The Boy

by Richard Williams

  Macklin eventually retired to Spain, but returned to England shortly before his death in 2002, aged eighty-two. As a racing driver, he was a gifted dilettante. Moss loved his company and picked up some useful tips but did not copy his entire philosophy of life. Chasing crumpet had a place, but he had no intention of allowing it to undermine the commitment to his career.

  In filthy weather on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, Moss takes the chequered flag in the Tourist Trophy, beating the works Jaguars at the wheel of a borrowed XK120 (Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust).

  CHAPTER 10 TOURIST TROPHY

  The first Jaguar XK120 off the production line went to the Hollywood actor Clark Gable, a sign of the importance of Britain’s post-war export drive. Launched by Jaguar at the London Motor Show in 1948, the new sports car looked built for success on both road and track. Its name referred to the claimed top speed produced by the powerful six-cylinder engine under the bonnet of the aerodynamic roadster body, and it cost around £1,000, which was good value for a car of such performance.

  Soon another of the rakish two-seaters would be playing a leading role – that of murder weapon – alongside Jean Simmons as a spoilt rich girl and Robert Mitchum as her father’s chauffeur in Angel Face, Otto Preminger’s film noir set in Beverly Hills. Before Ferrari, Maserati and Aston Martin had got their planned road cars into series production, and while Mercedes was still out of action, the Coventry firm jumped in to attract customers in the market for a car with the right blend of high performance and kerbside charisma.

  Aware of the publicity value of success in competition, the company’s racing department built half a dozen lightweight aluminium-bodied XK120s, three of which were prepared for the 1950 Le Mans 24 Hours. Two finished the race, in twelfth and fifteenth places. Possibly stung by the sight of two new works-entered Aston Martin DB2s in fifth and sixth, Jaguar started to take their racing more seriously. On their schedule that September was the Tourist Trophy at Dundrod, near Belfast, a 225-mile handicap race over a challenging circuit featuring narrow, uneven but fast country roads bounded by earth banks.

  Having admired the XK on its racing debut at Silverstone the previous year, Moss petitioned Jaguar for a place in their works team for the TT. They turned him down, explaining that he lacked sufficient experience. Instead, after a conversation in the Steering Wheel Club, he was loaned a similar car by Tommy Wisdom, the Daily Herald’s motoring correspondent, a friend of his parents and an experienced amateur racer who had been watching his progress with interest. Wisdom had been offered a drive in the TT in a Jowett Jupiter, and he was curious to see how the young man would go in the Jaguar.

  Moss believed he had been rejected by the factory team simply because they were afraid of the bad publicity if this increasingly popular 20-year-old should crash and hurt himself at the wheel of one of their cars. But they were clearly taking him seriously, and in the run-up to the race they lent him a car to drive on the road for a few days, allowing him to get used to its characteristics.

  Settling into Wisdom’s car in Dundrod, he practised in the rain on the first day and in the dry on the second, setting excellent lap times. The rain returned for race day, along with high winds. Conditions throughout the three-hour race were filthy, but by the second lap he had taken a lead over the other thirty starters and held on to it without being seriously challenged throughout the remainder of a long and demanding drive. Completing the race at an average of 75mph, he could look at the results sheet and see below him cars driven by men with far more experience: the works XKs of Peter Whitehead and Leslie Johnson, Bob Gerard’s Frazer Nash, and the Astons of Reg Parnell, Abecassis and Macklin.

  That evening, in a pivotal moment in his career, Bill Lyons, the boss of Jaguar, and Lofty England, the team manager, offered him a contract as their team leader for 1951. It was 16 September, the day before his twenty-first birthday.

  CHAPTER 11 SEVEN

  Like most racing drivers, Moss had his superstitions. He thought of seven as being his lucky number. The Jaguar had worn the number seven. So had his Cooper in his first win at Goodwood’s inaugural meeting two years earlier. The number had now become talismanic for him. To the small boys who were starting to follow his progress, it seemed no coincidence than seven was also the number on the shirt worn by Stanley Matthews, the nation’s football hero.

