The Steering Wheel Club was next door to the Mayfair studio of Baron Nahum, the society and fashion photographer whose circle of friends included the Duke of Edinburgh; sometimes Moss, leaving the club, would spot a model coming or going outside from a shoot with Baron and, overcoming his shyness, seize the moment. Further opportunities were offered by his keen eye at the cinema and the West End theatre; he was described as ‘a bit of a Stage Door Johnny’ by one rising young actress who resisted his approaches in the ’50s.
Under Lance Macklin’s tutelage, his seduction technique became more refined (‘Would you like to stay for breakfast?’). He had a black book containing the names and phone numbers of girls he had met around the world, and with whom he stayed on friendly terms even when they were no longer romantically attached. His dates included actresses such as Patsy Lancaster and Jean Aubrey, models such as Valerie Agnew (his frequent companion in 1956), and dancers such as Margot Hollen, a Windmill Girl, and squadrons of air hostesses whose names are lost to history. Some were sent flowers, ordered from Moyses Stevens in Berkeley Square.
He would drive them back to their flats before returning home, recording in his diary: ‘Bed at 4.30am’ or ‘Bed at 5am’. When he took them back to his place, they found themselves in the home of a man devoted to modern design: modern furniture, modern glassware, modern blinds on the windows. After cars and girls, in whichever order, design was his obsession. (Once offered a silver trophy, he successfully asked if it could be swapped for a Charles Eames chair made of moulded plywood and leather, introduced in 1956 and the last word in contemporary furniture design.)
To the organisers of the Miss World contest, held annually in London, he was the perfect candidate for membership of their judging panel. His marking from 1956 survives in his scrapbook for that year. Among his notes on the contestants: ‘Miss Great Britain: Legs bad. Speech good but affected. Miss Morocco: Cute. Miss Holland: Cute. Nice smile. Miss France: Good bottom. Miss Sweden: No bottom.’
CHAPTER 18 MISFIRING
The urge to race a British car was still there, despite the BRM fiasco. Now that the world championship was being contested by Formula 2 cars, there seemed to be a greater range of possibilities, although he felt that the HWMs had reached the limit of their potential. Leslie Johnson, with whom he had formed a good relationship in the Jaguar team, got in touch. In 1947 he had bought the ERA name and was building a two-litre car which would be eligible for the new series.
Johnson’s G-Type ERA featured several advanced design elements and used the six-cylinder Bristol engine which was also being employed by Cooper and other F2 teams. There was a delay in its completion, but when it finally made its debut at Spa an engine blew up in practice and another, hastily flown in from England on a chartered plane and fitted during an all-night session by Johnson’s five ex-RAF mechanics, suddenly expired halfway round the opening lap of the Grand Prix itself, sending Moss crashing into a kilometre post. In drizzly conditions in the wooded hills of the Ardennes, he had started tenth on the grid and was up to fifth when the engine seized. He was lucky to emerge unhurt from the wreckage. Mike Hawthorn, in a Cooper-Bristol, came fourth, winning the Winston Churchill Cup for the best British finisher.
Further engine problems ruined the ERA’s home debut in the British GP, and in a total of seven appearances the car yielded nothing better than a fifth at Boreham (where Hawthorn earned applause by leading Villoresi’s 4.5-litre Ferrari for many laps until the rain stopped), a fourth at Charterhall, an aerodrome circuit in the Scottish Borders, and a fifth at Goodwood. Accepting that the car’s inherent flaws meant it was never going to compete for Grand Prix honours, Moss abandoned the project.
Late in the season he tried a rival British F2 car for which the ERA had proved no match: the Connaught A-type, made at Rodney Clarke’s garage in Send, near Guildford, using a modified four-cylinder Lea-Francis engine and bankrolled by the construction company heir Ken McAlpine. Three cars were entered for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, for Moss, McAlpine and Dennis Poore, arriving via the team’s transporter – an old bus – in the centre of Milan the night before practice was due to start. Behind a police escort, the three single-seaters had to be driven through the city and out to Monza – in darkness and, of course, without lights. The next day, Moss exploited his slipstreaming skills behind Ascari’s Ferrari to set a good time in practice; he was lying a respectable seventh in the race when the engine failed. The Connaught was a decent enough car, but never likely to be outstanding.
