Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  I loved horses from my earliest days of ploughing with Clydesdales in Scotland, and carriage driving kept me in contact with the equestrian world while providing an outlet for my competitive instincts. I started in a small way by learning to drive a pair and graduated to four-in-hand, where I eventually became good enough to represent Great Britain. I made many good friends in the carriage-driving world and seemed often to be in competition with the same man for a place in the British team – Prince Philip. Indeed, one year there was a minor frisson in the sport when he was selected for the team ahead of me despite having inferior results. I had beaten him in the trials, but they gave him full team member status and pushed me down to reserve. The newspapers made a fuss, but I never objected. I went to the competition, in Switzerland, and beat him anyway.

  Prince Philip was very competitive indeed – overly competitive, sometimes. We were up at Scone, near Perth, for a full-scale event and I was inspecting the course beforehand in a Land Rover; the marathon stages can be thirty-two kilometres long and it pays to know the layout. I came round a corner to be faced with a hazard where one had to drive the carriage through a man-made obstacle in a stream, and there I found two men furtively moving the boundary flags to create more room around the obstacle. This was not the done thing! Once a hazard’s been built, you’re not allowed to muck about with it unless you can prove it’s dangerous. I leaned out of the Land Rover.

  ‘Hello!’ I shouted. ‘Are you sure you ought to be doing that?’

  Prince Philip looked up guiltily, flag in hand. I affected not to notice him, but addressed his groom.

  ‘Something wrong with the hazard?’

  ‘No,’ the groom muttered. ‘We’re just taking a closer look.’

  I thought it rude not to acknowledge the Prince’s presence. ‘Hello, sir,’ I said. ‘Nice day for it.’

  ‘It is indeed, Bristow,’ he said, returning the marker to its proper place. The incident illustrated the degree of his competitiveness – he gaveno quarter. We had cometo know each other well through carriage-driving, a world in which he was treated as just another competitor. If he wasn’t in the British team he’d be reserve, and although he did well, he never made the first three. I always thought his horses were too big. They came out of the Royal Mews and I suppose were selected by Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Miller, the Crown Equerry. Prince Philip gave a lot of thought to the design of his equipment, and we argued several times about the relative merits of wooden and steel wheels. ‘Time you got up to date and had metal wheels, Bristow,’ he said.

  ‘Never, sir,’ I replied. ‘Those old chaps who made wooden wheels knew what they were about – you’ll not get fatigue breakages with wooden wheels.’

  He had a beautiful cross-country phaeton made in Edinburgh and he went for steel spokes. Sure enough, they fatigued and broke during the course of a single competition. I sailed past him on traditional wooden wheels. He persisted with metal wheels for years, but never got any value out of them.

  At an International Equestrian Federation event in Germany I was sitting with my girlfriend on a bench watching the dressage when Prince Philip came over with a glint in his eye.

  ‘And who is this young lady?’ he asked. ‘I see her with you a lot.’

  ‘This is Diana Mounsdon, sir,’ I said. ‘She’s my girlfriend.’

  ‘Ah, she’s your CC.’

  ‘My CC, sir?’

  ‘Your constant companion, Bristow.’ She was, too, for many years. I asked her to marry me but she declined, which I thought was a great pity. She didn’t want a family, she said – not even a husband. She never married.

  Prince Philip practised at Windsor and Balmoral, where he had built carriage drives on which competitions were run. The Queen was sufficiently interested to come out to watch, and at one event Alastair Gordon and I were inspecting the marathon course when we saw the Queen in the field next to the track with a dog. She was bending down trying to pull something out of the ground.

  ‘Can we help you, ma’am?’ I offered.

  ‘It’s this awful barbed wire,’ she said. ‘Philip’s going to be coming along here later and the horses might run into it.’

  Alastair and I started helping to pull up the wire, but there were miles of it, rusted and dangerous. It was beyond our capabilities so we reported it to the organisers and a gang of people were sent out to remove it.

  The Queen understood enough about carriage driving to know when it was being done well – or badly, as the case may be. I was driving a beautiful coach of my own when I met her in Windsor Great Park and stopped to exchange pleasantries. I simply forgot that the carriage had only one-quarter lock, and as I tried to make too tight a turn there was a bang and the pole broke. My embarrassment was overwhelming. I had Alastair Gordon and James and April Clavell in the coach, and the Queen was standing at the side of the track laughing ungraciously at me.

  ‘Oh, Philip will love this,’ she said. She moved in for a closer look, and to compound my misery the wheelers – the rear horses of the four – got nervous and started backfiring, banging their hooves on the carriage. Later that day when the Queen presented me with a prize for the event we’d been attending she was kind enough not to mention it, but Clavell never let me forget it.

