Shunt

by Tom Rubython

  Murray Walker says: “They found him dead on the bed with the telephone in his hand. It was climbing the stairs that killed him; if you’ve got a pain in the chest, the first thing you should do is lie down.”

  After discovering the body, Dennett called an ambulance, which arrived within minutes. A doctor, who had followed, went through the standard procedure of trying to revive the inert body. But it was clearly hopeless, and James Hunt was dead at 45 years old. The ambulance took him away to hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival, and they took his body to the mortuary. There was nothing suspicious about the death and it was clear that Hunt had died as he had been about to get into bed. The time of death was estimated at around 1:30am on the morning of Tuesday 15th June 1993.

  At half past ten, Wilkin dialled Hunt’s number at Wimbledon to confirm he was coming up for lunch at 12:30pm. Peter Hunt picked up the phone and Wilkin asked him why he was there. Peter said to him: “Listen I’ve got bad news. James has had a heart attack and he’s dead.” Wilkin put the phone down in total shock. A repeat of the Canadian highlights programme was due to be broadcast that afternoon and Wilkin’s first thought was to stop it from going out. He now faced the difficult task of telling his boss, Jonathan Martin, the BBC’s head of sport, what had happened. Martin had recruited Hunt to the BBC 13 years before and Wilkin knew he would be very upset.

  Wilkin recalls: “Normally, you couldn’t get in to see him and his secretary would usually stop me and say: ‘I’ll make an appointment, how about next Thursday?’ But he was great friends with James.”

  Wilkin went straight up to Martin’s office and, predictably, found his PA, Rosey Stern, in his way. Wilkin said to her: “I have to see Jonathan now,” to which she replied: “You can’t go in.”

  “I have to”, he insisted.

  “But you can’t.”

  Martin was sitting around the table with seven other BBC execs in an important meeting, but Wilkin couldn’t wait. He brushed past an astonished Stern, banged on the door and simultaneously knocked it open. He said to a surprised Martin: “Jonathan, I’m sorry. I’ve got some news I have to tell you right now.” Martin took one look at Wilkin’s face and followed him out of the room. Wilkin said simply: “James has died.” Stern burst into tears and Martin stood in shock as Wilkin recounted to him what little details he knew. Martin authorised Wilkin to halt the broadcast of the repeat that afternoon and then went back into his office and told his colleagues he would have to reschedule the meeting. He didn’t tell them why. With his office emptied, Martin sat behind his desk. He says: “It was an absolutely shattering shock as James had just put his life to rights.”

  Wilkin came back later and the two discussed what to do next. They quickly decided that ex driver and current pit lane pundit Jonathan Palmer was to be Hunt’s replacement and that they would hire Tony Jardine to replace Palmer in the pit lane. Wilkin says that both he and Martin “felt really awful to be discussing their friend’s replacement just a few hours after his death.” Back at Hunt’s mansion, Peter Hunt began the wrenching task of calling the people he thought should hear the news first. He had two particularly difficult calls to make: the first to his parents in Wiltshire and the second to Hunt’s ex wife, Sarah, in Sussex. He tackled the call to his parents first – the most difficult of his life. Wallis and Sue Hunt couldn’t believe what they were hearing and immediately made preparations to drive up to Wimbledon. The call to Sarah was almost as difficult. As she took in the news, she faced up to what she knew she had to do next. But first, she needed to gather her own thoughts.

  One of the first non-family calls was to David Gray, the advertising executive, who had been close to Peter’s brother since 1973. Gray remembers: “It was about 8:30 in the morning. I had just got out of the shower and I was just getting dressed at my house in Wandsworth. I answered the call on my mobile and I couldn’t believe it. I think I was one of the first he called.”

  The calls continued. At around nine in the morning in Toronto, one o’clock in London, Gerald Donaldson answered the telephone in his kitchen and Peter told him what had happened. Donaldson recalls: “It was just very difficult to comprehend.”

  By then it was nearly the middle of the afternoon, and Peter Hunt and his friends gathered in Hunt’s sitting room and discussed what to do. A press release was prepared to go out to the Press Association announcing his death.

