by Paul Howard
He was looking for a car that suited him. Once, Glen Kidston remembered, he was considering buying a Ferrari from Sir William Pigott-Brown, the kaftan-wearing champion amateur jockey and heir to a banking fortune. ‘Tara took it out for a test drive,’ he said, ‘but it was making all sorts of strange noises. He had a look underneath the car and the whole undercarriage was torn away. I think Sir William had been using it to drive across the fields to his horses – a Ferrari!’
Shortly afterwards, at Brands Hatch, Tara got to meet Jim Clark, who had just won the Formula One World Championship in the revolutionarily designed, slim and low-to-the-ground Lotus 25. ‘Clark was a humble fellow,’ said Glen, who was with him that day, ‘rather like Tara in that way. He wasn’t flash. He was a farmer from the Borders. We watched him drive the circuit in a Lotus Cortina, taking the corners with three wheels on the track and one up in the air. We didn’t even know a Cortina could do such a thing.’
From that moment onwards, Tara was a Lotus man. In April 1964, he became one of the first people in Britain to own an Elan, a two-seater sports car with a lightweight fibreglass body that was built for speed. It was a lethal combination of fast and fragile.
‘I drove it one night,’ remembered Hugo Williams. ‘We were on Finchley Road and Tara said, “Do you want to have a go?” I got behind the steering wheel. The place was stuffed with traffic and I was terrified. Tara said, “Come on, Hugo, put your foot down!” so I did, and the thing just took off like a bullet.’
The early models were available in kit form, to be assembled by the customer, as a way of avoiding purchase tax. ‘They arrived in pieces in a series of crates on the back of a lorry,’ said Nicholas, who bought one shortly after Tara. ‘You assembled it – or you got a mechanic to assemble it for you – then you had to take it to the Lotus factory somewhere in Hertfordshire so they could check that you’d put it together properly. I was coming back from the factory, having got mine passed. I was stopped at a traffic light and a cement mixer ran into the back of me and I realized what kind of protection a fibreglass car offered you. It just buckled. It looked like Shredded Wheat afterwards.’
Tara’s first Elan was put together by a mechanic in Notting Hill named Norman Webster. But having seen it done once, he assembled every model he bought subsequently himself, including the one he bought for his wife as a present for her twenty-second birthday.
As Tara’s fascination with racing cars grew, Nicki said, he started to take an interest in the story of Sir Algernon Lee Guinness and his younger brother, Kenelm, cousins of his grandfather who were famously fearless drivers from the early days of motor racing.
Algernon – or ‘Algy’ as he was known – had specialized in straight-line speed trials and record attempts in his boxy two-seater Darracq. He would tow the car, with its naked chassis and bicycle-like wheels, to Blackbushe Airfield in Hampshire, where Kenelm would mark Start and Finish lines on the runway one kilometre apart using flour, then clock his brother’s speed, before the police were, inevitably, summoned from Camberley. According to the legend, Algy always sent the law packing, with rude hand gestures and an earful of colourful abuse. He competed in a number of British and international circuit races and set a World Land Speed record in 1908, before he succeeded to the baronetcy and left the field open to his younger brother.
Kenelm was a member of the Bright Young People set and the very astute Guinness director who persuaded Oonagh’s father to advertise the black stuff. He also invented – and lent his initials to – the KLG spark plug, although it was his feats behind the wheel of a car that defined him and eventually cost him his life. He won a number of major international races and, in 1922, set a new World Land Speed record of his own in a Sunbeam 350HP. But two years later, he was involved in a horrific crash at the San Sebastian Grand Prix, which caused him serious head injuries and killed his mechanic, who had been sitting alongside him in the passenger seat. He quit racing. The accident was said to have changed him. He suffered from debilitating headaches and, in later years, delusions that he was being pursued by American gangsters. He gassed himself at his home in Kingston upon Thames in 1937 at the age of forty-nine. Algy told the subsequent inquest that his brother had, to all intents and purposes, been a madman for a number of years.
According to Nicki, Tara wondered whether his own obsession with speed was in some way inherited. In pursuing a racing career, however, he saw himself following not so much in the steps of Algy and Kenelm, but rather those of his own half-brother, Gay – a gentleman of means who raced horses for the thrill of it rather than for the money.
