THE INTREPID SIR HENRY SEGRAVE By Margaret Brecknell
Above: Sir Henry Segrave at the 1921 French Grand Prix
On Friday 13th June 1930 a tragic accident occurred on Lake Windermere during an attempt to set a new water speed record. The famous racing driver, Sir Henry Segrave, was killed, together with one of his mechanics, Victor Halliwell. The other mechanic on board, Michael “Jack” Willcocks, was seriously injured, but survived the crash. The news of Segrave’s death, at the age of just 33, sent shockwaves across the entire racing world, where he was a highly respected and popular figure. 156
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orn 125 years ago on 22nd September 1896, Henry Segrave packed a lot into his sadly all too brief life. A British national, Segrave was born in Baltimore, Maryland, of an Irish father and American mother. He spent his early childhood years in Ireland, before coming to England to be educated at Eton College. Segrave turned eighteen as World War I was breaking out in September 1914 and was soon displaying the same courage and determination that would later serve him so well in his racing career. Having been commissioned as an officer in the British Army, he was seriously wounded on the battlefield in May 1915 during a hand-to-hand fight with a German soldier. Undeterred
LANCASHIRE & NORTH WEST MAGAZINE
by this near brush with death, Segrave decided to join the fledgling Royal Flying Corps (the forerunner of the RAF) and became a fighter pilot. Only a few months into his flying career Segrave was involved in another hair-raising incident when the fighter plane which he was piloting was struck by enemy gunfire and plummeted some 7000 feet to the ground. Miraculously he was found in the plane’s battered cockpit, which had lodged in a tree, and survived the crash, but because of his injuries was compelled to spend the rest of the war working as a technical adviser on the ground.
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