by Gwen Russell
The stunt didn’t lead him to lose any fans. In fact, he was gaining them and the lads who had always loved him, the devoted followers of Top Gear, his videos, books and other speed-related projects, continued to hero worship him. They were not going to turn against him, now. But he was also building up another following, one that was not interested in motor journalism but who did enjoy the documentaries he made. And Clarkson enjoyed making them, too. Having discovered something about Francie’s family history, it was time to turn to the Clarksons themselves. Jeremy was about to embark on yet another serious documentary: one that would take him deep into his own family’s past.
CHAPTER 11
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
Jeremy Clarkson had come a long way. His television career had been something of an accident and, although he was perfectly competent for his first three years of reporting, he had not stood out. His real success only began in 1992 when, as he himself admitted, the production company encouraged him to speak his mind rather than to follow a polite script. The success of that tactic has resonated from that day to this, with the upshot that Clarkson is now one of the most successful media personalities in the country.
Instantly recognisable, for his distinctive appearance and deep voice have also helped him get a phenomenal amount of public recognition, Jeremy’s career soared higher than anyone could have dreamt of. The truculent teenager ‘expelled’ from school had so far outshone most people of his generation that it is sometimes difficult to remember that they are the same person.
But the key to success in a career like Clarkson’s is constant reinvention. Television is an unforgiving medium and what one day seems new and shocking shortly afterwards becomes clichéd and tired. No one who manages to maintain a long-term career on the box can afford to sit back and let newcomers catch up with them: they must maintain their edge and provide constant diversion for the viewer. And, wittingly or not, that is what Jeremy has done.
During the 1990s, when he was in his thirties, he was the personification of the lad. Rail against it he might have done, but it stood him in phenomenally good stead. It was the fashion of that moment, and Jeremy, with his liking for cars, booze and women, not necessarily in that order, appeared to sum up the whole feeling of the time in one man.
But what works in a thirty-something man can look a bit tragic a decade on, and so, with brilliant timing, the Clarkson persona underwent a change. Yes, there were still all those remarks about cars that snapped knicker elastic – old habits die hard – but now there was something more substantial there as well.
Jeremy had shown he had a far greater understanding of history, architecture, engineering and, indeed, of Empire, than anyone would have guessed, and it stood him in brilliantly good stead. It deprived his detractors of at least some of their ammunition, while adding a whole new layer to an already well-known personality. To paraphrase a cartoon of the 1980s, it showed he was deep, and not just macho. And, because of the massively more complex aura that now emanated from Clarkson, it also widened considerably the range of work for which he was now suitable. In other words, it made him even more employable.
Now that the new, improved Clarkson had an altogether more serious image, it was almost inevitable that he would be included in the BBC’s next big idea, a programme entitled Who Do You Think You Are? The show did exactly what it said on the label: it invited a number of celebrities to delve into their own backgrounds and find out where they really came from.
The idea worked on several levels: it sparked a countrywide interest in genealogy, as viewers were inspired to find out more about their own family tree, and it uprooted quite a number of interesting stories from the people who took part. Apart from Jeremy, they were naturalist Bill Oddie, actresses Amanda Redman and Sue Johnston, journalist and TV presenter Ian Hislop, newsreader Moira Stuart, comedian and author David Baddiel, soprano Lesley Garrett, actress and author Meera Syal and comedian Vic Reeves.
As it happens, Clarkson was not initially interested: ‘Too boring to bother with,’ he said, when first asked if he would like to find out more about his family’s past. But the BBC persisted for good reason, for, as mentioned in the first chapter of this book, Clarkson had an interesting family background, in that his great-great grandfather had invented the Kilner jar. It was not just a popular television presenter they wanted to make use of: they also wanted someone with a real story to uncover and Clarkson was it. After some persuading, he finally agreed to take part, stating that he had a specific aim: ‘Selfishly, I’m quite keen to find out what happened to the money,’ he said. ‘Is there somewhere a dusty piece of paper that says Jeremy Clarkson is owed £48 billion?’
With that he was off, displaying his usual mastery of the loaded question, the subtle pause and his not-inconsiderable skills as a broadcaster. Jeremy was already aware that one of his ancestors had invented the Kilner jar, but didn’t know much more than that. His own parents had known that there had once been a great deal of money in the family, but that there wasn’t anymore, possibly because it had never been registered in the first place. Whatever had happened, though, they knew one thing: the money had been lost.
Now Clarkson was intent on finding out the whole story. And, of course, Jeremy started his search for the truth in his own inimitable way. ‘Take the Clarkson name back to its Yorkshire roots and they all come from within a few miles of each other,’ he said. ‘I’m the product of 200 years of interbreeding – I’m surprised I haven’t got one eye!’ But some of those Clarksons had been very pioneering indeed, playing a full role in the Industrial Revolution and making a fortune for themselves in the process. John Kilner established a number of glassworks in the north of England, among them the Providence Glassworks in Conisbrough, which became the main source of employment for the town. The family’s importance can be judged by the fact that there is a Kilner bridge in Conisbrough, where the family also helped with funding for the local Methodist church.
