Radical drivers who did not know
their left from their right
PAUL JOHNSON
Things may be more difficult nowadays, but in my time it was quite possible to go through life without driving. I dislike operating complex mechanical objects and being dependent on them. In the army they tried to make me drive, or ride, a motorbike, but I declined that too. It is my experience that, if you are resolute, sooner or later they provide you with a car and driver to enable you to go about your work. In the army my rank as a captain did not, strictly speaking, entitle me to this privilege but nonetheless it was granted. Since then the role has been performed by my womenfolk, Selfish? Not necessarily: women are not averse to creating areas of dependency. I dare say Jane Austen would have been only too glad to drive her two naval brothers around on their leave, or her brother Henry when he was a banker. Charlotte Brontë would have happily chauffeured, and so controlled, Bramwell after he lost his licence; George Eliot, careful and reliable behind the wheel — if slow — might have performed a similar service for the raffish and sometimes pixillated G.H. Lewes.
Anyhow, I was not alone. Dick Crossman never drove a car, fortunately for all. Nor did Bernard Levin, the tall girls he favoured seeing to it. Another non-driver was Clem Attlee. And that brings me to the point: who was the worst driver of the 20th century? The choice is wide, for many never passed a driving test, which was slow to become compulsory and suspended in the war. That was how my mother-in-law secured the right to imperil lives. I rather think Elizabeth Longford, who drove dangerously into her nineties (her husband was another non-driver), got her licence in those carefree days, as did Mrs Attlee, since she could not conceivably have passed any test. She was widely known as 'the worst driver in the Home Counties'. Douglas Jay told me that, when he joined the Cabinet in 1964, his driver, Albert, had chauffeured Attlee when he was prime minister. 'Did you talk much?—No, sir. Mr Attlee was a very silent gentleman. Each day he would say "Good morning, Albert" and in the evening "Good night, Albert." That was all,' Never said anything more?' Only once, sir. We were driving to Chequers, and a car came out of a sideroad fast, without warning, and nearly put us in the ditch. Mr Attlee said, quite loud, "Who's that bloody fool?" I said,
"That was Mrs Attlee, sir." He thought for a bit and said, "Best say no more about it." ' I associate leafy Bucks with bad driving. That was where Nye Bevan had his famous accident and, thank God, never drove thereafter. The Left in those days produced some bad drivers of genius. One characteristic they shared was to take their hands off the wheel while arguing a knotty point of economic policy. Claud Cockburn not only did this but turned his head and body around to direct his whole attention to an ideological opponent in the back seat. 'Very dangerous driver, Claud,' Kingsley Martin would say, with one of his pitying smiles and condescending shakes of his noble, wobbly head, usually reserved for Tory backwoodsmen like Sir Waldron Smithers. He added. 'I do think Claud should be banned from driving.' This from a man who produced from the gearbox of his dilapidated Sunbeam Talbot, which had once belonged to R.H. Tawney (or was it G.D.H. Cole?), noises like the grinding of an old treadle-driven dentist's drill or the final collapse of a Napoleonic semaphore. The saving grace of Kingsley's driving was that, as he could seldom get out of bottom gear, he drove slowly, albeit veering from one side of the road to the other like Coleridge out walking. Dr Tommy Balogh, on the other hand, drove fast, being a man of desperate impatience, always in a hurry to get from one political impasse to another, or searching anxiously for the wrong end of a stick to pick up. He subjected me to a terrifying ordeal in High Wycombe by refusing to keep his place in a jam-packed high street, and driving on the wrong side of the road until blocked by an oncoming coach. There followed much swearing from the doctor, before he was finally persuaded to back on to the pavement beside Boots. He justified his behaviour by saying, 'There is an old Hungarian proverb — "If your forward march is blocked, take to the woods." Another motoring adage of his was, 'Never hesitate to go to the head of the queue.'
This Balogh incident at High Wycombe took place not far from the wartime HQ of Bomber Command, where Air Marshal Harris held bellicose sway, dispatching his crepuscular armadas to Hamm or DUsseldorf, Essen or Cologne. Also at HQ was the young Revd John Collins, later Canon of St Paul's and apostle of unilateral nuclear disarmament but then command chaplain, praying forgiveness for 'the Bomber's' atrocities. He told me Harris occasionally gave him a lift in his enormous Packard, which he drove at great speed without regard to anyone else on the dark Bucks lanes. Once, at a red light, a sweating policeman on a push-bike came up and said, 'You must not drive like that, sir! Why, you might even kill somebody.' To which Bomber Harris replied grimly, 'Young man, I kill thousands every night.' The policeman gaped, the Air Marshal drove on. Collins prayed.
I was never driven by 'the Bomber', but had the next most alarming experience of sitting in the dicky seat of a bright scarlet MG, the proud joint possession (I think) of two uproarious young dons during my time at Oxford. One was Tony Crosland, Fellow of Trinity, who had established undying fame for himself by singlehandeclly, it was believed, 'liberating' Cannes in 1944. He was a handsome, flashy fellow, a great man for the girls (and boys) and supposed had used his demob money to buy into the sports-car classes. His coowner, Raymond Carr, struck me then as a wonderful mentor, a man of great recklessness, courage and devilment, who was burning the candle at both ends, and in the middle, and was not long for this world. Thus I sat in the dicky, my arm around the slender waist of the ravishing Hilary, the girl we shared, and in front these two academic buccaneers, one to become foreign secretary, the other the august Warden of St Antony's College. Their tipsy squabbling over the car-keys and over who should drive, let alone the driving itself, through a midnight Oxford then mercifully free of traffic — barring the odd RollsRoyce or Bentley frantically driven by the young Alan (`Sparking-plug') Clark — was an invigorating education in the hazards of life among the intelligentsia. It is odd to think that, while Crosland had the mercy of an early death, Sir Raymond, after a long life of candle-burning, compounded by acquiring the reputation of the hardest rider-to-hounds in the entire West Country, is still with us, and to be seen at every fashionable party in Mayfair and Kensington where literary men and women gather and the wit, like the champagne, is vintage. Oddly enough, all the bad drivers I have known died peacefully in their beds.
Previous page
