The Boy

by Richard Williams

  In later years he was a valued guest at events from the Concours d’Elégance at Palm Beach in Florida to the Festival of Speed at Goodwood. He gave his name to a special edition of Mercedes’ SLR McLaren supercar, liveried to resemble his Mille Miglia winner, and to a recreation of the green and yellow Lister-Jaguar in which he had won the supporting race to the 1958 British Grand Prix.

  He had been attracting queues of autograph hunters since very early in his career, and he was invariably patient, courteous and obliging. But eventually, realising that he was being asked to sign photographs and books simply so that they could be put up for immediate resale, he insisted on adding an individual dedication.

  The magnetism of his presence seemed only to increase. Somehow the fact that his attendance at an event had been bought and paid for never diminished the thrill felt by even the most jaded enthusiast from proximity to a man in whom so much history reposed. Only one other retired racing driver brought more charisma to a public gathering: Juan Manuel Fangio, his friend for life. And when Fangio died in 1995, aged eighty-four, Moss travelled to Balcarce to be one of the six pallbearers at the parish church of San José, the crowd outside estimated at 10,000.

  He never stopped working. From early in his adult life he had followed his father’s advice to invest in bricks and mortar, and not just for his own use. Gradually he built up a small property empire, buying residential buildings and letting them to tenants. By 2010 he had forty-five tenants in ten London properties, divided into flats or bedsits, spread across West Kensington, Maida Vale, Pimlico and Battersea – all within a ten-minute ride of his office. ‘I always stay within scooter distance of my office so if someone calls to say the washing machine is broken, I can get on my bike and go over myself to try and fix it.’ He had never borrowed funds to expand his property empire. ‘It may sound like a good idea on paper, but borrowing against one property to buy another seems to me like building up a house of cards – it will only come crashing down later.’

  In March 2010, aged eighty, he was talking to someone while waiting for the lift to arrive on the second floor of his high-tech home in Shepherd Street. When the doors opened, he stepped in. But there was no cabin. It was stuck on the floor above. He fell 30 feet down the empty shaft onto the concrete base, breaking both ankles and several bones in his feet and chipping four vertebrae. Six months later, to the surprise only of those unaware of his history of swift recoveries, he was back at Goodwood, racing his red OSCA in his pale blue overalls and white helmet, drifting through Madgwick as though nothing had happened.

  The following summer, during practice for the historic-car race at Le Mans, he was lapping in his Porsche when he suddenly realised that even a gentle outing in such sympathetic machinery no longer felt right. ‘This afternoon I scared myself,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve always said that if I felt I wasn’t up to it or that I was getting in the way of other competitors, then I’d retire. I love racing, but now’s the time to stop.’

  CHAPTER 57 POLITICALLY INCORRECT

  His knighthood came in the New Year Honours list of 2000. He received it from the Prince of Wales, who remarked that it seemed long overdue. ‘If it had come much earlier,’ Moss replied, ‘it would have been given to the wrong wife.’ That drew a laugh from the Prince.

  After Katie, it had taken him a while to get back into the swing. But eventually the parade resumed: the actress Judy Carne comforted him after the Goodwood crash and found herself denying rumours that they had become engaged before she jetted off to America and a career that took flight with Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Who else? Sally Ducker, Jean Clarke, Claudia Hall, Jill Stevenson, Caroline Nuttall and Sally Weston again in London. Jan Lindsey and Victoria Turner in Australia. Francesca and Albertina in Italy. Beverley and Shirlee, both air hostesses. Women called Inge, Arta and Helga. (Sally Weston, who continued to use that name, married later in the 1960s, gave birth to three children, and died of cancer in Newmarket in 1983, aged fifty-two.)

