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Sport, speed, and the technological imperative

- dealing with the 'declinists’

It’s 1967 – for aficionados of psychedelia, the summer of love, but for bikers the year of the most keenly contested 500cc World Championship, and the Isle of Man’s most exciting and most fiercely fought Senior TT. Dad hasn’t worn leathers since 1952, when my arrival put paid to a longstanding love affair with square four Ariels – a loyalty betrayed only by a brief fling in Berlin with a shaft-driven 1000cc BMW that was reluctantly abandoned in the transport depot of the Olympic Stadium on the day his demob papers came through. My father makes aircraft not motorcycles, and aged 15 I make no connection between the two – I’m not old enough to think holistically, and so I compartmentalise. I can appreciate the technical achievement and the aesthetic appeal of say a Hawker Hunter night fighter and a Triumph Tiger Daytona Super Sports, but I fail to see each product as complementing the other, taken together part of a postwar technological initiative that, seen in domestic and in global terms, is both challenging and – not least for the British motorcycle industry – challenged. As someone not especially interested in motor sport my dad has perhaps read a back page report or watched a blurred, Murray Walker-charged clip on Grandstand – a news item or perhaps a passing comment at work has clearly caught his imagination, and given him an idea. Why? Because he’s brought us to a point midway between Hinkley and Leicester, to the smallest, fastest, most tightly bended circuit in Britain. We’re not picnicking at Stratford or visiting aged relatives at Stapleford. We’re at MalloryPark. Dad drives past the parked legions of big bikes – BSA Gold Star, Royal Enfield Interceptor, Triumph Bonneville, Norton Commando – and parks his own mean machine: an Austin A110 Westminster (3 litre straight six engine with twin carbs/3 speed box with overdrive), a car that properly marketed could have cruised every Commonwealth highway from Peshawar to Perth. So why are we here? A question asked more than once by my mother, who has gamely agreed to come along, if only because the sight of so many pillions brings back fond memories of keeping a firm grip and going with the flow as the 600cc of Square Four is lent in to the turn coming down Porlock in a warm late ‘forties Indian Summer.

We’re here because, although the races are not part of the World Championship (to show this really is another age, Britain’s 1967 championship event is the Ulster Grand Prix), they are the next best thing. Never mind all the other competitors, riding the Honda works bike is Mike Hailwood, four times 500cc world champion and reigning 250cc and 350cc world champion, and, astride the MV Agusta machine that brought Britain’s talisman fame and fortune before he headed east, is the current 500cc king, Giacomo Agostini. Forget Jim Clark and Graham Hill, forget England and West Germany, forget Coventry and Gloucester – even ignore the City and Wolves – this is truly a clash of titans. Every race Agostini starts from pole position with an extraordinary explosion of speed, and every race Hailwood is tight on his tail eager to exploit the slightest hesitation or premature deceleration. They end the afternoon honours even, reflecting the then senior World Championship, which a few months later is settled only in the final race: the combination of Italian old money, traditional engineering skills, contemporary design, and a young pretender’s Azzuri-style will to win brings Agostini six successes; while the new fashion for fusing old world racing guile with Japanese invention and collective endeavour secures Hailwood a tally of five victories. Consolation for Hailwood came with retaining his current two titles and just holding off his great rival in that year’s legendary TT race. While the man from Agusta continued to dominate his sport until the mid-1970s, Hailwood sought, with mixed fortunes, to emulate John Surtees’ double success – he never became a Formula 1 world champion, but he did make a brief and spectacular return to two wheels with a one-off triumph in the 1977 Senior TT. Within four years Mike Hailwood was dead, ironically killed in a car crash along with his young daughter. Fans of Nick Drake on pilgrimage to Tanworth-in-Arden find, lying in the churchyard alongside the singer-songwriter, Britain’s most successful speedster – both men died too early, albeit in very different circumstances. (There is a tenuous connection in that playing on Nick Drake’s first album is Richard Thompson, writer of Britain’s best-loved motorcycling song, ‘Vincent Black Lightning 1952’, a hymn to the ferociously fast machine that made Surtees a ’fifties household name – along with the likes of Pat Smythe and Stirling Moss worthy of mention in hushed tones on Sportsview or, an even greater honour, awarded a full-page strip cartoon biography in the Eagle).

