caravans, World Cup football, a Radio Caroline studio, motoring competition, pedal cycles, motor scooters, toys and models to a nursery. Each room had the appropriate music or sound effects and the cars had photographs of film and TV celebrities inside and a few words from the founder in a booklet attached to the vehicle about its history.
In the introduction we had been told to look up when going round and on entering the first area through a ‘Tardis’ Police Box one member of our group gave the most emphatic wow! I can ever
recall. Every surface of this lofty space was covered with artefacts; it was truly breathtaking. The more you looked the more you saw, you just had to stand and absorb the enormous range of items on display. This continued as you moved from room to room, with so many objects, many of which prompted remarks such as ‘I had one of those’ and ‘I remember my parents using one’.
One visit is not sufficient, as you need a break
to recover from visual overload. Our thanks to Angela Hume for making all the arrangements and shepherding her ‘flock’ on the day. Nigel Brecknell
BTM TALK –DONALD CAMPBELL News
Blue Bird CN7 at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2013 (Gareth Tarr).
B
lue Bird skims across Coniston Water in the grainy black and white film, the camera- man struggling to keep pace with the strange craft. Then the nose starts to ominously lift. “I’m going,” are Donald Campbell’s desperate final words. The boat back-flips, almost completing a full somersault, before the nose crashes hard into the lake’s surface and its momentum is brought to a shuddering halt in a plume of spray. Many of us have seen this film of that deadly water speed record attempt in January 1967, but who was Donald Campbell and what brought him to try to achieve 300mph on that cold winter’s morning? His story was told to Brooklands Trust Members in the October talk by Phil Holt who had memo-
16
rably told us about the Apollo 13 mission last year.
Born 23rd July 1921, Donald was the only son of Malcolm Campbell (later Sir Malcolm), the famous Brooklands racer and land and water speed record ace who named his vehicles Blue Bird after a play he had seen. Coming from a wealthy Scottish family, Malcolm had plenty of resources to indulge his fascination with speed, becoming the first man to break both 150mph and 300mph on land. Indeed, the car in which he broke 150mph was the 350hp Sunbeam in which Kenelm Lee Guinness broke the land speed record in 1922, the third and final time Brooklands was to be the host for that landmark.
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