  He married his second wife in 1964. Elaine Barbarino was a dark-haired, 24-year-old New Yorker who liked a good time. He flew her to London, where they were married quietly. ‘It was pure sexual attraction,’ he told The Scotsman many years later. ‘She was a swinger – that is, she loved night clubs – and I didn’t, so we soon had a problem.’ Nevertheless, a daughter named Allison, his first child, was born on Christmas Day 1966. After four years of marriage, seeking a divorce, he commissioned a private detective who confirmed that Elaine was seeing someone else. The decree came through in 1970. Allison and her nanny spent about half the weekends of the year with him (and many years later, after her own marriage, she would give him three grandchildren). Then the parade began again until, at the third time of asking, he got lucky with Susie Paine.

  His knighthood was bestowed, according to the citation, for services to motor racing. It could have added for services also to a generation of small boys, some of whom might have been inclined, as adults, to avert their gaze in 2004 when he joined the actress Joan Collins, the actor Edward Fox, the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the cricketer Geoffrey Boycott, the astronomer Sir Patrick Moore and the former Labour MP Robert Kilroy-Silk among the celebrity supporters of the newly formed UK Independence Party.

  Some of those former small boys might also have wanted to turn away from the row that erupted in 2013 after his assertion that, if they made a film of his life, he didn’t want to be played by ‘a poofter or anything like that’. The chap from Skyfall – Daniel Craig – would do, he thought. When gay rights groups reacted with outrage, he did his best to produce a measured response: ‘I think it would be difficult for someone of the other persuasion, who is homosexual, to take on the part, as I have spent my life driving cars and chasing girls. I’m sorry I’ve caused offence, but I’m disappointed anyone could be so narrow-minded as to take offence. It was not meant to cause any. I have homosexual friends. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s the way things are nowadays.’

  He was from a generation that saw no need to come to terms with what was dismissively known as political correctness. Several waves of feminism had come and gone, making profound changes to society, while Moss carried on referring to ‘crumpet’. Equal pay was the rule at Wimbledon and women were even welcomed into the pavilion at Lord’s, but his own sport had remained largely resistant to female participation. His contemporary Maria-Teresa Di Filippis remained one of only two women to have started a Formula 1 world championship grand prix.

  No one in the future will use the term ‘crumpet’ to describe attractive women in the way Moss continued to do until he was silenced by illness. It was a usage as patently archaic as his contemporary Tony Brooks’s habit of describing a full-throttle effort behind the wheel as ‘going harry-flatters’. And he was indulged. It became part of his brand. Some women – women of a certain age, perhaps, and with an ironic sense of humour – might even be amused to be described as ‘crumpet’. Others would assuredly not.

  The UK Independence Party was a slightly different matter. It was set up to campaign for British withdrawal from the European Union and for strengthened immigration controls. To some, this seemed an odd allegiance for a man who had seen so much of the world and who had learned how to express himself in his chosen profession on the road circuits of continental Europe, who had driven for Italian and German teams, and would presumably have appreciated the benefits of freedom of movement. But after the European elections of 2004 his name was no longer heard in connection with the political organisation through which Nigel Farage spooked David Cameron into a decision that changed the course of British history.

  His early endorsement of UKIP could hardly have implied an approval of racism. When he visited South Africa for the first time, in the winter of 1959, he disliked the apartheid system on sight, and before the race in East London he advised his fellow drivers to limit their acknowledgement of the crowd to waving at the segregated enclosures reserved for non-white spectators.

  The support for UKIP came
from a different impulse, an affection for a certain idea of England, although in later life he claimed that he had been foolish to allow patriotism to guide so many of his decisions. ‘I find it very offensive now that there is no patriotism at all,’ he said. ‘I was very patriotic because I loved the country. I have regrets because England now is no longer what England should be. So I certainly regret that because it was a wasted thing to do. I certainly would have been wiser not to be so patriotic. So, in hindsight, it was a mistake.’

  UKIP also campaigned for lower taxation, but it might be worth noting that although a limited company was set up in 1955 to help limit Moss’s tax liability, he never moved abroad to avoid paying UK tax altogether, as many other drivers would do. Some of them, such as Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart and Jenson Button, based themselves in the Bahamas or Switzerland or Monaco without a breath of criticism from the media. Not so in a more recent case, although opinions on Lewis Hamilton’s tax arrangements may have been influenced by attitudes to the colour of his skin.

