PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
Daily Express headline shortly before his death:-
Pictured below: the Donald Campbell memorial tablet at Coniston and (2) a more extended view of the lake.
Going a mile or two faster than anyone else on land or water was the life's work of Sir Malcolm Campbell (1885-1949) and his son, Donald (1921-1967). It was an odd choice and they were an odd pair. The latter, in my opinion, was fighting the Battle of Britain 27 years late when he died on Lake Coniston during a record attempt, and as he plunged to the depths he was re-united with all those who had plunged from the skies. He had not been privileged to be one of them. He was accepted as a trainee pilot with the rank of AC2, but within days was told that rheumatic fever in childhood, revealed by an electro-cardiogram, barred him. He left in despair while his contemporar
ies won their medals, or lost their lives.
In his own way, he had done his best to catch up. That is what his life was about. Whether the result would have been different had Campbell flown his planes against Germany, no-one will ever know. Would he have felt the need to emulate his father to the extent that he did? Maybe the acquisition of a medal or two would have preserved him from improvident peacetime acts. As it was, he desperately needed an enemy, and if the enemy was a stretch of water, so be it. He could fight the water for England.
I fIrst saw him on the edge of Coniston, a darting man in every sense: physically, and in the mind; affable, absorbed, hopeful, and I thought, a little sad. Seldom in creation can there have been a bigger Jingoist than Donald Campbell. He was the good chap in a wizard show: he alone had retained the jargon of the war long after its end. Campbell was inclined to talk about Great Britain - never Britain. He was the Crusader off to fight a Holy war; St George out to slay a dragon; the frontiersman living in an age when there were too few frontiers -born 100 years too late according to his wife. I put this thought to him: "If you had been born a few hundred years ago you would have been an explorer." And he replied, "I'd have been burned at the stake as a witch."
If you have watched black and white cinema, of the Colditz variety, where everybody talks in clipped tones and plans escape from impossible places using some soot, a piece of string and a passport made out of Woodbine packets, you know Campbell.
I did not witness his intensity of Jingoism again until the Falkland war, where tabloid newspaper Jingoism became crude and distasteful.
Campbell' s version was not in the least offensive; it was naive and surprising and pristine and against prevailing trends. Most people were growing out of intense tribalism. He flew the flag in everything he did. This good egg, this chap's chap, quite apart from his wartime traumas, had a deep psychological need to prove himself to his dead father, who had humiliated him in his childhood.
He was the only man I met whose hero was Max Aitken, son of Lord Beaverbrook. Aitken, an amiable man trying to fill a role which his his more robust and ruthless father set for him, that of a newspaper proprietor, had, during the war, been all that Campbell wished himself to be: an Air Force hero, no less.
As Campbell's boat rocked on Coniston at speed, and its nose pointed skywards and he was tom and battered with the descending wreckage in the darkening flow of water, I dare say he had one last vivid moment in which he savoured the drama of his own end. "The old sea of fate," he would be muttering to himself; and beyond the beckoning fingers of oblivion, no doubt he sensed his father's wisping spirit ready to criticise and condemn. Maybe Max would be on the other side, welcoming him.
Donald Campbell had a feeling that he would die out there on the lake, and the lake, with its five miles of water, did not disappoint him. "She's tramping... the water's not good... I can't see much... I'm going... I'm on my back... I've gone." The last words. He attempted his record when the surface was not quite right and he did so, I imagine, because the money, and not merely time, was running out. "Do you think," he said to me, "that the lads" - meaning the Press and other media people - "would chip in something to lay a path to the lake? It is so muddy ." I doubted it, although only a modest amount of money was involved. The Media looked clubby enough but did not identify itself over-much with the attempt. Its members were there for stories and pictures, not to support curious notions of national pride.
Coniston is a small place with two main inns, the Sun and the Crown, and while Campbell waited to make his record attempt, he went from one to the other in the evenings grinning, buying drinks, like a squire. There were mechanics and timekeepers, and a sizable community had formed, wearing woollen bobbed hats. The Cumbrians did not seem over-impressed. The shops and pubs did rather well.
He and I talked in his caravan and his curiously dated words were laced with foreboding:
"This weather is driving one through the roof. You know damn well that sooner or later, you are likely to take a thoroughly unjustified risk. And what can you do?"
At the bungalow he rented in the village, his wife, Tonia, was finding the waiting no less hard. "When Donald started speaking about this record I was not enthusiastic. This is my seventh record attempt and for the first time I am terribly worried. I kept telling him, 'I wish you weren't doing it. I wish it were all over' and I have never before allowed myself to say that. I can't explain it. Maybe because it wasn't supposed to be lucky. Maybe because of this weather. I don't know why, and I still feel it."
