intended to protect the occupants against falling masonry. Such devices became known – after Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Home Security – as Morrison shelters; more than half a million were provided free to households whose income was less than £400 a year. (The official history says that its designer was a Cambridge professor named John Baker.)

  In the last year of the war, the 15-year-old Stirling was registered as a motorcycle dispatch rider. At the Royal Windsor Show, a few weeks after VE-Day, both Moss children won showjumping prizes, presented to them by King George VI; it was just about Stirling’s last competitive outing on horseback. He left school at sixteen, in the summer of 1945, and sold his possessions – including his radio, his tent and his bicycle – to his father in order to raise £140 for a Morgan three-wheeler, which he was allowed to drive using a motorcycle licence. His first four-wheeled car, acquired in 1946 after selling the Morgan, was an MG TB drophead.

  Since following his father into dentistry was not an option, thanks to his failure to pass the necessary exams (even after a few months spent at a crammer), it was thought that hotel management might be a suitable career option. He worked as a junior chef at the Palmerston restaurant in the City of London, followed by spells at the Bayswater Hotel, near Hyde Park – where he called himself ‘Toni’ because he felt that ‘Stirling’ was an unsuitable name for the job – and behind the bar at the Eccleston Square Hotel in Pimlico. It was there, he told the motoring historian Doug Nye, that he learned to collect the dregs from splits of bitter lemon and tonic water in fresh bottles and resell them to unsuspecting customers for a bit of freelance profit.

  But by the time he was seventeen, his mind was made up. His head was full of cars. He was going to be a racing driver.

  CHAPTER 4 THE WHITE HELMET

  In the 1940s, Grand Prix aces still wore thin linen wind-bonnets offering no protection at all against impacts; anything more substantial was deemed to be for amateurs. Hard-shell helmets would not be compulsory for racing drivers until 1952. But as soon as Stirling progressed from speed trials to hill climbs, his parents insisted that he protect himself with the sort of headgear worn by polo players, as used before the war by a number of prominent British racing drivers. His first, on loan from his father, was dark leather. But in September 1948 he appeared wearing a lid of his own: a pure white helmet with white leather earpieces and chin strap, and a small peak around which he could attach a visor to replace his aviator’s goggles in bad weather.

  Moss’s helmet came from the hatter Herbert Johnson, of 38 New Bond Street; it was made of cork, papier-mâché and an outer shell formed from several layers of laminated resin-soaked linen, and cost five guineas. Slightly tilted as he leaned back in the cockpit, the white helmet became his visual signature in an era when racing drivers were easily identified by their individual headgear: dark brown for Fangio, pale blue for Ascari, black with a white-peaked visor for Hawthorn, tan for Peter Collins, and so on. When Herbert Johnson produced a model with a fibreglass shell in 1958, the price went up to six guineas. Later he used similar helmets from Les Leston, a former driver who had established himself as an equipment supplier.

  In the final years of his career he wore pale blue two-piece Dunlop overalls; before that his kit had been mostly white, occasionally British racing green. For races in high temperatures he usually wore short-sleeved polo shirts, including a pale blue one with a waffle pattern – made by Suixtil, a manufacturer based in Buenos Aires endorsed by the great Juan Manuel Fangio and other Argentinian drivers – that he believed was more effective at dispersing the kind of extreme heat encountered in places like Sebring and Pescara; he probably acquired it in Buenos Aires after suffering heatstroke during a non-championship grand prix there at the start of that year. Like most drivers of his generation, he wore string-back gloves with leather palms. His watch, worn on his right wrist, had a distinctive bracelet formed from two thin steel bands; unlike leather, it would not absorb dirt and sweat. On his left wrist he wore a silver identity bracelet. He wore ordinary socks and shoes, usually slip-on loafers.

  None of his garments offered any significant protection against fire, although by the end of the ’50s the drivers were being offered a preparation that was supposed to provide some sort of flame-proofing to standard cotton overalls. The danger of fire was why he and his contemporaries disdained the idea of seat belts: they preferred to be thrown out of the car in a crash rather than risk being trapped in a blazing wreck.

