The Top Gear Story - The 100% Unofficial Story of the Most Famous Car Show... In The World. Martin Roach
of academic achievement on the site of a former twelfth-century Augustinian Priory; the school itself dates back to the second half of the sixteenth century. One of the founding fathers of the halcyon Victorian era believed that ‘healthy exertion of body and spirit together, which is found in the excitement, the emulation and the friendly strife of school games’ was the way forward for his pupils. Clearly, he didn’t have Jeremy Clarkson in mind.
So-called Old Reptonians include none other than writing legend Roald Dahl, who boarded there for four years (it was here that Cadbury’s presented ‘blind’ confectionery tastings to pupils for market research purposes, an experience widely believed to have been Dahl’s inspiration for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Other notables include novelist Christopher Isherwood, poet James Fenton, Olympian Harold Abrahams of Chariots of Fire fame, actor Basil Rathbone, no less than three Archbishops of Canterbury and Jeremy Clarkson, who is listed on their website as a ‘journalist’.
In fact, Clarkson has gone on record saying he was bullied in school and that the ‘fagging was brutal’ but he has also pointed out that the baptism of fire applied to all new boys. One fellow pupil was a certain Andy Wilman and it was here at Repton that the two became firm friends and a future television partnership was born. It was their cheeky schoolboy humour, founded here at this fee-paying public school, that many years later would transform them into a household name and a TV production legend respectively. Talking in the Guardian, Wilman said that Clarkson at that age had, ‘a massive gob, really bad music taste and massive hair – the full Leo Sayer.’
Clarkson’s rebellious streak that has caused so many controversies on the set of Top Gear was there from an early age: he is reported to have spent much time visiting the local girls’ school as well as numerous drinking establishments around Burton upon Trent. He also enjoyed ribbing teachers and confronting those authority figures with whom he disagreed.
Despite this, the young Jeremy was academically excellent, gaining nine O-levels and easily graduating straight into the sixth form. Some reports suggest that until his voice broke, he even played the part of a pupil named Taplin in a BBC radio adaptation of Anthony Buckeridge’s novels about a schoolboy called Jennings and his friend Darbyshire. The Children’s Hour specials started in 1948 and were extremely popular for many years. They made much of the author’s unique schoolboy language, such as ‘fossilised fish hooks!’ and ‘crystallised cheesecakes!’
Unfortunately, just over two months before sitting his A-levels, Clarkson was expelled: his mother told Auto Trader that the school took a dim view of him ‘drinking, smoking and generally making a nuisance’ of himself. He was allowed back to take his exams but according to his mother, he didn’t pass any (at the time he told her that it didn’t matter as he was going to be a TV presenter). The current school website makes no mention of his expulsion.
Nonetheless, his public-school days were formative. With such an esteemed academic background – even allowing for his expulsion – it was not surprising that once unleashed into the outside world, Clarkson made rapid progress as an ambitious young man, despite having no A-levels. Clearly, there was aspiration in his genes – obviously his parents’ own success proved that, but so too did the recently unearthed entrepreneurial ways of his more distant ancestors.
In a 2004 episode of the BBC’s genealogical programme Who Do You Think You Are? Clarkson discovered that his great-great-great-grandfather John Kilner had invented a famous rubber-sealed jar for preserved fruit which became an industry standard and was subsequently named after him. He started work in a glass factory and later set up his own glassworks with friends, which ultimately grew into a huge business. By the 1840s, he owned two colossal factories in south Yorkshire and was posthumously granted the only medal awarded to a British glassmaker at the Great International Exhibition held in London, in 1862.
There was a genuine family mystery discovered on the programme too. When John’s son Caleb died, he left millions of pounds to his son George and a son-in-law in his will. However, further probate records show the two died with very little money. So, where had it all gone? One local legend suggested the son-in-law liked technology and in 1901, was said to have become one of the first people in south Yorkshire to buy a motorcar.
When asked to go on the historical show, Clarkson admits to thinking it was ‘too boring to bother with’. However, on hearing all of his fascinating personal history, he says that he wanted to know what had happened to the money from this trademarked invention and secretly hoped the programme’s experts might stumble across a piece of paper stating, ‘Jeremy Clarkson is owed £48 billion’.
Fast forward to the 1970s and Clarkson’s first job within the media was on the Rotherham Advertiser, but his fierce creative and linguistic streak quickly found the confines of local news media too claustrophobic. According to a later appearance on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, it was ‘in the middle of an assignment to a vegetable and produce show’ that he handed in his notice. He would also work at the Rochdale Observer and later the Wolverhampton Express & Star but his sights were firmly set on something far bigger: television.
For now, he turned his back on journalism and went to work selling Paddington Bears in his father’s business. Despite this, he realised he’d caught the reporting bug and it wasn’t long before he returned to the journalistic arena. It was during those formative newspaper years that Clarkson had the idea to pen motoring columns and subsequently syndicate them to other local papers so in 1983 he moved to London and started his own business (with a partner) called the Motoring Press Agency (MPA). Nicholas Rufford, editor of The Sunday Times’ InGear magazine, told the broadsheet that this intensive journalistic background explains Clarkson’s meticulous approach to writing: ‘He is an old-school journalist who learnt his craft the hard way. He delivers copy on time, word perfect, and can produce stories very quickly, even on a train. His headed notepaper says, “Jeremy Clarkson, journalist” – that’s how he sees himself.’
The MPA led directly to Clarkson writing extensively for Performance magazine and his articles consistently proved both popular with the readers and elegantly written. As Jon Bentley has pointed out, it was while on a launch for the Citroen AX researching a piece for his MPA business that Jeremy Clarkson sat next to the-then Top Gear producer.
Officially, Clarkson first appeared on Top Gear on 27 October 1988 and was to feature on the original incarnation of the show for more than a decade.
The Hamster and Captain Slow, Part I
In the week before Christmas 1969, on 19 December to be precise, Richard Hammond was born into a family steeped in automotive history. Both his grandparents worked in the West Midlands motorcar trade; his paternal grandfather, George Hammond, was a coachbuilder for Jensen, ‘very much in the tradition of crafting cars.’ George also taught Polish airmen to drive during the Second World War while his own father (and namesake) was a stoker on the railways. The previous two generations of Hammonds had been craftsmen, working as glassblowers in the famous Black Country factories in and around Dudley (they lived in Kingswinford, where coincidentally this author was born and bred; my own father worked in precision engineering, making tooling for car manufacturers).
Hammond’s maternal grandmother, Kathleen Shaw, was employed in the Colmore Depot, a part of the Morris Motor Company. His great-grandfather on his mother’s side was a jeweller but that was the exception, with most other relatives working in industry, mostly in tool-making or a number of brass foundries so the Hammond lineage is saturated with Midlands manufacture.
A young Richard Hammond first went to Sharmans Cross School in Solihull before attending the fee-paying independent Solihull School for Boys. Like Clarkson’s Repton, this school dates back hundreds of years, in this case to 1560. Being a single-sex school, by his own admission the young Hammond was scared of girls. Although he had been ‘great with girls’ at primary, by the