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Cynghordy Llandovery
best roads and scenery in the UK 2019 / 20 Club Tour Packages
2
Tours include dinner, bed & breakfast, drinks reception on 1st night, a welcome pack containing a memento of the
SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2019
brooklands bulletin
Relived comes to life
Looking for a venue for your club or friends in 2019 or 2020 contact us to discuss packages and dates. We already have 18 clubs booked in 2019 & 7 for 2020
weekend, rally plate, window sticker, Ordnance Survey Mid & South Wales road map, road books containing the route for each day & entry to a local attraction. Prices from £252.50 per person for 3 night tour.
The Design Offi ce, with Spud Boorer in the left foreground
2019 ALL MAKE TOUR DATES Open to any Make & Age of Car 5th to 8th July – 11 cars booked, 2 rooms left 5th to 8th August – 4 cars booked, 7 rooms left
A FLYING START
What was it like to work and train on the
Brooklands site at a time of extraordinary activity? Malcolm Reid remembers the profound effect of being an apprentice at Vickers-Armstrong in the 1950s had on his career, life and friendships.
34 BROOKLANDS BULLETIN | SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2019 Brooklands
Sept19.indd 34-35
shaping Viscount stainless steel exhaust pipes where the noise of the hammering was horrendous. Enrolling for the engineering course at
the Brooklands Technical College, I noticed the queue divided into two and asked why. The answer was: ‘Mechanicals to the left and Electricals and Electronics to the right’. I had no idea of this distinction and as those who I was chatting to turned left, I went with them and became a mechanical engineer. A mistake as electronics were to be the big future.
At this time, my friend and fellow
I applied to Avro, De Havilland and Vickers- Armstrong (Aircraft). The fi rst two required my father to pay them for the privilege of being an indentured apprentice, whereas the last one offered £3 per week, so it was no contest.
A Starting in the autumn of 1955, my
apprenticeship commenced in the newly- built apprentice training school situated near the Campbell gate. The fi rst task was to make my tool box in aluminium, which I still have. After a few months, I was introduced to the fi tting shop making and riveting together small airframe sub-assemblies. Then it was into the ‘tin bashers’ assisting the very skilled men
s you make model aeroplanes, you should enter the aircraft industry’. Following this guidance from a careers advisor,
apprentice Mike Walker and I had digs in a small hotel that was a watering hole for pre-war Brooklands drivers. It was where the Multi-Union and a Bugatti Type 23 were stored. Particularly memorable was meeting Charles Brackenbury and have a ride in his Jaguar XK140. I also met Dudley Gahagan, owner of a Bugatti Type 37 and ERA R7B. After a year at college, I went on a
three year ‘sandwich’ mechanical and aerodynamics-aerostructures course at Kingston Technical College. During this time, I attended a Weybridge branch meeting of the Royal Aeronautical Society. This was a Question and Answer forum, chaired by Vickers-Armstrong’s Managing Director, George Edwards, later Sir George. When asked if the company was going to produce helicopters, his characteristic wry answer was: ‘We have enough trouble keeping wings on, let alone them going round!’
This was in the aftermath of the Valiant wing-spar fatigue issue created by the late requirement to include low level operations. Working on Valiant bombers, my job was to assist a ‘mate’ with wing assembly. This was labour intensive work by teams of two men inserting thousands of rivets. With this aircraft, the rivet material was unusual because they were ‘age-hardened’. The process involved storing them in a fridge to maintain their softness to avoid cracking during the actual riveting and they were issued at the beginning of every morning and afternoon. The rivet cans were colour coded to prevent the use of old rivets and it was one of the apprentices’ jobs to collect these coloured cans. The end results were completed airworthy aircraft. Every week, a Valiant with minimal fuel load took off over the gap in the Byfl eet banking and landed almost immediately at Wisley airfi eld for fl ight testing. Then there was the Viscount. Initially, it was wing assembly again, but across the airfi eld near the New Haw gate were the twin assembly lines for BEA, KLM and another for Howard Hughes, which he never collected. As with the Valiants, the wings were assembled in a jig at 90-degrees to the normal fl ight position to give the riveting teams good working access. Later, I was transferred to airframe assembly for two jobs in parallel. The fi rst was installing the special clips that held the cabin window glass panels in place
SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2019 | BROOKLANDS BULLETIN 35 26
THE GREATEST WOMAN DRIVER
Gwenda Stewart was arguably the best woman racing driver of her time. Roger Radnedge looks at her life and career in the fi rst of two instalments.