‘I think he was going to do Formula Three first,’ Martin Wilkinson recalled, ‘and try to get into Formula One that way. And he quite likely would have been killed along the way, because motor racing in those days had a very Battle of Britain atmosphere around it. You knew that if you raced, you were very likely to die in a crash, as Jim Clark and lots of others eventually did.’
There was no question that Tara possessed the skills and fast instincts required to handle a race car. ‘I remember one time we were going to Ireland,’ Glen said, ‘and I was driving a two-litre Spyder. It was a left-hand drive. Tara was in the front passenger seat. We were driving through Wales, on the way to Holyhead, flying along the road, when the front end of the car started creeping and I wasn’t in control anymore. I really thought we were going to have a horrible smash. Tara saw I was in trouble, and, straight away, he said, “Put your foot on the throttle.” As soon as I did, the tail came around. He had a racing driver’s instincts.’
In May 1964, Tara decided to put those instincts to the test for the first time when he returned to Ireland for the Mercantile Credit Trophy, a road race organized by the Motor Enthusiasts Club in Rathdrum, County Wicklow. It was a handicap time trial, which took place over three laps of a triangular course, less than a mile in length and full of tight bends and hairpin turns. In his first ever road race, he would be up against an experienced field, which included, most tantalizingly of all, Rosemary Smith, the twenty-seven-year-old Dublin-born beauty, who was competing at the highest level in the male-dominated world of rally driving.
Because he’d never raced competitively before, the organizers advised Tara to go to see Larry Mooney, an experienced driver who was also in the field and who could talk him through the course and its dangers. The day before the race, Tara showed up at the head office of Volkswagen on Dublin’s Long Mile Road, where Larry worked as a service manager.
‘I was aware that two grand-uncles of his had raced in the 1920s,’ Larry remembered. ‘They were exceptionally good racing drivers, even though most people would never have heard of them. So I was looking forward to meeting him, to find out what kind of driver he was. So in he came. He was very young, quite reserved, not at all flamboyant like I expected him to be.
‘I gave him some general advice about driving and racing, talked him through the hairpins, how to drive into them as deeply as you can and don’t overheat the brakes – that kind of thing. I gave him as much knowledge as I could. He nodded very politely and said thank you very much, even though I’m not sure he needed my advice at all.’
The following day, Saturday, 30 May 1964, a day so hot that the sun melted the tar on the road, Tara arrived at the Rathdrum circuit in his Lotus Elan. The other cars entered for the race came in all shapes and sizes: Volkswagens, Alfa Romeos, Morris Coopers, Ford Cortinas, MGs. Tara was given a handicap of 47 seconds, based on the speed of his car and his experience as a driver. ‘The handicaps were worked out very scientifically,’ according to Larry. ‘They tended to be correct to within a fraction of a second.’
But when the race officials inspected Tara’s car just before the start, they discovered a problem with his windscreen. It wasn’t laminated, which meant the car was in breach of the rules. Tara was told he couldn’t race, until he suggested a clever solution. He would drive Formula One style – that is without any windscreen at all.
‘I took it out for him,�
�� remembered Larry. ‘As it happened, it was the kind of glass that breaks into tiny pieces, so I had to be very careful taking it out. And then, because of the wind factor, he put his leather jacket on backwards and got into the driver’s seat.’
In his very first competitive race, Tara blew away a highly experienced field with a display of precision driving, finishing three seconds ahead of his nearest rival, Freddie Smith. ‘The Honourable Tara Browne,’ Autosport magazine reported, ‘was literally the sensation of the meeting,’ while the Irish Times reported that he had driven ‘faultlessly’.
Rosemary Smith wasn’t among the five fastest finishers. ‘I was in quite a slow car,’ she recalled of the race. ‘Larry’s was slow as well. And Tara had this Lotus Elan, which had a wow factor in those days. You could keep up with it on the bends – the Rathdrum circuit was one of those squirt-and-brake, squirt-and-brake, squirt-and-brake circuits – but on the straight it just went vroom and it was gone. I would say that, as a driver, Tara probably had no fear whatsoever, otherwise he wouldn’t have been cut out to be a racing driver, which, on the basis of the way he drove that day, he clearly was.’
