Donald Campbell - In the Shadow of Sir Malcolm

By David Tremayne

The grainy old newsreel raises myriad questions about the relationship between Donald Campbell and his illustrious father, Sir Malcolm, the joint architects of 11 speed records on water and 10 on land.

It answers none of them.

A young and evidently nervous Donald rushes to greet the Old Man at Southampton Docks. It's 1933, and the great hero has just boosted his own land speed record to 272 mph. In the poignant vignette the boy goes to shake the man's hand, but the man appears not to notice. The kid's left there with his hand sticking out into thin air.

I once mentioned the footage to Donald's widow, Tonia Bern. She clapped her hands excitedly. "I know the film you mean! It was watching that film with Donald that made me fall in love with him! There was this little boy, so proud of his father, and his father didn't even notice..." Maybe Sir Malcolm really didn't notice his son's gesture. Or maybe he simply wasn't the demonstrative type. But few relationships between public figures have been as complex as that of the Campbells. Sir Malcolm was a hero. A self-made man who let nothing stand in the way of his ambitions. He was an upper-middle class product of all that England stood for between the wars, and arguably, the greatest speedking of them all.

He could be a tough parent. Stories abound of his harsh treatment of a son who was frequently rambunctious. There was the tale of the expensive toy railway. Pathe News film footage captures a homely scene where the train derails after Donald sets the points incorrectly. Father says to contrite son: "I'm afraid you've broken this, old chap." Things may have been rather less quaint beyond the camera, which Sir Malcolm controlled as a director of Pathe. Later he took over the train set for himself, allowing Donald access only on request.

Then there was the dinner party, at which Sir Malcolm allegedly choked a proper goodnight out of his embarrassed son after Donald had fluffed his bedtime farewells to guests. But Donald's younger sister Jean is adamant that they enjoyed a wonderful childhood and denies such abuses ever occurred. "Father was strict, sure, but Donald was always wild. After some of the things we got up to, it's hardly surprising that Father's nose would twitch!"

Freud would have been on cloud nine analysing the relationship, but regardless of what Malcolm might or might not have been as a father, Donald worshipped him.

While the Old Man was alive there was only room for one record breaker in the household, but when Donald finally took over the mantle, everything he would do had an edge, and would always be done with the thought in mind: Would the Old Man have approved?

Despite his feelings for his father, Donald was no colourless dweeb with no personality of his own. But he never truly emerged from his father's long shadow. It would influence his mannerisms and, most certainly, his refusal to give up any project that he started. He lived his life on his own terms but was forever trying to prove to himself that he could do the same great things, that he was worthy of his father's name. He was so trapped within that shadow that, no matter what he achieved - and most historians reckon that he was far greater than his father on the water - he would never feel it was quite good enough. Part of him wanted to do better than his father, but the boy within him wanted to preserve the legend.

Father and son had charisma in spades, allied to an awesome determination beyond the understanding of ordinary men. Donald inherited his father's flamboyant manner and the tendency to exaggerate and embroider the tales he recounted. He also inherited the Old Man's refusal to start something he wouldn't be able to finish. In the early days with the 350-hp Sunbeam, Malcolm had broken the land speed record three times, only to be denied official recognition on technicalities. That initial failure spurred him on. The fight became a lifelong obsession.

Malcolm Campbell lived in an age that feted its heroes and ignored their human weaknesses. He succeeded in almost everything. In record breaking, once he'd got the old Sunbeam up to official speeds, his only real failures were at Verneuk Pan in South Africa in 1929, and Coniston in 1947 with the jet-powered Slipper version of the pre-war Bluebird K4. (Donald would be acutely aware of this when he went to Bonneville with the Bluebird CN7 car in 1960, when he took the new version to Lake Eyre in 1963-64 and was washed out by rain, and during all the hanging about at Coniston in 1966.) A combination of luck, ruthless determination, sufficient personal wealth, and enough financial backing to do the job without compromise, not to mention the support of an adoring nation, helped Sir Malcolm to venture forth time and again to slay dragons and never really come close to getting singed by their breath.

For Donald it was all very different. He was born out of his time, and as the Fifties became the Sixties, younger, trendier icons stole the spotlight.

When he took over Sir Malcolm's Bluebird K4 in 1949, only months after the Old Man's death, it was with the same bloody-mindedness that would ultimately seal his fate. He'd learned from MG racer Goldie Gardner that American industrialist Henry Kaiser planned to break the record with an Allison-powered boat called Aluminum First. Once again history repeated itself; initial problems only served to put the spurs to his challenge. On the first try they told him he had broken the record, only to discover an error. In 1951, after Stan Sayres and Ted Jones had wrested back the record for America with the remarkable Slo-Mo-Shun IV, K4 was disembowelled on Coniston when Donald and faithful engineer Leo Villa were lucky to survive a 170 mph collision with a submerged railway sleeper.