  When Ian Fleming, who had been on the fringes of the pre-war Grand Prix circus, published Casino Royale, his first spy novel, in 1953, he gave his secret agent the code name 007. At the Steering Wheel Club, where racing drivers gathered and drank, Moss would be given a membership number: 0007. Later some of his memorabilia, including the mangled steering wheels from his celebrated accidents, would adorn the club’s walls. He would lunch there often with friends, colleagues and rivals.

  What was it about the number seven? God created the world in seven days. The Book of Revelation is full of sevens: seven seals, seven trumpets, seven angels, seven stars. The Israelites captured Jericho by marching around the walls seven times. The Talmud describes seven heavens. The newborn Buddha took seven steps. The ancient world had seven wonders. Seven cardinal virtues, seven deadly sins, seven colours of the rainbow, seven brides for seven brothers. The seventh son of the seventh son: a healer in Irish folklore (but a vampire in Romanian legend). Seven: in many cultures, a symbol of perfection.

  These were the days when numbers were allocated by race organisers, but it soon became clear that his preference was something to be indulged, not least as part of his increasingly valuable box-office appeal. The number seven was on his Kieft when he won the Brands Hatch championship in 1951, on his Cooper-Norton when he won the British Grand Prix support race in 1953, on his Maseratis at the British GP itself in 1954 and 1956, on the Cooper-Climax with which he won the 1958 Aintree 200, on his F2 Porsche in the 1960 South African GP and on his Ferrari 250GT when he won the 1961 Tourist Trophy.

  For all his success, his career was also noted for its many examples of bad luck: the words ‘gremlin’, ‘jinx’ and ‘hoodoo’ were often employed by Fleet Street journalists reporting on his latest sequence of retirements from races he had been dominating. The number seven was on the Lotus he was driving at Goodwood on Easter Monday, 1962: his last real day as a racing driver.

  CHAPTER 12 AROUND THE CLOCK

  For manufacturers with fast cars to sell in the post-war years, successful attempts on speed records made useful material for their advertising departments. Stirling’s first outing with a works Jaguar was at the Montlhéry autodrome, 15 miles south-west of Paris, where the company booked the banked oval track for a record attempt. The plan was that he and Leslie Johnson would share the wheel of an XK120 in an attempt to drive for twenty-four hours at an average of 100mph, the first time such a thing had been done.

  Opened in 1924, the Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry had been the location of the French Grand Prix before the war, and its 2.5-kilometre speed bowl became a favourite site for record attempts. In 1926 the English racing driver Violette Cordery had led a team which covered 5,000 miles on the track at an average of just over 70mph in an Invicta built by her brother-in-law Noel Macklin, Lance’s father.

  The attempt on the around-the-clock record was Johnson’s idea: he had won the 24-hour race at Spa with an Aston Martin in 1948, and had given the XK120 its first victory at Silverstone in 1949. Born in Walthamstow two years before the start of the Great War, he was an amateur who subsidised his racing with the proceeds of a successful cabinet-making business inherited from his father. A mature man with a balanced attitude to life and sport, he had accumulated a great deal of experience in rallies and hill climbs as well as road racing. Only his business responsibilities and the lingering effects of childhood heart and kidney problems had held him back from a career as a top driver, and he provided Moss with a kind of mentoring very different from that of Macklin.

  The white Jaguar roadster was the one Johnson had driven at Le Mans a few months earlier. With a crew of factory mechanics
in attendance, their attempt began at a quarter past five on a Tuesday night in late October, shortly before nightfall. Both drivers took four three-hour stints, with Moss setting off first. The car’s headlamps were not really adequate for night driving on a banked track at such speeds, but they maintained a good average, with Johnson setting a best single-lap speed of 126mph on the way to their final 24-hour total of 2,579 miles at an average of 107.46mph, giving Jaguar something to shout about in their newspaper and magazine advertisements.