  Moss lived to see Hamilton, a mixed-race man from a working-class family in Stevenage, be crowned champion of the world not one but six times, with a seventh still to come, often displaying a virtuosity of which he himself would have been proud, moreover securing five of those titles as only the third Englishman, after Seaman and Moss, to drive for the Mercedes Grand Prix team. In 2015, at eighty-five, Stirling joined Lewis for a gentle day out at Monza in two W196 Grand Prix cars: an open-wheeled model and the streamliner. They circulated happily for the cameras in the sixty-year-old machines, Hamilton riding high up the banking – ‘We don’t have that in F1 today’ – while Moss stayed down low, with his memories from the season when he had followed in Fangio’s wheel tracks. If he had not been entirely comfortable with the different culture – symbolised by the diamond ear studs, the braided hair, the tattoos and the friends from the world of rap music – that Hamilton brought to Formula 1, his admiration of the young champion’s talent was certainly unfeigned.

  CHAPTER 58 THE WAVE

  ‘There was a girl with pale pink lipstick,’ Moss told me in 1992, when I rang him up to say I was writing a piece about the fiftieth running of the Monaco Grand Prix and asked for his memories of a race he had won three times. ‘She used to sit outside Oscar’s Bar, by the side of the track going down from Casino Square to the Station hairpin. It was opposite the Metropole hotel, where I stayed every year. They gave me a twenty per cent discount. I noticed the pale pink lipstick, and I used to wave at her every time I went round.’

  The Moss wave was almost as famous as the Queen’s. Like Ayrton Senna’s brandishing of the Brazilian national flag on a victory lap, it was something that brought him closer to the public. He made a fetish of it, and not just to celebrate a win. In the days when photographers were allowed to crouch on the grass a foot or two from the apex of a fast bend, he would spot one he knew – a Bernard Cahier, a Geoff Goddard, an Edward Eves or a Louis Klemantaski – and give an insouciant wave just as they were pressing the shutter. One man had a childhood memory of watching Moss during a practice session for a historic car meeting at Silverstone, on a day with almost no spectators at all, and noticing that he raised his hand every time he passed by. The boy looked around, wondering who it was for, before realising that it was meant for him. The wave made everyone feel good.

  Once, looking back, he described it as ‘just commercialisation’. As a public gesture that established his personality and enhanced his appeal, it would be noticed by race promoters, who might be prompted to offer him better starting money. It was also about getting the public involved. In front of a crowd of half a million at the Nürburgring, for example, ‘if you can get a reasonable proportion of that quarter of a million waving back at you, then it’s good because they’re following you.’ And there was never a hint of anything inauthentic about it.

  Motor racing was more individual in those days. The drivers chose their own overalls. The men who ran the teams didn’t feel obliged to wear the same sponsored kit as their drivers and mechanics. Neubauer had his trilby, Ugolini his Italian suits and Mays his silk shirts, handmade in Jermyn Street. Vandervell, on a hot day, had his braces on show. Even the spectators were individuals. They weren’t in team livery, banding together in the grandstand like banks of football fans, in solid blocks of red or orange or blue.

  No one expected a Fangio or a Moss to turn up for a press conference and parrot a line fed by a public relations manager. No one told an Uhlenhaut or an Alfieri how many cylinders they could have in their engines, or how many ratios in their gearboxes, or, for that matter, how many wheels on their cars. No one told an Alf Francis or a Guerino Bertocchi to stop working at a certain hour or took their cars away to a parc fermé so they couldn’t do an all-nighter to fix something in time for the race. No one asked the drivers to compete on a circuit whose limits were delineated not by the natural hazards that confronted earlier generations but by colourful lines painted on asphalt.

  No driver would barge a rival off the track in order to secure a championship or pre-arrange a crash in order to win a race. No one needed a system of penalty points for dangerous behaviour. No team was told they couldn’t test whenever and wherever they wanted. No driver was cocooned inside a metal frame that made it even harder for the spectator to see what their hero was doing. The drivers had no mechanical devices to help them overtake a rival and no engineers coaching them through radio earpieces; once they were out there, their only guidance was what they could see, hear or feel for themselves.