In terms of top-line single-seater racing, the season had been a washout. Still insistent on driving a British car at a moment when Hawthorn was signing a contract with Ferrari, he decided to pin his hopes for 1953 on a new project involving a partnership between another John Cooper – not the one who had made his 500cc cars, but a former BRM designer who was now the technical editor of The Autocar – and Ray Martin, who had been responsible for the Formula 3 Kieft. Joined by two mechanics, Alf Francis from HWM and Tony Robinson, one of more than a hundred respondents to advertisements placed by Ken Gregory in the motoring magazines, they built a relatively simple car around chassis tubes supplied by the other Cooper, in Surbiton, and the four-cylinder Alta engine of the type used in the HWMs.
Moss was very closely involved with the creation of the Cooper-Alta Special, which made its debut at the East Monday Goodwood meeting, but it was destined to be, in his description, ‘a dog’, with a chassis that flexed, leading to unpredictable handling, and an underpowered engine. It looked the part but that was all, and the results in its half-dozen appearances were poor. When its clutch disintegrated during the French Grand Prix at Reims in July, firing out chunks of hot metal that narrowly missed vital parts of his anatomy while the Ferrari-mounted Hawthorn was becoming the first Briton to win a round of the world championship, he was left with no car for the British Grand Prix a fortnight later.
That was enough of that, and he invited Francis and Robinson to start again and build another car from scratch, using the same engine in a chassis acquired from Cooper’s in Surbiton. They finished the second Cooper-Alta within twelve days, in time to set off for the Nürburgring. Sixth place in the German Grand Prix, far ahead of the other British entries, was respectable but nowhere near to matching the Italians. Looking for more speed, Francis converted the engine to fuel injection and a nitro-methane blend, but at Sables d’Olonne, on a 1.5-mile circuit laid out around a park and a small lake halfway down France’s Atlantic coast, Moss could do no better than an unimpressive third against a weak field.
Next was Charterhall, where his presence was welcomed by the Newcastle Journal, whose reporter attended the practice session: ‘Among the early birds was Sterling [sic] Moss, who drove up to the airfield in a sleek Jaguar, which he manoeuvred and parked in a manner reminiscent of track driving. He wore an open-neck vest, trousers clipped at the ankles and boxer-style boots, and in between inspecting his Cooper munched a peach and carried petrol tins around. When the time came for his trial he pulled on green overalls, goggles and crash helmet.’ Alas, the engine of the Cooper-Alta Mk II engine gave trouble throughout the day.
At the Italian Grand Prix, the improved top speed allowed Moss to dice with Felice Bonetto’s Maserati on the long straights at Monza, but half a dozen pit stops – to fix a leaking fuel tank, among other problems – pushed him down to thirteenth place. After a few more desultory races and hill climbs on home soil, the car was put away for good. It had been no improvement on its equally misbegotten predecessors in two largely wasted seasons.
In those two years he had entered an astonishing ninety-six events, but all the Formula 3 wins at home and abroad – and a third consecutive BRDC Gold Star, presented to him by the Duke of Edinburgh at the club’s annual dinner – could not disguise the fact that his progress had stalled, while that of his closest British rival had surged ahead. Some were asking if his early success had been a flash in the pan, if he was too hard on his cars, or if his driving was too wild. There had bee
n disappointments everywhere, even the major sports car events – the Mille Miglia, Le Mans and Goodwood’s Nine Hours race – providing one episode of thwarted promise after another.
The first book devoted to his career had just been published – Stirling Moss, written by Robert Raymond, with his co-operation – and a review in Autosport had concluded encouragingly: ‘One wonders how many similar works will follow, to chronicle the story of achievements yet to come.’ Still, it was Hawthorn who now had a seat in the championship-winning team, who had actually won a Grand Prix, and whose £4,000 Ferrari road car – on loan from the factory, as exotic in looks and performance as in price – was the subject of admiring articles in the motoring magazines.