Not that Jeremy had ever been particularly bothered about all that. ‘I used not to care a tinker’s cuss about my family past,’ Clarkson said. ‘That there was this family tree, starting with me at the bottom and spreading back to the eighteenth century, and including 200 people, all of whom were born, lived and died within 12 miles of each other, struck me as spectacularly dull. But when I discovered they were part of British social history and the Industrial Revolution, rather than just part of my family tree – which is only of interest to me and my mother – I got involved.’
Given his earlier championing of Brunel as the greatest ever Briton, his family history could hardly have been more appropriate. Clarkson was probably the most well-known admirer of the nineteenth century and the Industrial Revolution in the country, and now it emerged that his own family had played a part in it. Had someone written out a plot beforehand, this would have been it: laddish television presenter shows his serious side by a piece of interesting and informed journalism about a great engineer at a time when Britain quite literally ruled the world – and then turns out to have had ancestors who also played a part in that glorious past. It built up interest in the programme, while at the same time establishing Clarkson as a far more in-depth character than he himself made out. Jeremy was now in real danger of turning into a national institution and this programme was yet another reason why that transformation was happening. He wasn’t just mouthy; he had depth. Indeed, even people who had formerly loathed him were beginning to see the point of Clarkson. There was real affection in the way that many members of his audience regarded him now.
But, alas for Jeremy, the family money had disappeared long ago. American glass-manufacturing methods became more popular than British ones, on top of which the vast family fortune was mismanaged, with the patent passing into other hands. Clarkson tracked down the current patent holder and cheerily remarked that he wanted to punch him, before calming down. ‘It’s just thrilling to know that my ancestors were part of the most extraordinary superpower the world has ever s
een,’ he said. ‘Part of that patchwork quilt of ingenuity.’
But it was, perhaps, worth it just to have discovered his fascinating family history. And it wasn’t just a tale about the Clarkson family: it was a story that somehow summed up a whole slice of British history – even mirroring the rise and then decline of the British Empire, not that Clarkson would have made such grandiose claims. But he did point out that it was a tale redolent of the times. ‘The story is about the astonishing rise and calamitous fall of one of the many businesses that propelled the British Empire,’ he said on another occasion, in the Radio Times, explaining the nub of what happened.
‘My great-great-great grandfather John Kilner, who was born in 1792, had a glassworks that produced the Kilner jar, which is still used today for preserving fruit. The most amazing thing for me was discovering how big Kilner Glass was. I thought they made sweet little bottles in Doncaster, but it was one of 3,000 products, and the company had its own shipping fleet and railway sidings. When his son Caleb died, he left 120 houses along with lots of land in Bridlington. But the company went bankrupt! I’d come home after days digging around in Warwick library, wondering just how Kilner had got it so spectacularly wrong. It seems Caleb’s son, George, just wanted to build churches and read the Bible, so he wasn’t cut out for the gritty business of running a northern glass factory.’
The full story went something as follows. John Kilner had actually started out as an employee in a glass factory before deciding to go it alone. He enlisted the help and support of friends and, by the time of his death in 1857, had made the company enormously successful, owning two factories in south Yorkshire. After he died, the business went to his four sons, George (Jeremy’s great-great grandfather), William, John and Caleb. It was the youngest of the brothers who would seem to have been the really proficient businessman: Caleb opened a London factory for Kilner Brothers, as they were now called. From that base, the company was able to export to all four corners of the globe.
For a time, the company prospered. It was the only British glass-bottle maker to win a medal in the 1862 Great International Exhibition in London and, over the next two decades, it won similar awards all over the world. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, competition from abroad meant that Kilner Brothers, and quite a number of other companies, faced severe problems, and so the all-important Kilner patents were sold to a firm called United Glass Bottle.
But that was not the end of it and, intriguingly, it emerged that Jeremy’s love of cars might have been echoed in his family many decades before. After selling the patents, Caleb Kilner was still a very rich man, and died leaving a huge amount of money to his son George and his son-in-law Harry Smethurst, who was married to Clarkson’s great-grandmother Annie. Harry was an architect and he and his wife liked to live well, to which end it is believed that they bought a car sometime around 1901. This would have made him one of the very first people in the area to have owned such a thing.
But they were spending their money fast, which is where a good deal of it seemed to vanish, on top of which they also disinherited Clarkson’s grandmother Gwendoline in the wake of a family row about what to do with the money from the sale of the patents. And so it was that Jeremy was not born into great wealth. All told, it made for a very good story.
The series was an enormous success, so much so that it was commissioned for a second run, in the course of which, that old bruiser Jeremy Paxman famously wept when confronted with the early death of a poverty-stricken relative. The other Jeremy felt no such emotion when confronted with his past. ‘Hand on heart, it’s not been a life-changing experience,’ he said. ‘Like aristocrats, or the Royal family, we all have family histories that are that old. I still don’t feel any affinity for those people way back when, which I’d have enjoyed even if it was about another family.’
