Conspiracy of Secrets. Bobbie Neate
tense. Each time we discovered that Stepfather had been winding her up. It worried us but there was nothing we could do. Then Stepfather demanded we buy her more and more costly presents for her birthdays. It was a powerful tactic.
As the couple grew older we began to be anxious about what might happen in the future. However, when she became worried about the state of her finances a warning bell rang inside my head. I decided that her trusted accountant, Mr L, ought to know. As I talked privately to the man I had met many times before I surprised myself by blurting out that I had suspicions that my mother’s money might be going missing. I even surprised myself by asking this adviser if Stepfather could be the subject of blackmail. His reply bowled me over as he said, ‘I’ve learned over the years to rather like Louis.’
Why did he say this? This man was Mum’s trusted guru and was acting for her. So, rather than act on my vague suspicions, the accountant ignored my warnings.
I tried to forget about the meeting. I was powerless.
We had all individually pondered, when we were children, over Stepfather’s behaviour with our mother, but none of us had noticed how odd it was. It was our partners who appeared fascinated as to how and why our lovely mother had married such a problematical man while we had accepted the facts that no friends called on our sociable mother and she never went out on her own. Sporadically, sometimes over a glass of wine, our spouses encouraged us to conjecture what Stepfather had done in his earlier life. We had not thought him worthy of speculation.
There was a memorable time when I first suggested that perhaps his father had been an MP. ‘Why do you think that?’ asked my siblings. I had no absolute answer but they accepted my justification. ‘He seems to know so many politicians and people in that field,’ I replied. My siblings agreed it was possible and even half-heartedly searched for MPs with the surname Stanley. There had been a number of ‘Stanley’ MPs, and I found a photograph of one called Arthur, but none seemed of the right age, and, as we were not particularly interested, we never continued our search. One day, much later, I had turned to a historical text and spotted a photograph of Prime Minister Asquith. It had made an immediate impact on me. But, as I had no real reason to enquire further, I left the book unread and tried to forget the unmistakable likeness.
In those early days, golf and steeplechasing were Stepfather’s preferred interests, not Formula One cars. Mum eventually persuaded him to enjoy the motor races and when I was just six she took us children along too. So even as a very young child I visited the rarefied atmosphere of the racing paddock and became fascinated by the huge complicated engines. It is the noise of the sport that has left its legacy with me. Even now when I hear a souped up car in the distance I relish the noisy power of the engines reverberations. Every time my ears pick up the sounds I am reminded of the powerful roar of the V16 BRM and my childhood.
I am not alone. Motor racing enthusiasts still reminisce about the pitch and volume of the BRM’s 16-cylinder scream. Motor pilots of that generation recall that the engine roared its power with such ferocity its noise distracted even the most seasoned drivers as they waited for the flag to drop.
How did my mother come to be so involved in a Formula One racing car in the days when women rarely had careers?
Two enthusiastic and idealistic men called Raymond Mays and Peter Berthon wanted to emulate the might of the partially state-funded German motorcars of Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz, which had dominated racing up to 1940. So after the war the British Racing Motor Company was created. Its racing cars were to be known by the initials BRM. With great national excitement the first model, called the V16, was unveiled later in the year. Everybody agreed that it was handsome and hugely powerful. However, raising enough money in austere post-war Britain was always to prove a problem. Mays decided to contact companies involved in the motor trade. Rubery Owen, our family’s firm, was one of his targets. My two uncles took the bait alongside a large number of other motoring companies.
However, too many people, too soon, had wanted to see the car race with too little money. After much national hype, the first all-British Grand Prix car painted in patriotic Brunswick Green rolled onto the Silverstone grid for a demonstration run on 13 May 1950. The shrill V16 exhaust excited the crowds. But the world’s press wanted the car to race, so in August of that year the Daily Express funded a Silverstone race. The paper hyped up much public interest in the patriotic car. All the engines roared while the drivers waited for the flag to drop to announce the start of the first heat. All British eyes were on Raymond Sommer, perched in the cockpit of the BRM. To add to the tension, the royals looked on from the grandstand. The starter’s flag fell and the race began. The BRM lurched forward to start its great career. But calamity struck! The drive shaft broke and the huge machine failed to move further than a few metres. To the humiliation of all involved, the V16’s race was over before it had begun. The crowd in the grandstand jeered and catcalled the mechanics when they appeared from the pits to push the car back to the paddock. The British press condemned the car’s dismal failure. One paper headlined its front page with FLOP and another lined up the letters with BRM calling it a BLOOMING ROTTEN MOTOR!
I can remember Mum hiding her eyes in shame as she told me the story of the car with its chassis made by her family company, failing to leave the grid. Even though they were only part of a consortium of companies, she and her brothers had felt the nation’s shame on their shoulders.
After more outings that demonstrated that the cars were too unreliable to win races, the BRM Trust was disbanded and put up for sale. My Uncle Alfred and to a lesser degree my Uncle Ernest retained faith in the car’s potential, so the family firm, having recently expanded to be known as the Owen Organisation, bought BRM. It was a rash decision.
The modern industry of sleek, sponsor-endorsed, computer designed, semi-automatic cars, racing on pristine tracks with every possible facility, bears no resemblance to the fun loving sport of the fifties recovering from the traumas of a world war. It is now a billion dollar business for the ever-expanding racing teams and has little to do with a ‘sport’ in the original sense of the word.
In the fifties and sixties motor racing was colourful and exciting, full of dash, verve and characters. The rash youths of the day, frequently the sons of the world’s wealthiest families drove for pleasure, often recklessly and at breakneck speeds. There was little or no sponsorship with many of the cars financed on a shoestring. Mechanics from each team were friends and lent each other vital tools. In those times each part of the country had its own racing tracks; most were nothing more than old wartime airfields converted to form a circle. Safety for both drivers and spectators was rudimentary or in some cases nonexistent. Circuits used farmers’ straw bales to line the track or a tricky chicane. Their combustibility caused many unnecessary fires. Trees and telegraph poles were left to stand beside the track without a thought of their treacherous ability to kill.
Post-war cars were powerful. Even in the fifties racing motors could reach the type of speeds Formula One cars race today. But race technology was in its infancy. Engineers tried to apply lessons learned in the war from the performance of jet engines to racing cars. However the rest of the mechanical workings of the cars had not developed in line with the sheer pace of the engines.
Fire-protective clothes had not been invented so the drivers wore ordinary cotton overalls. Their gloves might have leather palms but were often string-backed and bought off the peg. They may have worn soft-soled shoes but there was nothing to protect them from the scorching heat of the cockpit. When I look at old photographs I realise their hard-hat style helmets provided little protection. As they sat high up, almost out of the vehicle, I loved to watch them change gear and struggle with the vibrating steering wheel. If the car should turn over they had no roll bars to protect their heads and no seatbelts to hold them in on the bouncy tracks. The only way of communicating between engineer and driver was by a metal board held out by a mechanic for the driver to read a coded message as he screamed past the pit lane.
Each car represented a country and they were painted accordingly: the German cars which had dominated racing prior to the war were silver, the French cars were blue, the Dutch orange, the Italians had their red Ferrari and Maserati, and the British cars were green.
Stepfather hated being an appendage.