Later Gwenda survived a bad accident when travelling at around 90mph on a Clément-Gladiator motorcycle when she crashed. She was thought she was dead, but instead had suffered a badly fractured skull and other injuries. After months of suffering, she fully recovered and returned to racing, but not on motorcycles. About now Gwenda and her husband tried a maritime adventure. They intended to sail across the North Sea in a 30 ft open motor boat called the Sea Hawk. In a calm sea, this craft was capable of achieving 45mph, but after they left Aberdeen the weather turned bad and they were buffeted about something rotten. Yet they did make it to Stavanger, Norway. This was the first and only time the crossing had been made in such a manner.
for the next two hours. They continued this two-hours-on, two-hours-off pattern until shortly after 10 o’clock the next morning when the trial ended. By this time, they had set a new track record of
54.21mph. This started a pattern for her and Gwenda preferred record-breaking to racing, aiming for long distance records and claiming any smaller records in the process.
Back in Montlhéry, Douglas Hawkes ran the Derby engine and car company. He also owned a small engineering company in England called the Brooklands Engineering Works. In 1928, Gwenda began riding his machines and also rode to success a Hawkes-Stewart cyclecar, which was actually a rebranded 1925 Jappic. Using this, she took the Class J record for three-wheel cyclecars with passenger not exceeding 750cc at 70.95mph, averaging 71mph for 100 miles. Also with Douglas Hawkes, in a stripped Vernon-Derby racing car, they took the 1½-litre 24-hour record at 64.32mph and in the process also took two other records. She seems to have quite liked the lighter cars and in the same year she drove for 10½ hours in a 996cc, V-twin three-wheeler Morgan. In 1929, Hawkes prepared a very special single-seat Morgan and Gwenda achieved 101.5mph. With SCH ‘Sammy’ Davis as her co-driver, she established further Morgan records including an average of 72.72mph over 12 hours. By 1930, Gwenda had built up a reputation as a record breaker. So, when on the 31 December George Eyston took the International Class H record from Austin at Montlhéry with a MG, Austin hired her to regain the record for them. They shipped out an Austin 7 Special and with this she took the five-kilometre record at 109.1mph, creating five other records at the same time before the car’s crankshaft broke. That summer, she took out an 1100cc Morgan and set a record of 113.52mph.
Part two of Gwenda Stewart’s story will appear in the next issue of The Bulletin
Stewart drove a Duesenberg single-seater in 1935 SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2019 | BROOKLANDS BULLETIN 29
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