BROOKLANDS BULLETIN | SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2019 15/08/2019 13:58 Brooklands
Sept19.indd 26-27
brooklands bulletin
TO ADVERTISE IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF
www.cambrianway.com
Carmarthenshire, SA20 0NB Tel: 01550 750274
e-mail:
info@cambrianway.com Explore some of the I
t is odd realise that in this age of gender equality there are few top women racing drivers. In the ‘Golden Days’ of Brooklands this was certainly not
the case. There were many. One such was Gwenda Stewart, who was born Gwenda Mary Glubb in Preston, Lancashire on 1 June, 1894. She was born into a military family and her father was Captain Frederic Manley Glubb of the Royal Engineers, later to become Major General Sir Frederic Manley Glubb and her brother John became famous as Glubb Pasha while serving as the commander of the Arab Legion. In January 1913, aged 19, Gwenda started as a student at St Hilda’s Hall, Cheltenham, which was a residential college attached to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. While there, she taught herself to drive in a car belonging to the family of a school friend. Her education was ‘fi nished off’ in Paris and as a result she became a fl uent French speaker.
Wartime
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Gwenda joined the SCottish Women’s Hospitals organisation as a volunteer driver and was sent to the Crimea. The train journey there took several weeks as the passengers had to disembark and chop up wood for the engine every 20 miles or so. Once there she drove ambulances under diffi cult and dangerous conditions. She was involved in what became known as the Dobruja retreat. This happened in the autumn of 1916 when the hitherto successful Romanian army got pushed back. The ladies of the Scottish hospital contingent were awarded the Crosses of St George and St Stanislav by the Romanian Government. Gwenda was also mentioned in dispatches probably because she was seen carrying out repairs to her ambulance while under fi re. By 1918, she must have been attached
to a fl ying unit because on 1 April when the RAF was formed, she became an Assistant Administrator in the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF). Fifteen months later on 1 July, 1919 she became its Deputy Administrator. Unfortunately, while she was at the Air Ministry (AM) the WRAF’s administration was in turmoil and she got involved in this in a very personal way. The WRAF’s original Commandant was intended to be Lady Gertrude Crawford, but on the 4 April Sir Geoffrey Paine, the AM’s Master General of Personnel, informed the Air Council that the lady ‘lacked the qualities necessary for organising a large body of women’. The lady seems to have accepted this and
stood down. The second choice was the Honourable Violet Blanche Douglas- Pennant.
However, there were two views in the AM as to what the Commandant’s function was. One view was that it was just a fi gurehead and the second saw it as a normal command function. Sir Geoffrey assured Violet that it was the latter. Yet she soon faced a series of increasing diffi culties both within the AM and outside it. Sir Geoffrey was replaced with Sir Sefton Branker who found the whole business unacceptable and he sacked Violet. That might have been the end of the matter except that Violet had a strong feeling she had been wronged and she had many infl uential supporters. They managed to raise a House of Lords enquiry into the matter. By now the affair had become a national scandal and was making headlines. During the enquiry, the ex- commandant had been asked to give examples of the problems she had faced. One such example she claimed was the immoral behaviour of some of her offi cers and the case she cited involved Gwenda. It was said that she and Colonel Janson had conducted an affair in a London lodging house. What follows is almost hilarious. The landlady said she had found Miss Glubb’s hot-water bottle in Colonel Janson’s bed and saw Miss Glubb emerge from his room one morning. Gwenda explained that she had given Janson the hot-water bottle because he was ill with a recurrence of trench fever and had gone into his room in the morning to take his temperature. To remove any suggestion of impropriety, a doctor was called in to settle the matter. He stated: ‘There is no defi nite physical sign of virginity, but I am of opinion that there has never been penetration of this girl.’ The popular press accepted this explanation and the Evening Standard ran a headline that complained about ‘Cruel and wicked charges’ that put a ‘Girl’s honour at stake.’