  In April 1951 Moss tackled the Mille Miglia in a works XK120, his first encounter with a race that would eventually occupy a prominent place in his personal history. Two months ahead of time, planning to examine the whole route, he had borrowed a car from the factory. But he had got no further than Ferrara – about 100 miles – when a van pulled out from behind an oncoming lorry and hit the Jaguar, damaging the steering and forcing him to limp back to England. When it came to the real thing, the experience was just as inglorious. With a Jaguar mechanic named Frank Rainbow alongside him, and having started the race at half past four in the morning in pouring rain, he had covered only 15 miles when he hit a patch of oil from the blown engine of a Fiat. He was unable to avoid hitting the stranded Italian car, the impact damaging the front bodywork. After he and Rainbow had bent the metal back into some sort of shape, they discovered that the gearbox had jammed. A local garage helped to free it, only for the bonnet to refuse to stay closed, ending their race.

  Two months later he raced at Le Mans for the first time, in Jaguar’s much-admired new C-type: a sports car based on the engine from the XK but with a chassis designed purely for racing. His co-driver was Jack Fairman, a 38-year-old veteran of Brooklands and the Tank Corps, who ran a precision-tool company in the Midlands and was prized as a driver less for his speed than for his virtues of steadiness, consistency and mechanical sympathy. Three cars were entered and Moss was given instructions to go out fast and try to tempt the drivers of the 4.5-litre Talbots, particularly Fangio and his compatriot José Froilán González, into overstressing their cars.

  Moss was lined up in twenty-second place for the traditional start in which the drivers sprinted across the track to their cars, and had worked his way into the lead by the completion of the first lap. González repassed him, but Moss pushed so hard that the Argentinian wore out his brake linings, which had to be replaced in a lengthy stop. By midnight, after eight hours of racing, Moss and Fairman were in a comfortable lead, a lap ahead of Fangio’s Talbot. Then, two-thirds of the way round the circuit, the Jaguar’s engine blew up. Moss got out and walked back to the pits in the pouring rain. It was the first of many such disappointments for him at Le Mans, but for the team the tactic of using him as the lure had worked perfectly. The beneficiaries were Peter Walker and Peter Whitehead, whose sister car claimed Jaguar’s first win in the 24-hour classic, a victory with priceless publicity value.

  That summer Johnson had another idea: they would use a car, and a team of four drivers, to average 100mph for a week. He, Moss, Fairman and Bert Hadley were the drivers, and this time they returned to Montlhéry with a closed XK120. Again taking three-hour spells, each of around 200 laps, they used a two-way radio to keep awake and alert. They also played tricks on each other. One night Moss covered himself with a tarpaulin, put a fuel funnel on his head, climbed onto Fairman’s shoulders and wandered onto the track with the intention of scaring the passing Johnson into thinking he was hallucinating. Johnson responded during one of Moss’s stints by setting up a table on the track and playing cards with Fairman, moving the table every lap in order to reduce the gap through which the Jaguar was passing at high speed. Once the pranks were done, they achieved their target: the coupé had covered 16,851 miles in seven days at an average of 100.31mph, generating more good publicity for the company.

  Back in the C-type in September at Dundrod, Moss won the Tourist Trophy again, this time in more pleasant conditions. In a single afternoon at Goodwood he won the sports car race and a handicap event in the Jaguar and the Madgwick Cup in the HWM. On his visits to British circuits, where the programmes would be filled with short races, such busy afternoons were good value not just for him, in terms of starting and prize money, but for his increasing number of fans.

  CHAPTER 13 COVER BOY

  By the middle of his first year with the Jaguar works team, he was already enough of a celebrity to be featured on the cover of Lilliput, a magazine for men in which articles by the likes of the philosopher C. E. M. Joad and the short-story writer V. S. Pritchett and cartoons by Ronald Searle appeared alongside discreet female semi-nudes and advertisements for non-leaking fountain pens, camera film, cigarettes and pipe tobacco, underwear (‘ “Piloting an aircraft all day, I must have comfortable underwear,” says Captain Peter Fletcher of British European Airways’) and long-forgotten drinks (‘Let’s have a Gin and VOTRIX!’). A colour illustration of a smiling Moss, in his already familiar white helmet and with his goggles and a red-spotted yellow scarf around his neck, was on the cover of an edition in the summer of 1951. The accompanying story appeared between a review of Orson Welles’s film Macbeth by Kenneth Tynan and a short story by Anthony Buckeridge, the author of the successful Jennings and Darbishire prep-school novels.