  The Queen loved horses as much as I did, but not all members of the royal family had the same touch. I was persuaded to lend horses to Prince Michael of Kent, and they came back in terrible shape – young horses, too. He was an awful man who can’t drive and has no idea how to treat a horse. Prince Philip was a good all-round sportsman. He was competent on a horse, he liked shooting and was a keen yachtsman – he’d been taught to sail by Uffa Fox and bought Bloodhound from Myles Wyatt in 1962. His participation in carriage driving gave the sport a cachet from which it could benefit, but I always said that much more could be done to popularise it and increase participation. I suggested we made four-in-hand less expensive, allowing competitors to use the same vehicle throughout instead of having to have a special carriage for dressage and presentation, and that we abandon the requirement for grooms to have silk hats and uniforms. Some of these suggestions would have cut the cost in half, but they weren’t well received – there was a lot of snobbery in the sport – and nothing ever came of it. I built two cross-country courses to international standards within the boundaries of Coxland and Baynards Park in order to show what might be done to popularise the sport. I had TV cameras positioned at all the hazards and erected large screens to show the action to spectators who would otherwise be scattered around a thirty-two-kilometre course, but while the turnout was good the events were never recognised by the British Horse Society as qualifying for points. There was tremendous inertia at the top, and carriage driving remains a sport enjoyed by a small minority.

  I’d bought my first carriage at Reading sales after taking advice from an old master called George Mossman, who at the time was putting together the fabulous Mossman Collection of horse-drawn vehicles, which he hired out for parades, weddings and films. Mossman knew more about carriages than any man alive, but when I flew up to Bedfordshire to see him he thought I was a city slicker who had too much money, and was caustic when I asked for advice.

  ‘Look, Mr Bristow, you might be able to fly a helicopter but you can’t drive four horses, because they’re flesh and blood and they’ve got minds of their own.’

  He became more helpful when we discussed Clydesdales and Suffolk Punches and he realised I knew what I was talking about, but I found that the carriages available at the Reading Sales simply weren’t strong enough to withstand the rigours of serious cross-country competition. So I sat down to design my first cross-country vehicle, and derived great enjoyment from doing so. While the traditionalists might not like it, there was a lot that could be improved. When one drove over rough ground the pole would crash up and down, and at full speed it could break – a regular occurrence in competition. I had a separate cantilevered spring fixed underneath the pole to control the rate at which it
came down, rather like a damper on a helicopter rotor blade. It was attached to the turntable at the front, and I never suffered another pole breakage in competition.

  Making the wheels posed special difficulties. I had to find an expert to put the steel rims on, and there were only one or two companies left that could do the job. At Sevenoaks I found a firm who made luggage trolleys with steel rims for British Rail. I doubt very much whether they stayed in business for much longer. I also moved to increase stability athwartships, putting in coil springs to augment the leaf springs, and that worked very well. I added conventional car brakes from a Bedford truck, then copied the Royal Artillery by turning the hubs inside the wheel so that instead of sticking out and smashing against hazards, they stuck inward and avoided damage. And none of this contravened the rules. I called it the Battlewagon, and it caused quite a stir when it first appeared. Based on experience of campaigning the Battlewagon I began designing an improved model, the Chariot, with a better turning radius, more manoeuvrability and a better centre of gravity, and all this work was done by three excellent craftsmen in my workshops at Coxland.

  Needless to say, it was expensive to compete. I had sixteen horses, which gave me two and a half teams. One could declare six horses ahead of a competition, you could take five of those six to the show, and you could use one as a substitute on the marathon, or the dressage, or the obstacle section, but you could only use him once. With events every fourteen days, you didn’t want to be taking out injured or tired horses, and like the Duke of Edinburgh I had a second team, with reserves. The carriages had to be immaculate, and achieving the proper standard was very labour-intensive. You were judged on the appearance of the horses, the harness, the condition of the vehicle – a chip of paint would rule you right out. Mickey Flynn was my head groom for years, and he was so good that when I quit the sport Prince Philip hired him. Mickey came from Young’s Brewery in London, where he’d looked after the dray horses, and in fact his son Kevin runs Young’s horses now. Kevin would often help out, and there were two girl grooms for cleaning and scrubbing. The three workshop men would all come to major events, and moving this cavalcade was quite a logistical exercise, especially if we were travelling to Hungary or Holland.

  I had a special pantechnicon made to carry the horses and vehicles. The elevated section at the front was the sleeping quarters for the crew. Behind that was a space where the vehicles went, then there were stalls for six horses. It was called the Bristow Hilton, and it usually took to the road in company with a van containing our three carpenters and their tools, with myself in the Land Rover towing a beautiful Weippert caravan in which I would live during the competition. I also doubled as the mechanic-fitter, servicing the lorry. If you were going to compete in Europe you had to write off a fortnight. Getting to Hungary, for example, was the work of five days by the time you’d cleared immigration and veterinary controls and driven 250 miles a day. And there were four teams on the road, including the reserve. A chef d’équipe was responsible for the frontier clearances and the night stop arrangements for all the teams, which helped enormously.