  When Ron Dennis heard the news at the McLaren factory, in Woking, he immediately rang Peter Hunt and offered the services of his private plane. Hunt snapped up the offer and asked him if he could send it to Lesbos to pick up Helen Dyson. Dennis readily agreed and ordered the jet to take off from Farnborough airport just as quickly as the pilots could be at the airport.

  But Peter had not even spoken to Helen at that stage. When he called her, the hotel receptionist told him she was out for the day. When Helen finally returned that afternoon, the receptionist told her there had been a number of calls from London. Helen went to her room and called the house, and Peter finally spoke to her at around half past three in the afternoon. When he told her what had happened, she just broke down and couldn’t speak through all the tears and the distress. Her friend Christina took the phone to speak to Peter and asked him what had happened. Peter told Christina that a plane was on the way and instructed her to get Helen to the airport as quickly as possible. By this time, Helen was in such shock that she could hardly move. The hotel manager came up to the room and made all the arrangements to get them to the airport. Meanwhile, a grief stricken Helen went out onto the hotel balcony and just stared out at the scene in front of her, not really comprehending what was happening.

  With all phone calls attended to, Peter Hunt went outside to address the 50-odd journalists and TV crews who had gathered outside the house. He managed to keep his composure and said as few words as possible to satisfy them: “He had had no indication of any problems, no heart problems in the past, and we’re all in shock, really, I am afraid.” With that, he went back inside. By then, radio news bulletins were carrying the story of Hunt’s death and, almost as soon as he had uttered the words, Peter heard his own voice on the radio repeating back to him what he had just said.

  Meanwhile, as soon as Sarah Hunt put down the telephone, she knew she had to suspend any personal feelings for the sake of her children. She went up to her bedroom and quickly prepared herself to tell her sons that their father had died. She glanced down at her children playing in the garden and prepared herself for the most difficult moment of her life.

  Leading her two sons out into the middle of the lawn, she sat them down. The father whom they had seen only two days before was now gone forever, and it was no easy truth to explain to a five- and a seven-year-old. With Freddie on her knee and Tom sitting on the grass, she said simply: “Dadda’s gone to Heaven.” Tom burst into tears, but the younger Freddie remained dry-eyed as he took in the news. Even now, Freddie recalls the precise moment: “I remember the exact time and place I learned of it.”

  When they realised what their mother was saying, they all cried, and Sarah then repeated to them what James had so often said: ‘God is everywhere and everyone’s spirit is part of God.’ Tom Hunt assured his mother: “Well, his spirit will still be with us.” Sarah later told Gerald Donaldson that she was grateful to have her two boys by which to remember her ex husband, and felt sorry for Helen Dyson who only had memories. But, at the time, she admits she was absolutely devastated in a way that perhaps an ex-wife has no right to be. In fact, friends and family who rushed over when they heard the news couldn’t understand why she was so upset at the loss of her ex-husband. But, as she explained, she was grieving for her children: “It wasn’t only my grief at losing him, it was the grief of my children losing their father.”

  Murray Walker was out doing some promotional work when he took a call from his wife, Elizabeth, who said to him: “Brace yourself, dear. I’ve got some very bad news.” Walker recalls: “My first thought was for my mother, who was th
en 95. ‘Oh God, is it mother?’ ‘No, it’s James. He’s died.’ I said: ‘James who?’ and she said: ‘James Hunt’. And human reaction can be quite illogical, as mine was then, as I said to her: ‘But I was with him on Sunday night’, as though being with him meant he couldn’t be dead now.”

  Meanwhile, in Greece, Helen Dyson and her friend arrived at the airport and were flown to Farnborough aboard the plane belonging to Tag Aviation. There, Helen’s brother was waiting for her. As she recalls: “My brother met me at the airport, poor thing, and I looked at him, wanting him to tell me it wasn’t true; that it was all a ridiculous nightmare.’