There was, however, a particular resonance that appeared to amuse him intently. Harry was not the only ancestor with whom Clarkson had something in common: his forebears appeared not to be too concerned about the environment, as well as owning the first cars in the area. Of course, environmental matters were not quite the hot topic they are now, but even so, it would take a very limited sense of humour not to smile inwardly at this one. ‘Kilner Glass was involved in one of Britain’s first ever environmental law suits, in 1871,’ Clarkson revealed. ‘It was brought by Lord Scarborough’s estate, alleging that the smoke pouring out of Kilner’s factory was killing his trees. Then there was a massive strike at the factory, with labour shipped in and police shipped up from London. It was like something from the 1980s.’ A row about the environment followed by the workforce making trouble? It was hard not to sense a real note of regret that he hadn’t been there.
The new, serious Clarkson was now in full swing. Another of his interests was, of course, aviation and, in the wake of the Concorde crash and its subsequent decommission – Clarkson was on its last ever flight – he became really quite thoughtful about the nature of machines. In April 2004, he appeared on Parkinson and mentioned the Concorde crash: when people heard about it, he said, they felt sadness for the machine itself, as well as for the terrible loss of human life. These musings prompted him to write a book on the subject – I Know You Got Soul – talking about the fact that machines themselves had exactly that: a kind of soul.
And he was becoming wealthier as well. The Isle of Man had always played a part in the family’s life, not least since that is where Francie comes from, and so Clarkson bought a holiday home there. He managed to turn it into a political statement, noting that it is ‘a thorn in the side of Tony Blair’s nanny state’, because there is no upper speed limit on the island. It also has tax advantages for residents, which could prove a very shrewd move in the years ahead. For now, though, Clarkson and his wife and offspring were based mainly in the Cotswolds mansion. The children were growing up, the family was moving on, and a great deal still lay ahead.
CHAPTER 12
‘AWARDS NIGHTS ARE JUST A LOAD OF BLONDE GIRLS WITH THEIR BOOB JOBS OUT’
By the summer of 2005, Jeremy’s ability to cause trouble had been refined into a fine art but, at the same time, his popularity had never been greater. For the point about love ’em or hate ’em types, and Clarkson most certainly is one of those, is that a lot of people do actually love them. A great many of those who do are men, of course, who would never dream of using that terminology about their hero, but, for all his many (and loudly admitted to) faults, Jeremy is a breath of fresh air; someone who dares to take a stand on issues of the day.
Clarkson also says what a great many people would like to say, but don’t dare, for fear of falling foul of the politically correct brigade. He gives voice to the man on the street’s secret concerns, whether it be irritating the environmental lobby – something he manages to do with such ease that it is a wonder any of them still rise to the bait – or being rude about the French. And the Germans. And pretty much everyone else …
But that is the secret of his success: a blunt-talking Yorkshireman who will give it to you straight. People trust Jeremy far more than they do most celebrities for the simple reason that he tells it like it is. It is part of what made him so successful as a commentator on the motor industry: the fact that he will tell the truth, no matter how lurid the phraseology he uses, with a great deal of wit thrown in as well. He is the antithesis of every celebrity who has ever jumped on a bandwagon just for the sake of it. Even in the world of show business, he has genuinely remained his own man.
But it is in his ability to cause mischief that Clarkson really livens up the proceedings, much to the delight of all who watch. One memorable day that summer, he decided to stage an ‘anti-environment’ stunt at Hammersmith bus depot: he handcuffed himself to a bus. If he wanted to draw attention to himself, he most certainly succeeded in this aim – the police were called and an enraged organisation called Transport for London complained to the Broadcasting Standards Council, blaming him for causing ‘a considerable amou
nt of disruption’.
Not to be outdone, the Film Office joined in the fray, complaining that he was bringing the entertainment industry into disrepute, something many observers might feel the entertainment industry could do all by itself, without any help from Clarkson. ‘Clowns like him put other people’s jobs at risk,’ it snapped. ‘This episode makes London authorities more reluctant to co-operate with filming projects.’
With that it shot off an official complaint to the BBC, while much outrage ensued from all the usual suspects. Clarkson’s response was magnificent: when one newspaper rang for a comment, Francie informed them that her husband was busy and didn’t feel like talking about work at the weekend. He had, quite effortlessly, caused the maximum amount of fuss with an extremely minimal amount of effort.
If no one took heed of such stunts and the very interest groups concerned didn’t allow themselves to express outrage, then the chances are that Jeremy would stop his japes. But he provides a great deal of entertainment, both for himself and everyone else, by proving over and over again quite how self-important and humourless some organisations can be. Indeed, in some ways, he is actually like the court jester of old: endlessly pricking the pomposity of the great and the good, and showing them up to look foolish with it.
And that was only one of the myriad ways he sent the hackles of the more sensitive of his observers shooting up towards the ceiling. In the aftermath of the bombings on the London transport system on 7 July 2005, when it was reported that many more people were using bicycles on the London streets, Jeremy decided that he, too, would contribute his little bit: ‘Handy hints to those setting out on a bike for the first time,’ he wrote. ‘Do not cruise through red lights, because if I’m coming the other way, I will run you down, for fun. Do not pull up at junctions in front of a line of traffic, because if I’m behind you, I will set off at normal speed and you will be crushed under my wheels.’ It does not need a particularly vivid imagination to envisage the cyclists’ reaction.