  But Moss was never one to bang on about how things were better in his day. In one of his early books he showed that he was looking to the future. ‘The use of inter-com telephony and radar is no longer a matter of conjecture, but can practicably and practically be applied to motor racing,’ he wrote in 1957 in the final paragraph of In the Track of Speed. ‘It won’t be long before we have constant contact with our pits.’ When he was a guest at a modern race, he enjoyed himself. He certainly relished the skill of men like Senna, Alonso, Vettel and Hamilton. When asked, however, he would be honest. He and his generation, he felt, had enjoyed the best of it.

  CHAPTER 59 HERO

  A traffic policeman stops a speeding motorist. His first question: ‘Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?’ As the decades rolled by, the name never changed. It was not ‘Who do you think you are, Mike Hawthorn?’ or Graham Hill or Jim Clark or John Surtees or Jackie Stewart or any of the other British drivers who actually became world champions, from James Hunt to Lewis Hamilton by way of Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and Jenson Button. Had Moss been able to collect a royalty for every time the question was asked, he would never have needed the fees from opening BP stations or the revenue from his little property empire.

  Early in his career, he became a figure whose appeal extended beyond followers of motor racing. Somehow, starting with his emergence as a teenage prodigy, he captured the imagination and the support of a wider public. Even if they had never actually seen him race, the public understood the special nature of his talent and accepted him as a symbol of his sport, just as people who wouldn’t be able to tell Bach from Beethoven knew that Yehudi Menuhin represented not just the pinnacle of violin playing but classical music at its most exalted. They also knew that in a sport where the balance between the machine and the human being often tilts in favour of the former, Moss elevated his particular skill to a kind of artistry.

  His admirers could sense and share the exhilaration he experienced whenever he stepped into the cockpit, knowing that he would give it everything he had, every time. ‘In all my racing career,’ he told Godfrey Smith of the Sunday Times in 1969, ‘I met a lot of fast drivers but very few fighters.’ He was a fighter, whether he was in the best car in the field or the worst, or anything in between. He drove with his head but also with his heart. Some drivers, recognising that their equipment wouldn’t allow them to fight at the front, settled for a respectable result. Others were known to have off days. Not Moss. ‘
I was always there to win,’ he told Smith. Even Hawthorn once wrote of ‘Stirling driving as only he can when the odds are stacked against him’.

  Hawthorn had been the beneficiary of the gesture that most dramatically illustrated his rival’s sense of ethics when it came to racing. Moss was not alone in believing in fairness towards his rivals: in those days, when competitors at every level were risking their lives, drivers tended to do as they would be done by, with very rare exceptions. But somehow the man in the white helmet was the one who gave the clearest impression that while he was there to win, some principles would always be more important.

  His patriotism, often expressed through his desire to succeed with a British team, struck a chord with those who had watched France, Italy and Germany dominate racing between the wars and yearned for the arrival of a proper challenge. In pursuit of that objective, he sometimes chased lost causes, passing up the chance of a seat in a works Ferrari – and the certain victories it would bring – in favour of the BRM, the HWM, the ERA and the Cooper-Alta, some of which were almost comically hopeless. His bad luck – the jinxes, the gremlins, the hoodoos – became proverbial: although some accused him of bringing it on himself, through quixotic choices or harsh driving, most accepted it as a side effect of his extraordinary talent and ambition.

  The admiration of his competitive spirit and willingness to fight against the odds was reinforced by the general perception of his essential seriousness of purpose. His lifestyle may in many respects have resembled that of the archetypal 1950s playboy, criss-crossing the world in permanent pursuit of what he called ‘crumpet’, but his true priorities were defined clearly and early. He worked hard to develop and refine his natural talent to its optimum level from every perspective – recognising, for example, that skill would have to be backed up by stamina.