  ‘With both feet pressing firmly on the floorboards we had the interesting experience, the other day, of being driven round Hampstead Heath by Mr Stirling Moss, the twenty-one-year-old British racing ace, confined on this occasion, perhaps happily enough, to the wheel of the green and white Morris Minor saloon which he uses for personal transport,’ the uncredited author of the cover story wrote.

  ‘There was a crash helmet on the back seat, but he did not put it on. He apologized, in fact, for not being able to show us real speed. The police, it seems, keep an uncomfortably close eye, quite unjustifiably, in Mr Moss’s opinion, on racing motorists using the public thoroughfare. “They pinch you,” he said, cautiously negotiating a bend, “if a tyre squeaks.”

  ‘There was also the matter of a summons outstanding, the result of a recent incident in Kingston, where Mr Moss and another car became involved in a collision which removed one of Mr Moss’s door handles and several feet of paint. For a racing driver a summons can be a serious matter. If his licence is suspended he may also lose his competition licence, and that means no more racing, until the period of suspension is up.

  ‘Under this cloud, therefore, we proceeded round Hampstead Heath, with one rapid burst along the North Circular Road. Mr Moss has fitted special valve springs to his Morris, giving it notable acceleration. Using the gearbox generously, and rolling his foot from brake to accelerator, he left a number of larger cars well behind, revealing at the same time a hair’s breadth judgment of distance and width. “I’m fitting a supercharger soon,” he told us. “Ought to get 80 or 82 out of her then.”

  ‘We were breathing a little more quickly as we returned to Mr Moss’s one-room flat in a quiet, tree-lined road. At no time had we been in danger, but there was undoubtedly a certain nippiness in Mr Moss’s method of getting about…’

  Over a cup of tea, he answered the interviewer’s request for an explanation of his cornering technique. ‘ “Drifting, we call it,” said Mr Moss. He sat well down in his chair. An intent look came over his extraordinarily level grey eyes. “You come into the corner, throw her over, and give her the gun. The back wheels start to slide. You’ve got to fight her then, or you’re for it.” Mr Moss, in his chair, fought her. We could hear the engine roaring, the scream of tyres.’

  As the man from Lilliput finished his tea and rose to go, Moss mentioned that he would soon be making a film, possibly to be called The Art of Cornering. He invited the journalist to come along and be given a demonstration on a proper track in something a bit quicker than the Morris Minor, perhaps an XK120.

  ‘We told Mr Moss we would bear his invitation in mind, and then drove, pretty nippily, back to the office.’

  CHAPTER 14 THE MANAGER

  In Britain’s evo
lving post-war racing scene, Ken Gregory soon became a familiar figure at Moss’s side. The elder of the pair by three years, he had left school at fourteen, joined the army in 1942 and was trained as an engineer before volunteering to become a glider pilot. In 1949 he applied for a job at the RAC, where he worked in the competitions department. He was also the assistant secretary of the 500 Club, and saw Moss race for the first time in a Cooper at Goodwood in September 1949. Soon they were sharing a table at the annual 500 Club dinner with Peter Collins, another young driver whose promise had been widely noted.

  Gregory made his own race debut at Brands Hatch in 1950, driving a new 500cc car built by an engineer named Ray Martin and bankrolled by Cyril Kieft, a Welsh industrialist after whom the car was named. It showed promise, and the first sign of a business partnership between Moss and Gregory came when they took a joint interest in the company, which moved from Bridgend to a mews garage in London’s Victoria. Gregory carried on competing for two seasons, and actually won a 500cc race at Brands Hatch, but his involvement in Moss’s career was gradually taking precedence.

  In 1950, after the lease on Long White Cloud expired, Alfred Moss had bought another farm, in Tring, Hertfordshire, which he renamed White Cloud Farm. Moss and Gregory were spending a lot of time there, and Stirling’s father endorsed the idea of Gregory becoming his son’s manager, not least to provide Stirling with company on his increasing number of foreign trips; for his efforts Gregory would receive 5 per cent of the driver’s earnings. Collins was taken on as Gregory’s second client, which introduced no conflict of interest since the two drivers got on well.