It was the rival whose smiling face was now appearing in advertisements: ‘Wherever followers of motor racing gather, talk turns sooner or later to Michael Hawthorn, Britain’s brilliant new racing star. Michael Hawthorn uses and recommends ESSOLUBE motor oil.’ In the Moss camp, that would have hurt.
CHAPTER 19 NATIONAL SERVICE
Exempt from compulsory national service in the Britain of the 1950s were those whose work was deemed essential to the post-war effort to rebuild the nation: farm labourers, coal miners and merchant seamen. And, it seemed, young racing drivers.
A system of peacetime conscription into the armed forces took effect from January 1949, requiring all healthy males between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one to spend eighteen months in the armed forces and then remain on the reserve list for a further four years. A year later, in response to the start of the Korean War, the period of service was extended to two years and the time spent in reserve reduced to six months. Also spared the call-up were those who could produce medical evidence showing them to be unsuitable material. Special deferrals were sometimes granted.
As well as the Korean War, the call-up would involve late-imperial conflicts like the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya or action against Malaya’s National Liberation Army and the EOKA insurgents in Cyprus. Without those unwanted excitements, national service was generally thought to be tedious and unproductive, but the burden was supposed to fall evenly on all sectors of society.
Sometimes the newspapers would spot what might have been a case of dodging the obligation via some form of privilege. Politicians were alerted, and the story would be whipped up into a scandal. Racing drivers, living a glamorous life that involved travel to exotic places and perhaps driving for the glory of foreign teams, were obvious targets for such paroxysms of populist indignation.
Tony Brooks, born in 1932, was not yet a headline name, so his medical exemption on the grounds of his varicose veins passed unnoticed. Greater attention was paid to Peter Collins, who sidestepped the call-up in 1953 by going to live in Paris, acquiring a resident’s permit and using his contacts to secure a job with the French distributor of Aston Martin, for whom he had been driving in sports car races. A leader writer in the Daily Mirror and a columnist in the Sunday Chronicle fulminated against his apparent refusal to do his patriotic duty, but those were pinpricks compared with the subsequent assault on his close friend Mike Hawthorn, who had also been trying to keep out of the country.
In February 1954, while Hawthorn was away racing for Ferrari in Argentina, a question in Parliament from William Robson-Brown, the Conservative MP for Esher, set off a barrage of accusations from both flanks of the national press, led by the right-wing Daily Express and the left-wing Daily Mirror, whose editorial was headlined: ‘Catch this dodger!’ Invited to comment, Hawthorn’s father explained that after passing a medical examination in 1952, his son had requested a short deferral to allow him to take an engineering course, and had then been informed that his call-up had been cancelled altogether. But questions continued to be asked about whether the 25-year-old was spending so much time racing abroad in order to avoid his military obligations. The row went on for the rest of a year in which Hawthorn returned to England during the summer for the funeral that followed his father’s death in a car crash and then again for a kidney operation at the end of the season. A subsequent medical gave him a grade four rating, which let him off the hook.
Before the Hawthorn business was over, however, Moss was dragged into it. He would have been eligible first for the peacetime prolongation of wartime conscription, which continued until 1948 and applied to males of eighteen and over, and then for its successor, national service. Had he applied for a deferral, he could notionally still have been eligible until the end of the scheme on 31 December 1960. But the childhood bout of nephritis, which had cost him part of his schooling, allowed him to claim a medical exemption.
In 1955, when he was driving for Mercedes, the story blew up in the papers and in Parliament. Manny Shinwell, the left-wing Labour MP and former Minister of Defence, had raised the matter in the House of Commons, proclaiming: ‘When I hear of these daring and courageous young people going abroad, racing around tracks to the danger of their lives, and when I hear of their physical incapacity, I wonder. I should have thought that if they are capable of doing one thing, they are certainly capable of doing the other.’