  They raced back to Wimbledon from Farnborough. She arrived at around nine o’clock and collapsed into Peter Hunt’s arms as he helped her though the door. By then, Hunt’s parents had also arrived and they sat in the sitting room with Helen’s parents, Mike and Molly, trying to come to terms with the future. Witnessing so many familiar faces all distraught with similar feelings, Helen was overcome with grief. She knew his death was just fate, as she said later to Daily Mail reporter Mary Greene: “I feel fate works in funny ways. In all the time we’d been together, I’d never been away without James – until then. Maybe it was just meant to be like that, maybe I was being protected.”

  Professor Sid Watkins was in South Carolina, in the United States, with his wife Susan, and had just popped into a liquor store to buy a bottle of whisky when the news came over the car radio.

  Watkins recalls: “We immediately telephoned our son Matthew, who was in Scotland. All the kids were very upset. They were extremely fond of James.”

  Tony Dron had been at the Black Bull, Moulton, a famous pub/restaurant in North Yorkshire, for the annual reunion of the Geordie Cresta Club. This involved a very long and splendid lunch for some 16 people, followed by a further session in a remote village pub some miles away – ostensibly to watch a cricket match. Few people had mobiles in those days but somehow his then wife, Karen, tracked him down to the village pub shortly after 5pm. As he recalls: “Somebody said there was a call for me, which seemed absurd as I was in the middle of nowhere, 250 miles from home and even I didn’t know the name of the village I was in. When the landlord took me through to his family’s private room in the back of his little pub and handed me the old-fashioned telephone, I was utterly baffled. When Karen told me the news, I thanked her and sat down. I didn’t move for ages. Tears just ran down my face. I was completely shocked.”

  Gathered in Hunt’s sitting room, his family resolved to hold the funeral as soon as possible. Peter Hunt and Chris Jones began making arrangements. As the evening news bulletins began, they all sat round the television set, many of them in tears, as both the BBC and ITN news led with the story of Hunt’s death. By the late evening, bulletins appeared and it was still a big story, with John Humphrys on the BBC and Peter Sissons and Trevor McDonald on ITN telling the story of Hunt’s life and death.

  The following morning, Nigel Roebuck, the Autosport journalist, who had been away at the Grand Prix in Montreal, got a shock. Roebuck was devastated upon hearing the news and immediately set out to write Hunt’s obituary for that week’s Autosport.

  He could not be bothered to listen to the phone messages that had built up after three weeks away in North America. As he recalls: “It was not until the next morning that I got around to playing back the messages on my answering machine. There were many, but the last one set me trembling: ‘Nigel, J. Hunt speaking. Six twenty-five, Monday evening. Just calling for a gossip. If you’re back tonight, give me a shout – failing that, tomorrow perhaps.”

  Roebuck broke down as he came to terms with the enormity of what had happened. He was not alone.

  CHAPTER 2

  Earliest Life 1947 to 1955

  A very precocious child

  There might have been a clue that James Hunt would turn out to be a difficult character when he nearly knocked over his mother, Sue, whilst he was still in her womb. She recalls how one day, a few weeks before he was born, he kicked her so hard in the stomach that she feared for her balance and almost fell over. She remembers the incident vividly because, coincidentally, it was the very same day that India was granted its independence.

  Needless to say, Sue Hunt was mightily relieved when James Simon Wallis Hunt finally came into the world a few weeks later, on Friday 29th August 1947. So too was his father, Wallis. Mrs Hunt told Gerald Donaldson, one of her son’s biographers, her recollections of that moment: “He was an odd little fellow, a rebel right from the moment he was born.”

  He was born in a small house at Cheam, which was all the family could afford at the time, as Wallis had just come out of the army.

  When James arrived, he became the second child in the Hunt family, born two years after his sister Sally. When he was followed by Peter, two years later, Sue thought that her family of three was complete. But James was to be the eldest son in what would become an oversized family, common for the times, ultimately consisting of four brothers and two sisters.

  The Hunts eventually moved to a bigger house in nearby Sutton to accommodate the expanding family, and lived there happily for over ten years before finally moving to Belmont.