  Eventually he sold the white helmet in which he won the 1957 British Grand Prix to the British Oxygen Company, who had it covered in gold leaf to be preserved as a trophy. In 2009 it was auctioned for £23,000.

  At Silverstone on 13 May 1950, the day of the first F1 world championship grand prix, Moss and his Cooper-JAP competed in the support race for 500cc cars, winning their heat but finishing second in the final when a piston failed on the last corner (Klementaski collection).

  CHAPTER 5 THE 500 CLUB

  He had paid his first visit to a motor-racing circuit at the age of five, when his father strapped him in for a lap around Brooklands. (That day, while peering into a car’s cockpit, he leaned against the hot exhaust pipe and burned his stomach, an incident he later credited for giving him a high threshold of pain.) At the end of the war, however, it became clear that the track in the Surrey stockbroker belt was lost to racing for ever. The Byfleet banking had been breached to make a larger entry road to the factory where Hawker Hurricanes were being manufactured, while the Luftwaffe’s visits had left a number of craters. The whole site was about to be sold to the Vickers aircraft company.

  It was in France that proper racing first restarted after the war. In September 1945, a crowd estimated at 200,000 thronged the Bois de Boulogne on the western edge of Paris to watch a day of races contested by carefully preserved pre-war Maseratis, Delahayes, Alfa Romeos and Bugattis. Three events – their titles reflecting the agony of the preceding six years – were held that afternoon: the Coupe Robert Benoist, dedicated to the former French champion and Resistance martyr; the Coupe de la Libération; and the main race, the Coupe des Prisonniers, won by Jean-Pierre Wimille, another Resistance hero. Continental racing was back, and the following year competitions would be held on road circuits in Nice, Marseilles, Geneva, Turin, Milan, Barcelona and elsewhere. The classic endurance races were also on their way back: the Mille Miglia would return in 1947, the Targa Florio in 1948 and Le Mans in 1949.

  In the UK, the resumption of activity was hindered by a law that since 1925 had prevented racing on the public roads of mainland Britain. As well as Brooklands, the other two purpose-built tracks were out of action. Donington Park in the East Midlands, also scarred by military use during the war, had been returned to its civilian owners, who showed no signs of inviting the racing world back on to their premises. At Crystal Palace, the local council had declined to permit the reopening of the circuit, claiming that the noise would upset the residents of the surrounding south London suburb.

  Speed and consistency trials and hill climbs were the first competitions to reappear. The Cockfosters Rally, held on 14 July 1945, was a reunion of the tribe: various Bugattis and Alfas were disinterred, even a 1914 Grand Prix Mercedes, some of them driven by men still in uniform – a squadron leader in a Railton, a flight lieutenant in a BMW, and Major Tony Rolt MC, liberated from Colditz before he could escape in the glider he had built in the castle’s loft, and now at the wheel of an ERA. A month later came the first genuine speed event, a hill climb organised by Bristol Motor Club. ‘Arranged primarily for competitors, with spectators tolerated rather than encouraged, the event gave some hundreds of people their most enjoyable afternoon in a very long time,’ Motor Sport’s correspondent wrote.

  A yearning for proper racing had been expressed as early as 1941 in the letters column of the same magazine, where a
reader presciently pointed out that the end of the war would leave an abundance of redundant military aerodromes, with their runways and perimeter roads offering ‘ideal sites for minor sprints and road races’. Five years later those words came true when, on 15 June 1946, Britain’s first post-war circuit race took place at Gransden Lodge, 10 miles west of Cambridge, on land from which Mosquito pathfinders and Lancaster bombers had only recently been taking off. Organised by Cambridge University’s motor club, the meeting consisted of a dozen short races for racing and sports cars of various sizes. Victory in the event’s big race went to the Bugatti of George Abecassis, who had been shot down and captured while dropping supplies to Danish resistance fighters in 1944.

  There was no sign at Gransden Lodge that day of a revolution that would profoundly influence the whole of international motor racing, and which had begun with a debate about what form racing might take when the war had been won. A series of articles in Motor Sport proposed basing a new single-seater formula on the international Class I, for cars with engines of no more than 500cc. This would appeal to impecunious enthusiasts who could use motorcycle engines and components from small saloon cars to create their home-built ‘specials’.