  The carriage driver had to be competent, the vehicle had to be well designed and built, and the horses had to be extremely fit. The cross-country was divided up into fast, medium and walking sections, with the slow sections allowing the horses to get their heart rates back to normal. In the early days of carriage driving horses were sometimes driven until they collapsed. To abide by modern rules, at the end of the walk section you must stop for a period, and the vet or the technical delegate will take the horses’ pulses. If they are still over seventy after they’ve been standing for ten minutes, they will not be allowed to go on. I served as a technical delegate when I wasn’t competing, and sometimes I found judging harder than competing. A judge sat in the front seat next to each competing driver to make sure the proper course was followed, and sometimes the job took nerves of steel. On one occasion, at Cirencester, I turned into a hazard early and the bar carrying the swingle trees for the back horses hit a sapling, which bent underneath it and sprung it up suddenly, throwing us out. I rolled into a ball and got out unhurt, as did Alastair Gordon and Mickey Flynn. The judge was also uninjured but he took fright and ran, and was never seen at a horse event again. I was often called on to judge, but luckily, never in a carriage.

  My decision to quit carriage driving was not taken lightly, and came after I’d been quite badly injured in an event. There was a massive tree stump close to a hazard, and my lead horses came into the hazard a little too quickly but managed to leap the stump. The wheelers, however, crashed into it and went down, and the carriage rolled. I was lying in the water semi-conscious when one of the referees, a chap called Pullen, put his nose next to mine and said: ‘Come on, Alan –you’ve got a minute left to get out of the hazard without penalty.’ I got up, managed to get the vehicle back on its wheels, drove out and completed the course, and I felt bloody awful. One of the spectators who was a doctor checked me over. Already, huge bruises were coming up on my chest and back. ‘I think you’ve got a couple of broken ribs,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Better get them checked.’

  I packed everything up and drove home, spent a sleepless night and arranged to have an X-ray the following morning. The doctor had been right. I had three broken ribs. It took me a long time to recover. They weren’t clean breaks – and I’d already been feeling the effects of competition in terms of aches and pains, even without breaking bones. But it was some time before I made an irrevocable decision, and it was not entirely because of the physical demands of the sport. I’d been pairs champion and had worked my way up to third in the four-in-hand, then I found I was sixth and I didn’t want to be ninth. I was slow and getting slower, the young were getting faster, and my back and knee pains were taking longer to settle. The travelling was onerous – to Lowther one week, Tatton Park the next, Sandringham, Perth, Castle Howard – and if you had an international, it was Apeldoorn in Holland, Switzerland, or Italy. So I started playing a lot more golf and having more holidays, usually in peace and quiet aboard my yacht. We always had horses at Baynards – my daughter Lynda kept stables there – but I retired from equestrian pursuits with my skull and limbs mis-shapen but largely intact.

  My personal life aside, work changed little after the sale of Bristow Helicopters, except that four times a year I was required to attend Board meetings dealing with the business of Air Holdings Ltd. Laker was always keen to have me at his side.

  ‘Come on, Alan,’ he’d say. ‘You and I are the only ones here who aren’t ennobled – we have to stick together.’

  He was right – the Board could have been taken straight out of the pages of Debrett’s. There was a Guinness, Lord Poole of Lazards, Sir Donald Anderson, chairman of P&O, Lord Vestey, the British and Commonwealth Cayzers, and Sir Brian Mountain of Eagle Insurance, who was only ever known as Bill. After a year or so I felt qualified to comment on the agenda, and found that Nick Cayzer would sometimes seek my opinion on things that weren’t my side of the ship. Nick was a very astute businessman, but his cousin Tony was a butterfly who flitted from one fad to the next. Very few people would stand up to him because he was a Cayzer, but after a while I found I wasn’t the only one who didn’t think highly of him – Nick Cayzer could not stand him. Tony should have remained a company gentleman, but he insisted on getting involved. The nice thing about Tony was that he never seemed to bear a grudge. You could squash him flat one day, and by the next day he’d have forgotten all about it.

  I took an active interest in the management of British United Airways as a non-executive director, and Laker and I often discussed company strategy. As time went on I gained a good working knowledge of BUA, which was to come in useful in future. My energy was devoted to Bristow Helicopters Ltd, which had begun to grow at an unprecedented rate. In the early sixties it was becoming clear that what I’d first heard in the Gulf years before was true – the North Sea could be the next big thing. All my oil company contacts, carefully fo
stered down the years, were full of the possibilities. Shell, BP and Amoseas were at the forefront, but the first contracts to come up were supporting gas exploration on the German concessions. I went after them with all guns blazing. Our main competition, BEA Helicopters, might have the advantage of government support and public finance, but there was more to a good helicopter service than public subsidy. Bristows were expanding across the world, but I made the North Sea Bristows’ backyard, and fought for every contract that came out of it.

  CHAPTER 16

  World Expansion