Shunt

by Tom Rubython

  But it wasn’t all bad by any means. The responsible, warm and loving side of his character, masked by the excesses, began to emerge as Hunt’s family matured. In so many ways, it was the perfect set up of the eccentric father, eccentric mother, eccentric manservant, eccentric dog, one small child just beginning to walk and talk, and his very young baby brother.

  As Tom began communicate, so too did his father. “As Tom grew up”, said Sarah, “you could see the love in him for his children and it was lovely to see. Suddenly, here’s a guy who in the 1970s was the playboy of the western world and the real man was coming through. His stage had changed and he was reverting to childhood.”

  Hunt became completely focused on Tom and developed his early education by reading and speaking to him. As Sarah recalled: “He was completely focused on whatever he did. I mean, if he was reading a story to the children, there was no question of anything else coming into it. No phone calls, no yapping dog or even a best friend arriving. I remember it very, very strongly.”

  That is, except for the family parrot, called ‘Humbert the parrot’, who often sat on Hunt’s shoulder. The relationship with the parrot was close, as it was with Oscar. The greeting Hunt received from Humbert after he had been away had to be seen to be believed.

  Sarah has so many happy memories of Hunt as a father, which she has recalled to many different interviewers over the years: “We had a baby coach that we’d bought from our neighbour, I think for a hundred quid. It was a London baby carriage, a massive big pram. It was his pride and joy. He’d push it and Oscar would be there, and every single day they’d go and feed the Canada ducks on Wimbledon Common.”

  At one point, it seemed as though the marriage was saved, as the presence of the children seemed to divest Hunt of his demons and to foster in him a true family man. Sarah says none of the temper that Hunt had demonstrated at the race track ever existed at home: “I’ve read that he was quite lively on the racetrack and once got out and decked someone, but home life was very, very calm, very relaxed and nothing like the character he needed to adopt as a racing man.” Of all the troubles, he always maintained a semblance of control and a calmness that was endearing: “James did not have a short fuse at all. He used to amaze me because he could let things go. Someone would make a wind-up remark and I’d be going mad while he’d already have forgotten about it. I’d be carrying it for a week, and he’d ask: ‘Why?’” She is adamant that, at home, Hunt was nothing like his public image: “You always admire people who have demanding jobs and the minute they get home they are a family man and nothing like the character they were in the meeting or whatever three hours before. It’s only men who take control of their lives who can do that.”

  Years after his death, she gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which she said: “His laugh was him, and that’s the side I saw most of the time as a family person. His sense of humour was wicked – wicked. And I loved it. We were very similar in that way.”

  Home life between the two of them was relatively serene.

  But Sarah also recalled what she called the “naughty” times with her husband. Every time they could get away and enjoy their old hedonistic activities, they did; leaving one of their mothers and Winston in charge of the children. The mothers were only too happy to take over the duty of looking after the two “delightful” boys.

  The British Grand Prix at Silverstone was always a highlight of those “naughty times” spent together. Hunt and Sarah were very good friends with Ron and Lisa Dennis.

  Dennis was a fastidious man who liked everything just so. Sarah recalled an incident in Dennis’ car at Silverstone to a Daily Mail reporter that reflected Hunt’s naughty side. In fact, she says it was the naughtiest she can remember: “James was trying to light up a fag in Dennis’ car – just James, me and Ron’s wife, Lisa, in it – and Lisa was saying: ‘No way, James. People do not smoke in Ron’s car. Ron is obsessive about things like that.’ So with a glint in his eye, James ate a McDonald’s and chips and then had a fag in the car. It was so childish and naughty and twinkling – I thought it was terrific. If Ron ever found out, he’d probably have changed the car.”