Racing and adventure After the war, Gwenda married Colonel Janson on 17 February, 1920. He was then the London Manager of the London Spyker motor company. Perhaps missing the excitement of war, Gwenda decided to take up motorcycle racing and started competing in events at Brooklands. She also offered to undertake long- distance promotional rides for motorcycle manufacturers. In November 1921, SF Edge took up her offer and entered her in ACU (Auto Cycle Union) monitored trials using a Ner-a-Car. The machine she was riding was best described as motorized scooter. It had
SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2019 | BROOKLANDS BULLETIN 27 UNRAVELLED
BENTLEY MYSTERY
Anthony Saunders unravels the mystery surrounding the creation the first Bentley cars and it appears they owed a lot to Humber’s TT model.
22 BROOKLANDS BULLETIN | SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2019 15/08/2019 13:59 Brooklands
Sept19.indd 22-23 B
ritain was still recovering from the devastation of war in the autumn of 1919. Yet in a small garage off Baker Street,
London, a group of men were creating what was to become a legend in the annals of motoring. One of the finest and best known of sporting and racing cars was being developed. The men were WO Bentley, Frank Burgess, who had been chief designer and racing driver at Humber, draughtsman Harry Varley and Clive Gallop, a racing driver and engine designer. A massive number of articles and theories have been published about the experimental Bentley cars made by WO Bentley and how he managed to design and produce a whole new car from scratch in less than a year. Research over the years has been done, not least by Bill Boddy, Tim Houlding, archivist of the Bentley Drivers Club, Kenneth Neve, as well as Brian Demaus and John Tarring both of the Humber Register and many others.
In 1914, Humber had many successes in trials and competition and decided to enter a team of three cars into the Isle of Man TT race. These TT cars were purpose built by the factory. As well as being Chief Designer, FT Burgess was also a driver and competed in the TT in Car number 2, the other cars being driven by WG Tuck and S Wright. Humber are known to have also built a number of spares for the TT cars. Although no documentary evidence has been found, Humber also probably built a spare TT chassis as this was a very different design to standard chassis. Another competitor in this TT was WO in a DFP. None of the Humber cars finished the race, all retiring with mechanical problems. However, Tuck’s TT car was supposedly the most powerful of the three and he successfully raced this car later that year, proving the potential of the design.
Aero development Prior to World War 1 and before deciding to go it alone, WO was working and racing with the French car company, DFP, whose engines would overheat dramatically in competition. WO realised this was mainly due to the cast iron pistons used which were heavy and had poor heat dissipation properties, so he started to work on the problem. Experiments with lighter magnesium pistons had ended up with the pistons ‘disappearing down the exhaust pipe’. Ordinary aluminium would not stand the temperatures and stresses involved but WO thought that if he could develop a strong, heat resistant alloy of aluminium then that might work. He did and it did. An alloy of 88% aluminium and 12% copper provided the necessary qualities and WO
went on to achieve many racing successes with his new idea incorporated in DFP cars, which he tried to keep secret for as long as possible.
Then came WW1 and the need for fighter planes. Over in France, British planes were fitted with French Clerget engines which had a very limited life of 15 hours or less due to overheating. This caused the British Government to get somewhat worried, so they called for help. WO stepped in as he knew exactly what the problem was and how to cure it. He fitted the Clerget engines with aluminium pistons and redesigned the cooling system to solve the problem.
The next step was for him to develop the Bentley Rotary engines (BR 1&2) using, of course, aluminium pistons and in 1916 the Humber factory in Coventry was chosen as one of the manufacturing sites. The Humber workers were delighted as, up until then, their war efforts had been confined to making mobile kitchens and military bicycles. Making proper engines was a much better use of their skills. It was here that WO and Burgess started working together and became firm friends, although they had already met on the racing circuits.
A new car
After the war ended, WO asked Burgess to join him in the development of a new type of high performance car and the rest is history, but not quite! WO developed his engine, with aluminium pistons and many other novel features, in a mews workshop off Baker Street along with Harry Varley and Clive Gallop as well as Burgess. When it was first fired up in October 1919,
SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2019 | BROOKLANDS BULLETIN 23 15/08/2019 14:00
CONTACT NICK ON 01452 730770 OR EMAIL
nick@hinemarketing.co.uk
Bentley mystery revealed Gwenda Stewart profile Vickers-Armstrong memoir
The Journal for Brooklands Members Brooklands
Sept19_Final.indd 1 20/08/2019 16:42
BROOKLANDS MUSEUM 187,000 VISITORS PA (2018) • A4 • FULL COLOUR • 10,000 COPIES • 6 ISSUES PER YEAR • 52 PAGES
44 BROOKLANDS BULLETIN | SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2019
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