In response, Alfred Moss sent Shinwell and every other MP his son’s medical records in order to demolish the suspicion that Stirling had been unpatriotic. In a statement to the press, he said: ‘Owing to the linking of Stirling Moss’s name with certain allegations made in the House of Commons I feel that, as he is in America and unable to defend himself, I, as his father, should put the defence of his case. On August 16, 1947, at High Wycombe, Stirling was medically examined under his national service call and was, unfortunately, graded three, owing to kidney trouble. A few months previous to this date he volunteered for the R.A.F. and was turned down for the same reason.’
In the end, the row subsided. Public opinion appeared to have been swayed by the belief that Moss, Hawthorn and Collins brought more prestige to Britain by excelling in a highly competitive international sport than by wearing khaki and learning how to salute an officer or strip down a Bren gun.
CHAPTER 20 SALESMAN
The letter was put up for sale at a London auction of automobilia in the 1980s. Dated 24 March 1954, it was a file copy of a contract renewal between Shell-Mex & BP Ltd and the 24-year-old Stirling Moss, signed by the driver in an early version of what would become a swiftly executed but always legible signature. Since before the war, oil companies and tyre manufacturers and makers of brake linings and spark plugs and other components had sought to use racing and its heroes in their publicity material, often adding significantly to the drivers’ earnings.
BP’s sponsorship of Moss would last many years, sometimes requiring him to spend a day cutting the ribbons at the openings of new service stations, hopping from one to another in a helicopter. And as the advertising industry prospered in the post-war years, companies sought celebrities willing, for a substantial fee, to be linked to their products. Denis Compton advertised Brylcreem. Reg Harris promoted Raleigh bikes. Stanley Matthews assured his fans that he smoked only Craven “A” cigarettes.
By the end of 1950, when he was twenty-one, Moss’s earnings were already topping £5,000, the equivalent of about £170,000 today. This included starting money, prize money, bonuses and the proceeds of his commercial endorsements. His early sponsorships included Lucozade, the popular energy drink, Nenette, a car-polishing brush, and, like Matthews, Craven “A” – he was a light smoker throughout most of his career, perhaps four or five a day, including one when he got out of the cockpit after a race, and the tobacco company paid him £500 for his endorsement. Two years after the launch of commercial television in the UK, he appeared, along with the comedian Tommy Trinder and the cricketer Alec Bedser, in the first series of TV advertisements for Coca-Cola; as a virtual teetotaler during his career, he was certainly a regular consumer, once estimating that he drank around 150 gallons of the stuff a year, or about four pints a day.
At the end of 1952, in a promotional stunt organised by the Rootes Group, he drove a cumbersome Humber Super Snipe throug
h fifteen European countries, starting in Norway and ending four days and 3,800 miles later in Portugal, accompanied by a mechanic and his regular Alpine Rally navigator, John Cutts. Seven years later he travelled to Paris to participate in the launch of a new midget racing car called the Micromill at the Palais des Sports, for which he received 380,000 francs (this was the last year of France’s anciens francs), then worth about £500, to race against a handful of his regular rivals on an indoor track.
There were commercial ventures of his own, too. Beefburgers were a novelty in Britain when Moss opened a restaurant in March 1957 under his father’s central London dental surgery on William IV Street, close to Trafalgar Square and just behind the historic church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Journalists flocked to watch the Moss family cooking for the photographers and reported on the modern design and decor, with customers able to obtain a cup of coffee from a press-button machine. The following year he and his father tried a scheme to breed chinchillas on the Tring farm: paparazzi at London Airport snapped Stirling and his new wife returning from a winter sports holiday in matching chinchilla coats.
He was always up for a novel project. In 1961 he performed the ceremonial opening of what the Daily Telegraph described as ‘a high-speed car laundry’ – a pioneering car wash and valeting facility. ‘With this new automatic system, a car can be completely cleaned, inside and outside, in three to five minutes, at a cost of from nine shillings to 12s 6d. Mr Hilton Lowndes, 37, from New Zealand, who has financed the £25,000 “Auto-Magic” washing installation in Brompton Road, hopes that in a few years the driver who washes his own car will be as rare in Britain as he is in the United States.’
The Boy Page 6