  The idea caught on, and the entry for an early post-war hill climb at Prescott in the Cotswolds included two examples of the new 500cc racing cars: the Strang, named after its creator, a New Zealander with a garage business in Harrow, who fitted a Vincent engine behind the driver on a chassis using pre-war Fiat Topolino parts; and the Tiger Kitten, built by Clive Lones around bits from various Austins and powered by a single-cylinder JAP engine, conventionally mounted in front of the driver. ‘These cars proved conclusively that 500cc cars are amply fast enough to hold the spectator’s interest,’ Motor Sport noted.

  By the start of 1947 a 500 Club had been formed, a set of regulations had been drawn up and the organisers of race meetings were beginning to include events for those who saw the new formula as a cheap and interesting way to go racing. Soon the cars of Colin Strang and Clive Lones were joined by other home-built specials – the Iota, the Spink, the Fairley, the ASA, the Wharton, the Aikens and others – among which the cars built at Charles Cooper’s little garage in Surbiton, south-west of London, quickly became pre-eminent.

  Stirling Moss was on the way home from one of his outings in the BMW towards the end of 1947 when he persuaded his father to stop at that nondescript building just off the Ewell Road, where the dimensions of chassis frames for new racing cars were drawn in chalk on the brick walls and the concrete floor. The owner’s son, 24-year-old John Cooper, and his friend Eric Brandon had designed and built a car to compete in the new low-cost formula. Like Strang, they had put the engine – their first one was a single-cylinder JAP, made in north London and mostly used after the war in speedway machines – between the driver and the rear axle, saving weight and allowing the driver to sit low in the cockpit, between suspension units scavenged from a pair of Topolinos, the two front ends welded together.

  The mid-engined layout had been used occasionally before the war, most spectacularly in the Auto Union cars designed by Ferdinand Porsche. But those were big and complex cars, rugged enough to race in Grands Prix on long road circuits where the surface was often rough and uneven, and their rearward weight balance presented an unfamiliar and fiendishly difficult challenge for all but such virtuosos as Bernd Rosemeyer and Tazio Nuvolari. The first Coopers, by contrast, were lightweights, perfectly suited to the new environment in which they were being raced: the smooth, flat asphalt perimeter roads of old aerodromes.

  The success of the Coopers paved the way for a generation of cars that would go on to dominate the highest levels of the sport, resetting the prevailing design philosophy – of circuits as well as cars – for generations to come. But when Stirling Moss drew his father’s attention to their existence, he was simply looking at an affordable way to take the next step in racing. The new Cooper Mk II – one of a dozen being built for customers – would cost £575.

  There had been an awkward exchange in the Moss household a year earlier when Alfred discovered that his son had sent off a £50 cheque as a deposit to the maker of another 500cc machine, the Marwyn, made in Bournemouth and offered as a complete car with a JAP engine for £445. That payment was stopped. But now he could see that Stirling was serious about making progress in a pursuit for which he was already showing not just keenness but aptitude. Alfred could even use his own friendship with Stan Greening, the man who made JAP engines, to get a decent unit at a favourable price. There would also be help from Don Müller, one of many German prisoners of war who had stayed behind to work on British farms. Müller had been a fitter at BMW in his native Bavaria; now, in addition to his duties as a farmhand on Long White Cloud, he was enlisted to help prepare and run the car.

  As usual, Alfred insisted that Stirling should contribute some of the cost of the car himself. But, basically, the cream-painted Cooper-JAP came as an eighteenth birthday present. When Stirling briefly tried it out on the roads of an unfinished housing estate, he discovered that the very rudimentary seat and the cutaway cockpit offered an alarming lack of support when cornering. He would need to develop a technique of steering with one hand while clutching the side of the bodywork with the other.

  After an attempt to enter a hill climb at Shelsley Walsh was rebuffed on the grounds of his inexperience, he gave the little car its debut at Prescott. Packed into one of the family’s horseboxes, it was towed behind Alfred’s old Rolls-Royce to the Gloucestershire venue, where Stirling finished fourth in the 500cc class. A month later at Stanmer Park, a hill climb in the grounds of a stately home outside Brighton, he beat several of the same opponents, including Eric Brandon, to take his first victory in the car.