Larry was equally impressed. ‘It was pretty clear to everyone that he had a gift,’ he said. ‘He was a natural. There’s one thing that competitive motorsport drivers are all good at apart from driving and that’s dancing. Because when you’re a motor racing driver, the dexterity of your feet is far more crucial than anything you do with your hands. I did competition céili dancing, for instance. Petter Solberg, who is one of the top five rally drivers in the world, was a Swedish disco dancing champion. It came as no surprise to me to find out subsequently that Tara liked dancing.’
After collecting the trophy, Tara invited everyone in the field back to Luggala, where they had tea in Oonagh’s drawing room. ‘It was a fabulous place,’ Rosemary remembered. ‘We weren’t used to fine china and silver teapots. We were worried about even sitting down, because we had our dirty overalls on. So I sat on the edge of the seat, china cup rattling away on the saucer, terrified. It was a different world.’
She resolved to look out for Tara’s name in the future, since it was clear to her that he had a great racing career ahead of him if he wanted it. But Tara never raced again. His victory in Rathdrum that day was the only time he ever drove competitively. No one really knew why, except that life just got in the way.
•
The mews needed doing up. All those late-night parties back at Eaton Row – the cigarette smoke, the knocked-over drinks, the four-inch pencil heels tramping back and forth across the threshold – had left the place a bit of a mess. Tara decided to redecorate. Nicki chose pearl and lavender as the colour theme and a brand-new carpet of deep maroon. They found an Irish decorator and set him to work at the beginning of June. But Oonagh told them that they couldn’t expose Dorian to paint fumes, so they all decamped to the Ritz, then became so comfortable there that they didn’t want to leave. They kept finding fault with the decorator’s work so they wouldn’t have to.
‘Every week or so,’ Nicki remembered, ‘we’d go and inspect how it was all going and Tara would say, “Oh, look, there’s brush hairs stuck in the paint. You can’t have brush hairs stuck in the paint. I’m terribly sorry – you’ll have to do it again.”’
Mary Fanning reckoned they spent about six weeks living in the hotel. ‘A sixteen-year-old girl from a tiny village in County Wicklow,’ she said, ‘and I was living in the most famous hotel in the world. It was an unbelievable time.’
But then it was an unbelievable time for a lot of people. It was the summer that Beatlemania went global. The band went to Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, then back to the United States for a month-long tour that incorporated thirty concerts in twenty-three states. The screaming had reached such a high pitch that the music was barely audible.
It was also the summer when mods and rockers went at it with chains and open razors at seaside resorts up and down Britain. It had all kicked off at Clacton-on-Sea in March and it continued through the summer of 1964 in Margate, Brighton, Bournemouth and Southend. The grandchildren of the generation that fought Nazism on the beaches of Normandy were locked in pitched battles on the beaches of Britain; on one side, young men in suits who liked rhythm and blues music, on the other, young men in leather jackets who preferred rock and roll. It’s not difficult to imagine Dom having a thing or two to say about juvenile delinquents having far too much time on their hands.
Tara and Nicki spent their summer holidays in the more genteel seaside climes of Sainte-Maxime on the Côte d’Azur. Oonagh was staying there for three months, her marriage to Miguel having recently entered the final stages of collapse.
Tara and Nicki’s photographs from that summer suggested a young, happily married couple having the time of their lives: Nicki, her hair dyed strawberry blonde, at the wheel of a rented speedboat, while Tara water-skied behind; the pair of them sitting in the last car that Oonagh bought for Miguel, a white, soft-top Corvette. Tara had discovered the southern California sound of The Beach Boys and their new album, All Summer Long, with its sweet-as-honey harmonies on the themes of surfing, cars and young love, became the soundtrack of their holiday.
But their marriage, too, was showing signs of strain. On the London scene, they were one of those couples whose identities were so intertwined that their names were indivisible. No one talked about ‘Tara’ or ‘Nicki’. They were ‘Tara and Nicki’ to one and all. But though they clearly loved each other, they had started to discover their essential incompatibility as husband and wife.