That sunny summer’s afternoon at Mallory Park caught manufacturing Britain on a cusp: the bulk of the big bikes parked in the surrounding fields were still flagship models of major manufacturers such as Triumph and BSA; in their appearance and technical spec not that different from the machines my dad had sadly said goodbye to 15 years earlier. Had racing enthusiasts preferred smaller motorcycles then the more observant spectator would have noted clear evidence of heavy import penetration – already a familiar sound on Britain’s roads was the whine of first generation Suzukis and Yamahas and the more mature sound of Honda’s initial attack on the medium-size market. The Kawasaki green giant was still over the horizon, but down on the track the still sponsor-free pristine pure white fairing of Honda’s 500 and 750cc high-tech racers signalled the future. Syd Barratt urged us to ‘See Emily Play’ and Cliff offered us ‘Congratulations’, but mixed in to the national soundtrack was a very loud bell, tolling for the terminal travails of the British motorcycle industry. Ariel, Matchless/AJS, and Royal Enfield all ceased production in 1967, and, while Triumph peaked with 29,000 bikes sold in the States, Honda raced to nearly a million. Ironically, such rapid sales were seen to justify Honda’s withdrawal from GP racing as promotion of a works team was no longer necessary: thank you Jim Redman and Mike Hailwood – mission accomplished. The same for the great Phil Read – his team, Yamaha, which in its sales strategy aggressively targeted Triumph, saw no financial cost in taking a break from the grand prix arena. Conversely, Triumph saw continued success at Daytona and other major racetracks in the States as crucial to shoring up its key export market.

That same bell was sending out a warning to Coventry, Longbridge, Luton, Cowley, and all those outposts of Butskellian regional policy likeEllesmerePort. The Honda Kei compact saloon was launched in 1967, establishing a niche market, to be ruthlessly exploited when the Civic was launched to international acclaim six years later. The British motor industry was far too slow in waking up to the corrosive effect of all those seemingly under-powered, under-sized sports cars and pick-ups – the late 1960s advance guard infiltrating the independent sales showrooms while attention focused upon Honda’s second and third wave of two-wheel invaders. It’s not difficult to identify key factors in the decline of Britain’s indigenous volume car and motorcycle industries: weak and blinkered management; poor industrial relations rooted in obstructive trade unions defending obsolete restrictive practices; antiquated plant and an absence of long-term investment; a dominant culture prejudiced against hands-on engineering; the absence of properly qualified skilled workers; unreliable products; outmoded or inappropriate design; inadequate market research; and a general absence of effective strategic planning and operational implementation.

The list could go on, and in the flood of a resurgent ‘declinist literature’ published in the 1980s the likes of Correlli Barnett and Martin Weiner identified every possible reason why British vehicle production, hand in hand with its West Midlands partner, the machine tool industry, was on a one-way ticket to extinction. To be more accurate Barnett got his hands dirty and examined the detail. David Edgerton, in his various critiques of what he labels ‘technocratic anti-histories’, points out that Weiner, despite titling his hugely influential little book, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, chose not to delve in to the actual history of manufacturing industry, backing up his argument with hard empirical evidence. Although he’s Barnett’s fiercest opponent, Edgerton has a healthy respect for his adversary on the grounds that he does the archival spade work. While other critics of Barnett’s key work on the Home Front, The Audit of War, and his subsequent studies of perceived postwar failure such as The Lost Victory, accuse him of being disingenuous and selective with his evidence, David Edgerton sees him as a credible and convincing advocate of ‘techno-nationalism’ – it’s just that he won’t sign up to Barnett’s ‘technocratic critique’, and for what it’s worth I’m not sure I do either. For 20 years now Edgerton has argued that Britain – and England in particular – has historically been one of Europe’s most militant and technologically driven nations: to draw on the title of his most important book, a ‘warfare state’ not a welfare one. The gist of Edgerton’s riposte to declinists of right and of left, from a Bismarckian like Correlli Barnett across the ideological spectrum to veterans of the New Left such as Perry Anderson, is that research and innovation have had a far greater scientific and economic impact than is generally believed – that, contrary to a central argument in The Audit of War, Britain’s military and technological capacity was not sacrificed to the demands of welfare reform by the Attlee Government and its successors, both Labour and Conservative. Consequently, Edgerton dismisses C.P. Snow’s powerful ‘two cultures’ thesis that the British elite have historically disregarded the importance of both theoretical and applied science. As he said in an interview with Huw Richards, ‘the belief that other countries gave higher priority to science, technology and those qualified in them, is rooted more in assumptions than evidence.’

Edgerton initially used the aerospace industry to argue his case, and it’s the British obsession with speed – in the air, but equally on land and in the water – which makes me wonder whether sporting achievement provides further substance for his argument. Has the manner in which individuals and organisations have utilised technology to secure success at an elite level exemplified British invention and ingenuity? Has the problem been that too often when, as with aviation, Britain seizes the technological imperative and takes the lead, that breakthrough has not been fully exploited? The answer to that is almost certainly yes – think vertical take-off – but are there any examples where such an indictment can apply to sport? To keep such BIG questions manageable I am thinking solely in terms of wheels, wings, and water, and not focusing upon the harnessing of R and D to improve individual athletic performance. Clearly Britain’s achievements in this area provide added weight to the view that, when applied, state of the art research does have a swift and demonstrable impact – spend a day at Loughborough or Bath if you need convincing.