  Sarah recounted another trip to Gleneagles, which also proved that her husband had lost none of his daredevil spirit by becoming a father, as she told the Daily Mail: “We were going to a pro-am (gold tournament) at Gleneagles in the old brown 6.9-litre Mercedes. It didn’t always go but it went that night, went like a rocket. We left at about 11 o’clock at night from Wimbledon, and near the Scottish borders there was a police car, a Panda car, behind us. So he thought: ‘No, I’m not going to stop for that one’ and he put his foot down. It was a bit hairy. We got well in front and he pulled off onto a track. We hid behind bushes and watched the Panda go by. You could almost feel the Panda’s driver saying: ‘Where’s he going, where’s he going, where’s he gone?’ We then came out and James really put his foot down and overtook the Panda. James said he knew there was the changeover at the border and that the Panda car couldn’t follow. It would take him a little while to phone through and get another guy on the other side to pick us up. Well, we were gone – and in thick fog. They were chasing us and we were doing 120 miles an hour in this fog, at 3 o’clock in the morning. He said: ‘The best place for you is down there on the floor – lie down, think of England and don’t forget I’m the highest paid chauffeur in the world.’ We got away. His concentration was total and I’ll never forget seeing the veins and the muscles on his forearms. I felt actually okay. He said: ‘Don’t look at the needle.’ Afterwards, I was fine but Oscar was ill for days.”

  The arrival of the two boys saw Oscar really come into his own and become the star of the show, demonstrating what a truly magnificent dog he was. Oscar was one of those very special dogs that forms an innate bond with its master which defies analysis. Jonathan Martin, Hunt’s boss at the BBC remembers: “Oscar was a remarkable animal. He used to go everywhere with James. I remember at Wimbledon one year, he was with him in one of the BBC caravans and James told him to ‘stay’. Oscar did not move from that spot for an hour until James returned.”

  Oscar also sometimes went to restaurants with his master and was well known at Langan’s Brasserie in Mayfair, owned by Peter Langan and actor Michael Caine. Langan, a true eccentric himself, loved Oscar and allowed him to sit at the table with Hunt. If any of his other diners didn’t like it, Langan would rather ask them to leave than Oscar. Peter Langan’s eccentricity made Hunt’s own antics look small, but they got on famously.

  There was one rather unsavoury incident, where Oscar disgraced himself by eating one of Bubbles Horsley’s children’s guinea pigs on a visit to his house near Silverstone. Horsley told Gerald Donaldson: “My daughter was far less upset about it than I was. I got quite emotional about the tragedy and sent James to bed with Oscar.”

  Despite the incident, Horsley recognised the bond between the Hunt and his canine companion: “He was a remarkable dog, no question. James thought a lot about animals and their requirements, and was very concerned about their needs. He gave Oscar the very best treatment and was also keenly interested in the welfare of other dogs. He would look at a dog and wonder if its owner was treating it well and bringing it up properly, and if the dog was getting everything out of life that it could.” Nigel Roebuck, the Autosport journalists also witnessed this kindness to animals when Hunt rescued a dog wandering around the paddock, gave it food and ensured its well-being, going through a lot of trouble along the way.

  John Watson agreed: “In his relationship with Oscar, James showed he was a very caring and loving man. When you saw James and Oscar together, you knew he was capable of great tenderness. I suspect that, for James, Oscar wasn’t a dog. He was a companion. And he loved him. There was a very deep bond between James and Oscar that I only saw again in the great love and affection he had for his two sons.”

  As an antidote to family life, Hunt renewed his love affair with golf, which had rather faded away since he had left Spain. H
e became, in the words of his friends, a “golf bore”. He installed a practice net in his garden to make his swing perfect and then toured the south of England’s golf courses where he knew he could always engage in an interesting round against some interesting opponents. After his knee injury healed, he played almost every day.

