British marques

A lovely pair of Bristols

William Waldegrave

A SMALL boy is examining a beautiful car in the driveway of his father's house in Somerset while a local grandees' lunch goes on inside. The car's owner, emerging full of post-prandial goodwill, asks him what he thinks of it. 'It is the best car in the world,' I reply, exhibiting political skills overdeveloped by manipulating five older sisters. And so my love affair with Bristol Cars began in earnest, because the owner of the car was Sir Reginald Verdon-Smith, chairman of the Bristol Aeroplane Compa- ny, and the reward for my flattery was a glorious tour of the firm's Filton factory.

I was sent away laden with bundles of beautiful brochures: for Proteus aero- engines, for the 'Whispering Giant' Britan- nia airliner; for the 403 aerodyne car, for the 404 'Business Man's Express' (which Sir Reggie had been driving that day), and much else. The cars were beautiful. The aeroplanes were beautiful. Even the brochures were beautiful — some had dark-red or blue velvety covers, and the drawings inside were works of art. One day, I thought to myself, I am going to own one of those. Luckily, I did not fix on a Britan- nia airliner.

Twenty years later, I was driving down a Wiltshire lane in my white Alfa Romeo 1750 Junior. Up the lane the other way came an identical car. There was some argument about who should give way. I came to the conclusion, probably quite unjustifiably, that if the person in the other car was the sort of person who owned an Alfa Junior, I needed another car. I went to Anthony Crook's Bristol showroom in Kensington High Street and, after a feeble negotiation, bought a not very distin- guished Bristol 405 four-door saloon for, I think, £750.

In truth, of course, I was wrong to be dis- loyal to my Alfa Junior — a lovely little car — let alone to the Alfa marque, the con- structor of some of the greatest sports and racing cars ever built. But I have never regretted the impulse that drove me back to Bristols.

When I was young and thought that overdrafts somehow looked after them- selves, I owned three Bristol-engined cars at the same time. First there was the 405, a splendid-looking beast with a square air- intake derived from the air-intake of the Centaurus engine which powered the great Bristol Brabazon airliner, killed by lack of a BOAC order after the war. In the middle of the air-intake was a spotlight (now, I think, illegal) which gave the car a Cyclo- pean look. It had an extremely efficient overdrive, which effectively gave it six for- ward gears.

Then there was what is my candidate for the prettiest sports car ever made in Britain: the Bristol-engined AC Aceca. I bought it for £3,000 and sold it when I got married for the same sum. I can hardly bear to think of it.

Finally, in 1975, I persuaded Anthony Crook to sell me the beautiful object under a dustsheet at the back of his garage, and now it sits in my yard glowing to itself in the Somerset sunshine as I write: the 402 drop-head; so elegant, such fun to drive — a convertible version of the aerodyne 401. Only 20 or so were ever made (two being sold to Stewart Granger, one for him and one for his wife Jean Simmons).

The aerodynes, and also the original 400, betray, or rather exult in, the BMW gene which, like Arab blood in a racehorse, raised the cars from their first inception after the second world war into the first rank. It came about like this.

Before the war Frazer-Nash, having been beaten by new entrants BMW in the Alpine rally, had bought their rival's engines for their famous sports cars. After the war, a visionary band (of which Verdon-Smith, who had owned a pre-war Frazer-Nash BMW was one, along with Sir George White, a fellow Bristol Aeroplane Co. director) brought together at Bristol Cars the Frazer-Nash engineers and some key BMW designers rescued from the compet- ing confiscations of Americans and Rus- sians in Germany. Without their experience and common sense I suspect Bristol Cars might have gone the way of the Brabazon into heroic oblivion. Indeed,

THE JOY OF MOTORING

Bristol's own experiments during the war (what exactly were they doing designing high-performance sports cars in 1942?) under the leadership of the brilliant aero- engine designer Roy Fedden had ended in spectacular disaster. At any rate, early Bris- tols paid tribute to the BMW connection with a radiator grille which is pure BMW. More than once I have been stopped when driving the 402 by elderly Germans bemused by the family likeness, as well they might be.

This is no place for a potted history of Bristol Cars. In any case, three excellent books exist: Charles Oxley's The Quiet Sur- vivor (published by Charles Oxley), L.J.K Setright's Bristol (Motor Racing Publica- tions) and the sumptuous new version of Setright's work, A Private Car, published by Palawan Publishers in two volumes with wonderful pictures at a price comparable to that of a 1945 car.

You can read there how the astonishing 450 racing sports car beat the Porsches out of sight at Le Mans in 1954, finishing in line, first, second and third, in the two-litre class and winning the overall team prize. (The year before, the car had a roof and enormous fins — as well as, typically for Bristol — a fitted carpet. It was immor- talised, luckily, by Dinky Toys; luckily, because no actual car survives.) There, too, you can read of the Bristol- engined Cooper Formula Two racing cars on which Moss and Hawthorn learnt so much of their trade. If you call in at Michael Lavers's Silver Arrows in Putney, the kings of Mercedes classic sports cars, Michael will show you the actual air-intake (sadly without the rest of the car) with which Hawthorn employed the Venturi effect to get an extra few mph out of his Cooper-Bristol and astound his rivals.

And you can read of how government Panic after the de Havilland Comet disasters killed the development of what would have been the best of all Bristol cars as every Penny and every engineer at Filton were directed to largely unnecessary remedial work on perfectly safe existing aircraft. After that they bought in a big Chrysler engine, fitted automatic transmission, and for me some (not all) of the magic was gone. Now along with Morgan and, let us hope, Rover Redivivus, Bristol is the only survivor. A new, spectacular model, design descendant of the 450, is due out this year, which will thoroughly restore the romance at aprice). Por this the White family and Anthony Crook deserve most of the credit. The !Flu. evement, like that of Concorde, another Bristol product, is not really part of economic industrial ndustrial history. I doubt if anyone has made much money out of Bristol Cars. It is a beautiful .from another age, of the creation of `ealinful artefacts for their own sake, like the story of Bugatti or Hispano-Suiza or Faberge. It seems now to be a terrible solecism to look for any connection between what Artists (defined as people whose work is to be found in the new Tate Modern) do and beauty: the building is beautiful, the contents are not, I assume, meant to be. But to those who think there is still some- thing in the last two lines of Keats's 'Ode to a Grecian Urn', or like to tickle that aesthetic sense described by A.E. Hous- man — to such eccentrics one can say, forget the art galleries, and get down to Anthony Crook's Bristol Cars showroom in Kensington High Street. There you will find something unabashedly beautiful. And you can take the children to school in it, too.