At least some of the trouble could be put down to their age and some of it to the times. All around them, young people were breaking out and enjoying the freedom that came with the general loosening up of sexual mores. No one was getting hitched in their teens or early twenties, as they had done. People were having fun, sleeping around. Tara and Nicki had very different expectations of what married life would be like. Nicki was far less prepared for a lifetime of stay-at-home fidelity than Tara. She strayed. He knew it. She didn’t regard it as cheating. It was the Sixties. But Tara, who wasn’t one for chasing skirt, struggled with it. Fast cars he could control, but a fast wife was a different proposition altogether.
Tara would have liked a more settled domestic life, according to Garech. But Nicki wasn’t ready to conform to the outdated role of the traditional wife and homemaker. For starters, she couldn’t cook – and neither could Tara. ‘He once made me beans on toast,’ said the artist Douglas Binder, who got to know him later on, ‘and he managed to burn the beans.’
So while Dorian was watched over by Mary Fanning and a succession of other nannies, Tara and Nicki ate out every night, often in the Hungry Horse on the Fulham Road, a favourite of Tara’s, which served traditional English fare like fish pie and kedgeree at a time when every second restaurant in London seemed to be Italian.
Oonagh was less concerned about Nicki’s shortcomings as a wife than her failings as a mother. Most of the Guinness and Browne children had nannies, but it seemed to her that she didn’t want to spend time with Dorian at all. Nicki resisted Oonagh’s interference. She put it down to a mother-in-law’s refusal to sever her umbilical tie to her son. ‘She had lost her baby to me,’ she said, ‘and it shook her rigid.’
There were some terrible rows. Caught in the middle, Tara’s impulse was to side with Nicki rather than Oonagh, but the arguments just added to his general feelings of unhappiness with the marriage. And there was an added complication, something Tara thought it best to keep from his mother for the moment. Nicki was pregnant again.
Joe Hollander, a local American journalist who was friendly with Oonagh, visited the villa that July, and chatted to Tara and Nicki, who, he reported in his syndicated column, were wearing matching velvet drainpipe slacks ‘in defiance of the St Tropez fashion’. They told him about the work they were having done to their Belgravia home and dropped a hint that there might one day be an addition to their number.
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p; ‘I don’t really want a large family,’ Tara told him, ‘but I think Dorian should have a playmate.’
The responsibility of having a second child on the way may have explained Tara’s response when asked about his plans for the future. He grinned and said, ‘I think it’s about time I found something to do.’
Nicki qualified this statement by adding, ‘He only thinks!’
Oonagh had other matters on her mind that summer than her daughter-in-law’s perceived failings as a wife and mother. At the age of fifty-four, she was about to be the mother of twins. Oonagh adored babies and had been looking to adopt one for almost two years – ‘a reaction to her loss of control over Tara,’ according to Nicki. Another factor may have been the knowledge that her marriage to Miguel was coming to an end and she would soon be on her own again, this time, in all probability, for good.
It seems reasonable to speculate that Oonagh tolerated Miguel’s behaviour, at least in their final year together, because she needed a husband if she was going to adopt. Even countries with soft adoption laws might have baulked at the idea of handing an infant over to an unmarried woman in her mid-fifties. Similarly, Miguel still needed Oonagh’s money to keep Maison Ferreras open. So they remained together, grating on each other’s nerves, long after the marriage was, to all intents and purposes, over. Oonagh was known to enjoy a scene, especially at the dinner table, but Miguel’s behaviour was beginning to challenge even her famously high embarrassment threshold. Michael Rainey, who, along with his then girlfriend, Jane Ormsby-Gore, was part of Tara’s London circle, remembered visiting Luggala around Easter of that year and witnessing one of Miguel’s outrageous tantrums in the dining room.
‘There was another fellow who came to dinner,’ he remembered, ‘called Lord Windlesham. He had a sort of travelling companion with him who organized his flights and things like that. Kind of like a valet – like Lord Byron would have had. Anyway, when Miguel found out who he was, he exploded. He said, “If he is going to have his servant at the table, then I am going to have mine!” So he started bringing all the kitchen staff in and telling them to sit around the table.’