The history of Britain since the Industrial Revolution suggests that here is a nation of instinctive record-breakers. Nor has this been a phenomenon primarily the preserve of a privileged few – of self-taught engineers and enthusiasts operating in the great gentleman amateur sporting tradition. Yes, there have been the likes of Seagrave and Campbell, Donald reluctantly forced to embrace sponsorship in a manner his father would have deemed deeply unpalatable. Nevertheless, much record-breaking has been undertaken by organisations – by companies controlled by hard-headed patriarchs who, while driven by simple patriotism and a will to win, nevertheless saw tangible commercial benefits. Within the car industry William Morris and Bill Lyons would be two obvious examples. Beyond the glory and the tragedy it’s hard to see what tangible benefits the Cambells’ heroic endeavours, whether on Pendine Sands or Coniston Water, brought to British manufacturing industry. In the same period, from the 1920s to the late 1960s, MG and Jaguar were insistent that record-breaking made a positive contribution to the design and development of mass marketed cars. Of course the same argument was – and is – made even more strongly with reference to motor-racing.

But before focusing upon the race track, a Southampton-based historian has to note the greatest debt this nation has to commercially-driven record-breakers. Supermarine contested the Schneider Trophy from 1920 to 1931 for a variety of reasons: to sell seaplanes; to wave the flag; to match the flair of Italian designers and the ingenuity of American engineers; and quite simply, to win races. But by 1926 Reginald Mitchell and his team had recognised the military value of high speed flight, harnessing in-line V-12 engines to streamlined all-metal monoplanes: in the summer of 1931 the S6B secured Britain permanent possession of the Schneider Trophy and set a new world air speed record of 407.5 mph. Malcolm Campbell used the same Roll-Royce engine to break the land speed record two years later, but Bluebird was a high-tech cul-de-sac. Mitchell, on the other hand, soon turned his speed machine into a very different sort of world-beater: the Mk 1 Supermarine Spitfire. This brings us back to David Edgerton, and his recent defence – in The Shock of the Old – of incremental change and of reliable, widely-used ‘technology in use’ as opposed to short-lived, big-bang ‘innovation-centred’ technology. The utilitarian, some might argue unduly puritan, Edgerton would presumably shake his head at Campbell’s single-minded R and D extravagance, while nodding approvingly of the super-adaptability of the basic Spitfire design.

Ocean-racing offers a parallel in that today’s hyper-inflation design costs rule out – literally – giant experiments, placing the emphasis on adaptable and ultimately marketable cutting-edge technology. One logical outcome has been identical boats racing round the world. This notion of ultra-competitive uniform racing, with the final result in theory solely dependent upon the skills of the crew, is familiar to petrol-heads in North America; and forms the basis for a forthcoming Middle East challenge to Formula 1. Critics see the down-side as a diminution of the technological imperative, for yachtsmen seen at its keenest in the America’s Cup: that repeated response to a steep and ceaseless learning curve of ever-greater technical challenges as set by one’s fiercest rivals. Barnett notwithstanding, wartime experience would suggest that here British scientists and engineers have a pretty good track record – the abysmal record of America’s Cup challenges, and the very different experience of Britain’s current rival for the title of top sailing nation, New Zealand, suggest that the weakness lies in organisation and lack of capital: to argue that it’s the last vestiges of the amateur ancien regime is too simplistic, witness the enthusiastic reception given by the pillars of the sailing community to Keith Mills’ announcement of a new £80 million consortium. On balance the British boat-building industry’s record is very good in maintaining the technological momentum, and in exploiting design breakthroughs, i.e. of facilitating that jump from competitive application to everyday usage. British technical expertise, evident in so many of the Louis Vuitton and America’s Cup challengers this summer, will eventually work its way in to the next generation of widely available yachts.

The assertion that this has been the case for British motor racing is clearly more contestable. As already implied, with the exception of elite family firms such as Brough pre-war and Vincent post-war, motor-cycle manufacturers’ record of technology transfer was poor. In terms of volume car production Jaguar’s record is mixed: the aluminium body of the XK120 was not a direct consequence of race experience, and anyway it was later dropped; but on the other hand, the E-Type was clearly indebted to experience gained at Le Mans, the Mille Miglia, etc.. In more recent years, Jaguar’s costly flirtations with motor sport have brought the company little other than poor results and bad publicity. Aston Martin, similarly in the 1950s, and Lotus in the 1960s, could point to race-honed technology finding its way on to the assembly line, but beyond this there was little comparable to, for example, the way in which Ferrari innovation has for many years permeated throughout the Fiat conglomerate. Thus, a quick survey of popular British-made cars in the 1970s would confirm that many models were built upon supposedly tried and tested technology, witness Austin’s reliance on an engine unit first deployed two decades earlier. Leyland’s survival became dependent directly or indirectly upon Japanese auto-engineering, with any spin off from motor racing courtesy of Honda’s mixed fortunes in Formula 1.