A lovely pair of Bristols

Spectator, The, May 20, 2000 by Waldegrave, William

A SMALL boy is examining a beautiful car in the driveway of his father's house in Somerset while a local grandees' lunch goes on inside. The car's owner, emerging full of post-prandial goodwill, asks him what he thinks of it. `It is the best car in the world,' I reply, exhibiting political skills overdeveloped by manipulating five older sisters. And so my love affair with Bristol Cars began in earnest, because the owner of the car was Sir Reginald Verdon-Smith, chairman of the Bristol Aeroplane Company, and the reward for my flattery was a glorious tour of the firm's Filton factory.

I was sent away laden with bundles of beautiful brochures: for Proteus aeroengines, for the `Whispering Giant' Britannia airliner; for the 403 aerodyne car, for the 404 `Business Man's Express' (which Sir Reggie had been driving that day), and much else. The cars were beautiful. The aeroplanes were beautiful. Even the brochures were beautiful - some had dark-red or blue velvety covers, and the drawings inside were works of art. One day, I thought to myself, I am going to own one of those. Luckily, I did not fix on a Britannia airliner.

Twenty years later, I was driving down a Wiltshire lane in my white Alfa Romeo 1750 Junior. Up the lane the other way came an identical car. There was some argument about who should give way. I came to the conclusion, probably quite unjustifiably, that if the person in the other car was the sort of person who owned an Alfa Junior, I needed another car. I went to Anthony Crook's Bristol showroom in Kensington High Street and, after a feeble negotiation, bought a not very distinguished Bristol 405 four-door saloon for, I think, 750.

In truth, of course, I was wrong to be disloyal to my Alfa Junior - a lovely little car - let alone to the Alfa marque, the constructor of some of the greatest sports and racing cars ever built. But I have never regretted the impulse that drove me back to Bristols.

When I was young and thought that overdrafts somehow looked after themselves, I owned three Bristol-engined cars at the same time. First there was the 405, a splendid-looking beast with a square airintake derived from the air-intake of the Centaurus engine which powered the great Bristol Brabazon airliner, killed by lack of a BOAC order after the war. In the middle of the air-intake was a spotlight (now, I think, illegal) which gave the car a Cyclopean look. It had an extremely efficient overdrive, which effectively gave it six forward gears.

Then there was what is my candidate for the prettiest sports car ever made in Britain: the Bristol-engined AC Aceca. I bought it for L3,000 and sold it when I got married for the same sum. I can hardly bear to think of it.

Finally, in 1975, I persuaded Anthony Crook to sell me the beautiful object under a dustsheet at the back of his garage, and now it sits in my yard glowing to itself in the Somerset sunshine as I write: the 402 drop-head; so elegant, such fun to drive a convertible version of the aerodyne 401. Only 20 or so were ever made (two being sold to Stewart Granger, one for him and one for his wife Jean Simmons).

The aerodynes, and also the original 400, betray, or rather exult in, the BMW gene which, like Arab blood in a racehorse, raised the cars from their first inception after the second world war into the first rank. It came about like this.

Before the war Frazer-Nash, having been beaten by new entrants BMW in the Alpine rally, had bought their rival's engines for their famous sports cars. After the war, a visionary band (of which Verdon-Smith, who had owned a pre-war Frazer-Nash BMW was one, along with Sir George White, a fellow Bristol Aeroplane Co. director) brought together at Bristol Cars the Frazer-Nash engineers and some key BMW designers rescued from the competing confiscations of Americans and Russians in Germany. Without their experience and common sense I suspect Bristol Cars might have gone the way of the Brabazon into heroic oblivion. Indeed, Bristol's own experiments during the war (what exactly were they doing designing high-performance sports cars in 1942?) under the leadership of the brilliant aeroengine designer Roy Fedden had ended in spectacular disaster. At any rate, early Bristols paid tribute to the BMW connection with a radiator grille which is pure BMW. More than once I have been stopped when driving the 402 by elderly Germans bemused by the family likeness, as well they might be.

This is no place for a potted history of Bristol Cars. In any case, three excellent books exist: Charles Oxley's The Quiet Survivor (published by Charles Oxley), L.J.K Setright's Bristol (Motor Racing Publications) and the sumptuous new version of Setright's work, A Private Car, published by Palawan Publishers in two volumes with wonderful pictures at a price comparable to that of a 1948 car.

You can read there how the astonishing 450 racing sports car beat the Porsches out of sight at Le Mans in 1954, finishing in line, first, second and third, in the two-litre class and winning the overall team prize. (The year before, the car had a roof and enormous fins - as well as, typically for Bristol - a fitted carpet. It was immortalised, luckily, by Dinky Toys; luckily, because no actual car survives.)