  On 4 July he entered his first circuit race, at the Brough aerodrome in the East Riding of Yorkshire. There were already signs that this was becoming a serious little operation: they took the car and its methanol fuel up north on the train, and flew it back. The track was tiny – barely two-thirds of a mile – and the fee for his entry was five shillings. In heavy rain, a win in the heat was followed by first place in the final and a third win of the day in a handicap race. The day produced prize money of £15 and an approving mention in the Daily Mail. Further hill-climb wins at Bouley Bay and Prescott provoked Raymond Mays, a senior figure in British motor racing, to describe Moss in the Daily Graphic as ‘the most promising of our young drivers’.

  The little team at Long White Cloud had spent time working on the car, drilling components for lightness – as the Germans had done before the war – and experimenting with gear ratios, spark plugs and tyre pressures, and on 18 September they travelled to West Sussex for the day on which the old Westhampnett fighter base was to be transformed into the Goodwood racing circuit – as yet lacking grandstands, paddock shelter or a scoreboard, but already a fast and challenging track. Despite starting from near the back of a grid whose composition was decided by ballot, Stirling was in the lead by the time the field came out of the first corner and won easily, almost a minute ahead of Brandon at the end of three laps of the 2.4-mile track, so dominant that his father was able to put out a signal to slow down. Thirty guineas was his prize, along with his first interview, given to a local paper. It was the day after his nineteenth birthday, and his cake was cut on the bonnet of his car as the family celebrated.

  There was a disappointment in the 500cc race at the first post-war British Grand Prix meeting at Silverstone in October, when 100,000 turned up at the Northamptonshire aerodrome. Colin Strang led from pole position in his own car but retired with a seized engine, leaving Moss to take over until an engine drive sprocket failed. But for the first time the teenager had rubbed shoulders in the paddock with the continental aces featured in the main event, including Luigi Villoresi and Alberto Ascari, who finished first and second in the latest Maseratis. A distinctive figure in the paddock was that of the portly Alfred Neubauer, the legendary manager of the pre-war Mercedes racing tea
m, visiting England for the first time since the funeral of his English driver Dick Seaman in London a few weeks before the outbreak of war. The Germans were still excluded from motor sport, but Neubauer was thinking ahead to his team’s return.

  The following week’s win at Dunholme Lodge in Lincolnshire, another former aerodrome, closed a season in which Stirling had won eleven of the fifteen events he entered, ending the year with only a small financial loss. He had caught the eye of many observers, including the members of the British Racing Drivers’ Club, who welcomed the precocious teenager to their exclusive circle; at their annual dinner he was introduced to the Duke of Edinburgh, who showed a keen interest in his progress.

  Now his father could see that this was definitely more than a young man’s passing fancy, and together they agreed to take the next step. For 1949 they bought John Cooper’s latest design, the Mk III, and a new Bedford van to go with it. To replace Don Müller, who had returned home to Germany, they hired a permanent mechanic, Rex Woodgate, who came to live in a caravan on the farm. The new car could be fitted with a choice of 500cc and V-twin 1000cc JAP engines, capable of being swapped between races, enabling Moss to race in two categories on the same day. Its body panels anodised in a shade of pale metallic green, the car had a seat that gave much better support for Stirling’s back and thighs; nevertheless he was also now wearing a corset-like kidney support belt, 5 or 6 inches deep and with three buckles, of a kind that some top drivers, including Nuvolari, used to counteract the effect of high cornering forces.

  At Goodwood in April the bigger engine provided the first win of the season in the Easter Handicap. That was an hors d’oeuvres to the support race at the 1949 British Grand Prix, now held in mid-May. In front of another huge Silverstone crowd, many of them watching from temporary grandstands, the pale green Cooper led the thirty-six entrants in the 500cc race by the end of the first lap. With an emerging young national hero at the wheel, it was never seriously challenged for the rest of the fifty-mile race. ‘Another great victory for Moss,’ Motor Sport concluded. ‘Nothing, one feels, could have been more popular.’