  Far less easy to explain was Hunt’s ten year affair with budgerigars, which arose directly from a childhood fascination. It was an obsession buried somewhere deep in his psyche. His interest in feathered birds began when he was 12, when his grandmother had introduced a yellow caged budgerigar to the Hunt household. The bird was apparently called Rita, after his grandmother. He used Rita as his base for breeding, installing breeding cages in the attic of their new house in Sutton and making an aviary in the garden. Before he discovered racing, he planned a career breeding budgies and reckoned he could earn a very good living at it. He told Taormina Rich he would be a budgie-breeding millionaire by the time he was 30. As the eggs hatched, the whole family became involved, and the population peaked at 32 birds. But when the family moved from Sutton to the house at Belmont, his father told him the birds had to go, and so they did. If Wallis Hunt hadn’t been so insistent, there is every chance that his son would have become a professional budgerigar breeder and never given any more thought to a career in motor racing.

  20 year later, the budgerigars made a comeback at his house in Wimbledon. A former world champion racing driver taking up budgie breeding in retirement was faintly ridiculous. And to those who suggested as much, and there were more than a few, James simply said: “Well, why is that ridiculous?” There was, of course, no answer to that and the questioners then felt ridiculous for having suggested it. In truth, it was just like any other hobby, and he didn’t think it out of character. But even James couldn’t explain to people why he enjoyed it so much; he could only assure them that he did.

  He built a large 4-metre by 9-metre aviary in his garden, which was insulated and equipped with 30 breeding cages, and he bought 30 budgerigars initially. His ambition was to breed exhibition standard budgies and to show them.

  He bought a 30-year-old Austin A35 van in which to transport the budgerigars around the country. The choice of vehicle, which cost UK£900, was truly absurd and reflected his total eccentricity. But he was proud of it and of his budgies. He said by way of explanation: “It really is a jolly good car and I’m very attached to it, and I chuck it about and drive it right on the limit without breaking the law.”

  Eventually, James had some 140 budgerigars in his garden, said to be worth nearly UK£60,000. He owned rare species with names such as Normals, Cinnamons, Opalines and Spangles. Trying to explain his enthusiasm, he said simply: “I like them because they are decorative and make a cheerful sound.”

  The children certainly loved them as well, and Hunt’s son Freddie can recall being showered with droppings from the birds as he, his father and his brother kicked footballs around the garden. They were very happy times, indeed.

  Sadly, they were not to last.

  CHAPTER 42

  Black dog and the lost decade

  Off the rails in his darkest period

  Few people knew about, and even fewer understood, the depression or the ‘black dog’ from which James Hunt suffered between 1980 and 1990, after he had retired from motor racing.

  That is because he revealed it to so few people. Even very close friends, such as John Hogan and Peter Collins, were totally unaware of it. In many ways, James Hunt lived his life in compartments; he was a different person to different people. Or perhaps those people just brought out different aspects in him.

  His problem was very common in successful sports people of the time; people like soccer player George Best and snooker player Alex Higgins were also victims of it. Inevitably, people who drank heavily and who had addictive personalities were more vulnerable.

  By the age of 33, James Hunt had been there and done it, and yet his natural adult life span was barely a quarter complete. From then on, as he realised only too well, it would be downhill all the way. And so it was.

  Ian Phillips strongly believes it started when Hunt went completely off the rails for a period after his retirement. He tries to define what went wrong: “It’s something I don’t understand and am never going to, but it fascinates me how sportsmen in general conduct themselves once it’s all over. Some do brilliantly and some go off the rails, and I think it’s not unfair to say that actually James went off the rails for a little bit.”

  Murray Walker believed that the problems were caused by withdrawal syndrome and nothing to do with the move from Spain or his subsequent lifestyle choices, He says: “For years, he had been lionised and harried ceaselessly by countless fans and given no peace by the media. He hated being so public and when he retired he was worn out by the pressure and what had been a very turbulent lifestyle. So he drank to excess, smoked to excess, womanised to super-excess and was now literally yesterday’s man.”