.
At the lakeside there would be cries of, "Best of British luck." Even luck had to have a superior country of origin.
"You 've got to believe what you are doing," he said, "no matter what that is. Money is sugar in the tea. But no amount of money can make a man do something he hasn't got within himself. You know the old story -before the curtain goes up or the bell rings, the old stomach is turning over at a rate of knots, the adrenalin is pumping through the system. You know- well, we've all got this fright process. There are days when you are at a low ebb and days when you are high. I can get frightened during an attempt and before it. You need to be frightened. It is like a curve if you could plot it. If you are not frightened you are a dead duck. And if you are too frightened then you slip down the other side. The act of dying? That most certainly worries me. I enjoy this life far too much. But you can be just as frightened of failure."I had a nasty accident in 1960 (a land record attempt) and this affected my system for some time. We were on run six with Bluebird in Utah. I slammed the throttle to the boards. The tail went haywire. I did not take the slightest notice. It did it again. Perfectly obvious what was going to happen. I saw it coming and I thought, 'Oh well, nice morning, not to worry - bang. ' The curtain came down. I had a good dose of oxygen poisoning. I woke up -I do not know how much later- and there was a great blur across my head and out of the darkness, I thought, 'I'm upside down.' Well, for quite a long time after this incident things went wild. You could sit just like this, talking, then suddenly you could be very frightened. Your hands would start to shake and your brow would pour with sweat. Driving in traffic might bring it out; telephone ringing. It wasn't a fear of getting back into the car. For a time I was desperately wonied it might have been.
"The game can be hell. One often wonders how Hillary might have felt. They have climbed the highest mountain there is, and that's it. In my life, the top at the moment is 300 miles an hour. Life is a succession of these mountains. All of us are struggling up and, oh God, isn't it a swine? You get there and you look around and it's great. And you just have time to breathe before you start getting everything in perspective. Then you realise it wasn't a mountain after all. It was a molehill. You look over there and you can see another mountain, the real mountain, and you are going for it, boy, and what hurts, what REALLY hurts, is when you come to the last one and you go down the other side."
Was physical challenge ever so beautifully described?
Four men had lost their lives trying to go faster than their predecessors on water. There had been only 12 successful attempts -seven by Campbell since 1955, four by his father. Donald Campbell's own record (Australia, 1964) stood at 276.3 mph.
A psychiatrist would, I suspect, have found Campbell's visions of his father intriguing material. He hero-worshipped the man, as he hero-worshipped Battle of Britain heroes: "He was a tenific example," said Campbell. "Courageous, colourful, dour, unbending, uncompromising. He and I were very different characters. I'm the sort of idiot who, once he gets tucked into a job, just puts on the blinkers and sees nothing else. Spirit counts very much. It is infectious. All you know is that there is a fire burning inside."
That was not Tonia Campbell's view of it: "I'll always remember seeing an old flashback in the films we have at home. In one, his father came back from America after making some record and there was this little boy (Donald) all dressed up in bow ler hat and so on. And there' s the big ship and the microphones, and this little boy had learned his speech for a week. Of course, he fluffs his lines, and Malcolm Campbell says,'OK, OK, boy' and taps him so that the hat falls over his eyes. Oh, I could have HIT that man.
"Donald has much more heart. He is a great sentimentalist. My heart could have cried for him about that bowler hat. And I think very often his heart must have cried too."
It was all a costly business. "We are virtually on our own in this one," said Campbell. "Something like £10,000 was needed to get the ventureunder way. Dear old Monty Burman (the theatre man) and I were having lunch one day and he said, 'I'd love to be a part of this. It is so exciting. Would you be offended if I offered £1,000 towards it?' And I said, 'Offended? That is 10 per cent of the total cost. You have bought our new engine installation."
He was over budget at the time of his death, and talking in gung-ho cliches to the last.
"It just so happens that I've been thrown into this, the old sea of fate; there's a saying -Better fish in the ocean than ever came out of it. And boy, you'd better hope your bait's good..."
He was a superstitious man believing in associations of colours or numbers. His father had said, "Don't go before your time, boy." I am not sure he did. There was nothing else to be done.
The eyes of the world were upon him when Bluebird soared out of the water at more than 300 miles an hour. The hero was making his ascent into the heavens where his father and all those war heroes were waiting. Donald Campbell was proving his manhood by losing it.
A few people still remember the anniversary of it all. I do not visit the Lake District without remembering it myself. And I wonder now, as I wondered then, what in heaven's name was the point of it?
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
3 March, 2007
