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THE SOUND OF DEATH: Charlie Hall and the Wailing Banshee of Dunluce Castle
*** EXTRACT FROM ‘THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU’ ***
Barker and Fairley prepared to start logging premonitions in the first week of 1967. As Christmas approached, the Evening Standard, like most of the country’s major newspapers, had a reporter standing by to cover Donald Campbell’s attempt to break the water speed record on Lake Coniston, in the Lake District. Campbell was an idol of Britain’s post-war jet age. He chased speed records on land and on water in a series of vehicles all named Bluebird, after the Maeterlinck play. He compared the urge to achieve greater velocities to exploring. ‘The faster man travels the more difficulties he encounters, the more he is determined to overcome and understand them; and as he proceeds, stage by stage, he penetrates farther into the unknown,’ Campbell wrote in 1955. ‘It becomes something of a disease in the blood, which feeds on inclination and atmosphere.’ By the late sixties, Campbell was an antique sort of hero. He used powerful, experimental technology; he was also strongly superstitious. An enamel medallion of St Christopher, the protector of travellers, was screwed into his instrument panel. He carried Mr Whoppit, a lucky teddy bear, every time he climbed into a cockpit. He loathed the colour green. On Lake Coniston in the winter of 1966, Campbell named his fears aloud and confronted them anyway. On 13 December, a bright, frosty day when no one expected him to take the boat out, Campbell piloted Bluebird K7, his jet-engined hydroplane, up to 267 mph and hit a seagull, which he considered a bad omen. The collision made a dent on the boat, which he refused to fix. He told a television crew about the time when he had driven his gas turbine-powered car over 400 mph on damp, treacherous sand on Lake Eyre in Australia in 1964. Campbell had been afraid to turn the car round and complete his record attempt. While he sat still in the desert, an image of his father, who had also been a speed record breaker and who had died in 1946, appeared as a reflection in his windscreen. ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be all right, boy,’ his father said, and Campbell drove back even faster than before. ‘Explain it as you will – I cannot. But it happened,’ he told rapt reporters on the lake shore.
On Christmas Day, with no engineers or safety team, Campbell persuaded a friend in the village to help him take Bluebird out on the water and he roared up and down alone. At a New Year’s Eve party at the Sun pub, he toasted the press at midnight. I know that you are all waiting for me to break my neck,’ he said. Campbell played cards to pass the time, waiting for the lake to still. A few evenings later, after a day of sleet and frost, Campbell was playing Russian patience while he waited for a card game to assemble at his bungalow. He dealt himself the ace of spades, followed by the queen. He told David Benson, a friend who wrote for the Daily Express, that Mary Queen of Scots had drawn the same cards before her beheading in 1587. He stayed up late. ‘I have the most awful premonition I’m going to get the chop this time,’ Benson remembered Campbell saying. ‘I’ve had the feeling for days.’
The next morning was 4 January, a Wednesday. Campbell had a breakfast of cornflakes and a coffee, laced with brandy. There was a slight swell on Lake Coniston but it was calm enough to launch Bluebird at 8.40 a.m. In order to break his own water speed record, Campbell had to complete two one-kilometre runs – up and down the lake – at an average speed of more than 276.33 mph.
At 8.50 a.m., the first edition of the Evening Standard went to the presses, announcing the launch of the Premonitions Bureau. ‘If you dream of disaster . . .’ ran the article’s headline. At the same minute, Campbell entered the second one-kilometre run of his water speed attempt on Lake Coniston at 328 mph. He was beyond the world record, well into the unknown. He had not left enough time for the wake of the hydroplane to settle on the lake and as Campbell sped back, Bluebird began to bounce hard on the water. She rose high into the air, somersaulted and killed him. Photographs of the flying boat and the story of Campbell’s ominous cards filled the front page of the newspaper by the late afternoon. A radio recording preserves Campbell’s last words as he streaked along. ‘Hello, the bow’s up . . . I’m going,’ he says. And then there is the sound of a small sigh. This is an extract from The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight (Out now, published by Faber | £14.99 hardback)
BY LORIEN JONES
As you enter Oundle, you will be
excused for gaping in awe. Beyond the physicality of walking into a new town, you have entered an old time. The warm glow of medieval stone surrounds you, the mismatched rooflines of ancient tiles top buildings big and small. Every façade has a story waiting to be heard, every door like the cover of an old book. Narrow, winding alley ways lead off to places untold and although the roads are now designed for the cars passing through, you can hear the rumbling cartwheels and horses’ hooves with little imagination. Small cottages are almost squeezed in between grand buildings of vast chimney stacks and gabled windows, adorned with intricate stonework decoration, further implicating their grandeur and status.
Cars squeeze down the narrow West Street and people bustle around you, shopping or walking dogs. Coffee shops are frequented by friends catching up in the sunshine on patio furniture, sipping their lattes and herbal teas. Delivery trucks make their rounds and as you look about you now, you see everything you would expect from a small town. But all of this feels out of place, you can see beyond these modern times. The tarmac roads become cobblestone, strewn with straw and horse manure, the soft-soled shoes of passers-by become hard and click along the pavement. You decide to take refreshment in the Ship Inn, a pub dating to the 1600s. Leaving the sunny street and into the pub almost feels like you are stepping below deck of a real ship. It is suddenly darker, cooler yet still comfortable. A ship wheel hangs on the wall and the passage is lit with decorative lanterns. Choosing to turn left at the end of the walkway, you step down into the main bar and are further welcomed by naval décor. A beautiful darkwooden bar offers ample choices and atmospheric lanterns continue to flicker, adding suitable ambience to the ancient pub. Dark wooden beams stretch low overhead, likely originating from old ships themselves, contrasting the white walls, adorned with brooding paintings of ships at sea. You take a seat near the grand inglenook fireplace and allow the hours to while away.