  Peter Warr thought that the problems were caused by the manner in which Hunt exited Formula One. He believes that Hunt developed a serious chip on his shoulder after he retired from racing. Warr is well aware that Hunt took against him and bad-mouthed him, as he did many people against whom he formed, sometimes irascibly, a strong dislike. Warr said: “He had it in for a lot of people, and for a time I was included in that because I think he saw me as the guy who couldn’t give him the car with which he could exit brilliantly from his career; but Formula One doesn’t pardon anyone. Everybody exits Formula One out of the back door, you never exit out of the front. It doesn’t happen, even to Nigel Mansell or whomever. Everyone exits from the back door because it’s that sort of business. One of the nice things is that James probably came the nearest of anybody to exiting through the front because everyone now has a good word for him.

  “But the James of those post-championship years, when the booze and the women got to him and he had it in for everybody, that wasn’t the real James Hunt, for sure. It certainly wasn’t the James of his latter years, or the James I’d known in the debriefs and the on-track situations.”

  There is no question that retiring relatively early left a huge gap in his life, emotionally as well as physically. Suddenly his whole reason for existing had been removed and he was, in truth, no longer James Hunt. Without racing, he was someone else. And it took him ten years to adapt to the new character he was forced to become. They were to be ten long, painful years.

  The problems arose because he hadn’t properly thought through the ramifications of retirement. Thinking that retirement entailed simply no longer driving a race car, he was taken aback by how much more there was to it than that.

  In truth, Hunt actually had no idea what he was doing, proven by the fact that he chose to retire in mid-season; an exit route few drivers have chosen and, when they have, have almost always regretted. For all Hunt’s intelligence, he totally messed up his exit and had no one around him strong enough to tell him so. He was actually risking his mental health with such a sudden and jarring change in his life.

  Niki Lauda, who had retired even more abruptly than Hunt, fared much better. With his flourishing airline business, Lauda had another life to turn to after retirement. Hunt, however, had absolutely nothing after his racing ended. Lauda agrees: “James had a bad time, no question. When he retired, he had nothing to do so he enjoyed himself too much.”

  What it was all boiled down to was that Hunt had retired from racing because he feared for his life, and that fear had destroyed the innate love he had for motor racing. In fact, he was actually more frightened of being severely disabled than he was of dying.

  After he retired, the accident that befell Clay Regazzoni at Long Beach in 1980 affected him more than anything he had witnessed when he was racing. He knew that could easily have been him, and it depressed him greatly. He already suffered from flashbacks from the deaths of François Cevert and Ronnie Peterson, and they were just two of the many deaths that occurred whilst he was raci
ng.

  Aside from his racing experiences, other writers have recorded that he blamed his parents for the troubled man he had become by the time he reached his 40th birthday. They say he looked back on his childhood and the manner in which he had been brought up, and placed part of the blame on his parents for not loving him enough. But there is nothing on the record to say that this was his sincere view and no evidence to suggest it. In fact, there is plenty of evidence indicating precisely the opposite.

  His mother did admit to interviewers that the family was guilty of what she called “unshared feelings” and that the deepest emotions sometimes went unexpressed in what was the busy Hunt household in Belmont in the late 1960s. Like many families in the sixties, the Hunts were not particularly demonstrative with their love and affection for each other, even though there was no doubt it existed. It was not a hypocritical environment in any sense. But Wallis and Sue Hunt were unselfish and gave up everything for their six children. Everything was funnelled into their development and they were perfect parents, as early chapters demonstrate.

  Gerald Donaldson had some intimate conversations with Sue Hunt when he was writing his 1993 biography, and she revealed that she had discussed with James his problems with depression around the time of his 40th birthday.

  It appears that Hunt himself had initiated a conversation with her and had sought her help with the problem he thought he had of “withdrawing into himself as a boy and his inability to form close personal relationships as an adult.” Donaldson recounted: “In response to his questioning about the way he was brought up, Sue wrote James a letter. In it, she admitted that she might have treated him differently, perhaps catered more to his special needs, but she didn’t recognise them at the time. She acknowledged that she was young and inexperienced as a parent, especially in dealing with boys, because she had no brothers and there were few males among her close relations. But she assumed what she was doing, the same as her parents had done for her, was best for him.”