  When Peter arrived, Sue Hunt had no plans to have any more children, even though she was still only 25 years old. But when the youngest was old enough to go off to boarding school at Westerleigh in 1955, she felt a big gap open up in her life. So, in 1958, ten years after the birth of her firstborn, she decided to have more children. By then in her mid thirties, Sue gave birth to her second lot of children, which arrived every two years to balance the first half perfectly with two more boys and a girl. Tim was born in 1958, David in 1960 and, finally, Georgina in 1962. And, with that, Sue’s childbearing days were over, just prior to her fortieth birthday, and she settled down to integrate her two-part family together as a unit. She couldn’t have been happier.

  Large families were fashionable immediately after the Second World War and actively encouraged by Clement Attlee’s Labour government to replenish all the good Britons lost. With their six children, Wallis and Sue Hunt had done their bit for the country, although they certainly hadn’t ever voted for Attlee.

  According to their mother, all of her six children were “active and independently minded and quickly developed strong personalities.” But unquestionably, James was the most difficult of the six, as he cried continually. His mother remembers: “He screamed all night as a baby for no apparent reason, and he was a rebellious, unhappy child prone to tantrums.”

  He may have been a horrible child but he bristled with inquisitiveness and intelligence, and soon began to dominate his parents. Of the six young Hunts, he learned to talk the fastest and had by far the keenest intellect. His determination was also legendary; if he wanted something, there was no question he would eventually get it.

  He was always a single-minded boy, with what has been described as a “relentless quest.” His mother recalls: “If James wanted something, he’d have it. He’d grind away, figure out how to outflank you and seemed always to win out in the end.” It’s hard to believe that, at the time, she was talking about a four-year-old.

  The young James felt some kind of inner compulsion to continually assert himself, and was obstinate and persistent in that aim. He often dominated his parents and would not accept normal discipline. As he became older, there were continuing battles against his parents’ authority. Staggeringly, they admit to having lost many of those battles of will to their precocious son.

  He developed a hugely competitive streak at a young age. It was this competitiveness that led to his persistence. At first, there were tearful tantrums. Then, as soon as he learned to talk, he used his growing vocabulary to grind away his parents’ resolve.

  When he set his heart on something, he was full of determination to get it – be it a banana or a new teddy bear. The more his parents resisted his demands, the more persistent he became. As Sue Hunt puts it: “His relentless quest to get what he wanted was like a
steady drip, drip, drip, which eventually wore you down.”

  Assessing James’ childhood, early biographer Christopher Hilton called him: “A difficult child; a loner who actively disliked not winning at anything he did.” He was also very aggressive. At four years of age, he whacked his two-year-old brother, Peter, over the head with a shovel. Peter required hospital treatment and stitches. There were several other violent incidents with Peter.

  According to Gerald Donaldson, both Sue and Wallis Hunt were concerned about the hyperactivity of their eldest son. At times, he was by all accounts simply “unmanageable.”

  His parents were brought up in the post Victorian era and were by no means permissive, nor were they naturally strict disciplinarians. But they worked hard at disciplining James, whom Donaldson refers to as their “peculiar and unruly son.” Wallis Hunt said before he died: “[James] was against all authority, but authority felt it had to draw the line somewhere.”

  His mother often became frustrated by James’ particular tendency, upon winning a battle, to reject straightaway whatever he had been battling for. But she had some respite: her eldest son may have been ultra competitive, but he was never vengeful. Vengefulness is a very common trait in competitive children, but James showed no sign of it.

  As he grew older, he displayed the characteristics of a loner. And yet he didn’t seem to enjoy his own company either. He always seemed troubled by one thing or another.

  Despite all evidence to the contrary, his mother has no hesitation in describing him as an “exceptional child.” His mother is a very remarkable woman and, although she may be criticised for failing to take her eldest son in hand, it is clear she gave her six children the best possible childhood. Although she provided a very loving home, Sue Hunt admits the family was never fully at ease with showing their feelings for each other. Confessing to Donaldson years later, she admitted to “unshared feelings”, saying: “private emotions were seldom expressed.” There was no lack of love and affection in the Hunt household, it was just that Wallis and Sue were not particularly demonstrative – it seemed to embarrass them.