A lesser man would have thrown in the towel, but Campbell regarded Slo-Mo's second record, and then John Cobb's death a year later, as the spurs to carry on. The jet-propelled Bluebird K7 was born from his limited personal wealth and boundless determination.

Leo Villa was the adhesive that held the Campbell attempts together. He was a feisty, intuitive mechanic who had been Sir Malcolm's paid employee, but he was much more than that to the easy-going Donald. He had known the boy almost since he had been born, and was friend, father confessor, and trusted lieutenant rolled into one. Donald called him Unc.

Donald was intensely superstitious. No attempt after 1958 could start without Mr. Whoppit, the Merriweather teddy bear given to him that year by his manager, Peter Barker. He so hated the colour green that 1964 project manager Evan Green was known within the team as Evan Turquoise. He hated anyone wishing him 'Good Luck' after Goffy Thwaites, the boatman at Coniston, had said it prior to the 1951 accident with K4. His fanatical interest in spiritualism more than once led him to try and contact his father.

The Fifties were Donald's golden years. He vied for national newspaper headlines with test pilot Neville Duke, unrelated motorcycle racer Geoff Duke, and Grand Prix aces Stirling Moss and Mike Hawthorn. He was the playboy adventurer who, like his father, had the knack of stamping his aura on any gathering that he joined. Like them all, he lived with death as a shadow at his shoulder. When Bluebird K7 was being designed, he had watched over and over again a film of Cobb's accident on Loch Ness with Crusader. His boat was well advanced by October 1954, when the Italian champion, Mario Verga, perished on Lake Iseo in his Laura 3. Campbell kept going.

Bluebird K7 was powered by a Metropolitan-Vickers Beryl jet engine of 4000 lb. thrust. It was taken to Ullswater early in 1955, but innumerable teething troubles hampered progress. Designers Ken and Lew Norris had to make many modifications before Donald was ready to attack what he liked to call the 200 mph 'water barrier'.

On July 23 that year he overcame all of his problems and achieved a staggering 202.32 mph. Later that season Bluebird sank while on test at Lake Mead in Nevada. The craft was raised and repaired, and on November 16 he boosted his own record to 216.20 mph. Like father, like son.

In the Fifties, holiday magnate Sir Billy Butlin offered £5000 annually to anyone who broke the record, and each year as he recouped his investment, Campbell would nudge it a little higher: 225.63 mph in 1956; 239.07 in 1957; 248.62 in 1958; and 260.35 in 1959. He was on top of the world.

Then came the disastrous interlude with the Bluebird car, a gas-turbine-powered monster that drove through its wheels and was thus already a white elephant when he crashed it at around 300 mph in Utah in 1960. Campbell sustained a fractured skull but, typically, insisted on walking into the hospital at Tooele.

On July 17, 1964 his moment of truth finally came. On a track on Australia's Lake Eyre that was still wet from recent rain, and far shorter than he and Norris had wished, he averaged an heroic 403.1 mph. He had faced down the demons of Bonneville and a terrible course that tore matchbox-sized chunks of rubber from his tires as Bluebird cut four-inch ruts. He won by a hair's breadth after an abnormally brave performance. It was a qualified success. Craig Breedlove had done 407 mph the previous year in his rule-busting pure-jet Spirit of America. Three months after Lake Eyre, newly ratified jet cars annihilated Campbell's hard-won record.

On the last day of December Campbell hit back the only way that he could, setting his seventh and final water record at 276 mph on Australia's Lake Dumbleyung. It was the only time in history that anyone set new land and water records in the same year.

It was his finest hour, but he was stung by lack of media interest when he announced plans for a supersonic rocket Bluebird with which to regain his land speed crown. To help raise the finance for it he crammed a more powerful Bristol-Siddeley Orpheus engine into Bluebird K7 and took her to Coniston Water for a crack at the 300 mph barrier. Late in 1966 winter edged around his small camp. Problems chased one another through the boat, and after a catalogue of delays and dramas came that final, fatal run on January 4, 1967. He recorded 297 mph running north to south, but for an unaccountable reason headed straight back down the course without refuelling. As he met his wake from the first run, Bluebird began tramping until, at a speed estimated by some as 328 mph, Bluebird climbed inexorably into the sky before flipping back into the murky waters of the lake. Later, Ken Norrisk said he believed his speed was much lower as Donald had begun to back off.

Donald Campbell was his father's son. He had all of Malcolm Campbell's guts, perhaps more given the way he kept going even after the Bonneville nightmare. Fate just placed them in different ages, and obliged them to express themselves in different ways and to play to different audiences.

Shortly before his death he played cards, and turned up the Ace and then the Queen of Spades. The same combination had signalled the end for Mary, Queen of Scots, Donald looked quietly at the cards, and said: "Someone in my family is going to get the chop. I pray God it's not me, but if it is, I hope I'm going ruddy fast at the time."