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.

Born 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 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.

By the time the war finished in 1918, Segrave had risen to the rank of Major. On leaving the armed forces, it soon became clear that he was looking for a new challenge. The young daredevil had shown a keen interest in cars and motorcycles since his teenage years and now, in his early twenties, Segrave began to boast that he would be the first man to achieve a speed of over 200mph in a purposebuilt motor vehicle. So preposterous did this claim seem at the time that some of his critics suggested that the war had driven him mad.

In the spring of 1920 Segrave raced for the first time at the Brooklands circuit in Surrey, then the premier venue for British motor racing. He quickly rose to stardom in his chosen sport, winning only his second race, and the following year he hit the headlines when at Brooklands he won the 200-Mile Race, the first longdistance race to be held in Britain.

His impressive performances earned him a highly coveted place in the prestigious Sunbeam-TalbotDarracq racing team and the driver began to enjoy success in Europe as well as at home. In 1923 he became the first driver to win a Grand Prix in a British-made car with his victory in the French Grand Prix at Tours. However, after two further Grand Prix wins, Segrave stepped back from motor racing to take on the challenge of breaking the world land speed record.

In the spring of 1926 the driver arrived in Southport to make an attempt on the record. The resort’s long sandy beach was ideal for motor racing and had been a popular venue for the sport since its earliest days. Segrave himself was no stranger to Southport. He had first raced in the town some six years earlier and only two months previously, in January 1926, had competed successfully in the Southport Speed Trials, winning all four races which he had entered.

On 16th March 1926, watched by a large crowd on Ainsdale Beach, Segrave set a new land speed record in a Sunbeam Tiger, nicknamed “Ladybird”, which had been specially built for the occasion. His speed of more than 152 mph surpassed the record which had been set the previous year by his great friend and rival, Malcolm Campbell. Segrave’s name lives on in Southport to this day in the form of the JD Wetherspoon pub on Lord Street.

His record was broken just a month later by the Welshman, John Parry-Thomas, but in regaining it the following year at Daytona Beach in Florida, Segrave achieved his longheld ambition of becoming the first person in history to travel on land at over two hundred miles per hour.

The driver set his third and final land speed record in March 1929, when, racing in the iconic Golden Arrow at Daytona Beach, he travelled at 231.45 miles per hour. Only two days later, as Segrave looked on, the American driver, Lee Bible, crashed at the same venue whilst trying to beat the record. The Englishman was one of the first people to reach the scene, but Bible had been killed instantly, together with a cameraman, Charles Traub, who had been filming the record attempt.

Segrave’s tribute to the American driver on the day after the tragedy provides a fascinating insight into his own attitude towards the risky business of motor racing,

“Deeply as I regret the sad occurrence, I wish to say that Mr Lee Bible, like others who have lost their lives in motor racing, has not died in vain. High-speed racing has been the chief source of the development of safe and efficient motor cars for general use.”

Segrave would not make another attempt on the land speed record, as by this juncture he already had another target in his sights. The Englishman had first stated his intention of aiming for the water speed record some two years previously, declaring that “We’ve won the records we wanted on land and in the air. What England wants now is the water speed record.”

Throughout the 1920s the American powerboat racer, Gar Wood, had been dominant in the water and had set a string of new world records in the process. Now, after his third successful shot at the land speed record in Daytona, Segrave travelled to Miami with a view to competing against Wood. In a boat which had been specially constructed for the occasion, Miss England I, the British racer became the first person to defeat the American on the water in over nine years.

Following his accomplishments in the USA, Segrave returned home as a national hero and was awarded a knighthood. The telegram he received from the then monarch, King George V, read,

“On your arrival home I send you my hearty congratulations on your splendid achievement in winning for Great Britain the World’s Speed Record for motorcars, and on your success in the race for the International Speed Boat Trophy.”

The following June, Segrave headed to the Lake District for an assault on the water speed record in Miss England II. Like its predecessor, the finance for the development of this boat, which is estimated to have cost the then substantial sum of £25,000, had come from Lord Wakefield, the English businessman who had founded the Castrol lubricants company.

An early hint of the tragedy which was to follow came on the day before the record attempt when during a test run the blade of the propeller snapped off and grazed the bottom of the boat. On returning to land, Segrave remarked that, “We were very lucky that the blade did not come right through the bottom.”

Segrave was fully aware of the risk involved in racing on the water at high speed and the fact that if his boat turned over during the attempt, he might well be killed, bearing in mind the impact with which he would hit the water. He is known to have previously had at least one narrow escape when in 1928 his boat overturned in the Solent during a practice run, although he himself maintained that one of his luckiest escapes came not during one of his speed trials on land or water, but on The Strand in London when he had stopped the car to light a cigarette. A lorry crashed into the back of his stationary car, almost smashing it to pieces, and Segrave was only saved from serious injury by the fact that he was thrown from the car on impact.

On the early afternoon of Friday 13th June 1930, a large crowd gathered on the shores of Lake Windermere, in glorious weather, to witness Segrave’s attempt on the water speed record.

As Segrave took the helm, he quipped, “I will break the record or the propeller this time”. After covering a measured mile up the lake, the boat turned and successfully covered a second mile back down the lake. Miss England II turned to make its way back up Windermere again and it was on this third lap that disaster struck.

An eye-witness account from the time reported that suddenly the boat “seemed to swerve violently and plunge beneath the water. The people on either side screamed. A huge mass of white spray went up and it was several seconds before the graceful craft was seen again. Then the sight was worse than the greatest fears. The boat emerged bottom upwards, with a large hole in the hull.”

Immediately a dozen speedboats rushed to the scene. Sir Henry Segrave was dragged from the water with serious injuries, together with one of his engineers, “Jack” Willcocks, who was also badly hurt. The body of the other engineer on board, Vic Halliwell, was only recovered several days later. Segrave was taken to a private home on the west side of Lake Windermere, where he was attended by three doctors, but died of his injuries later the same day. Shortly before he died, he is said to have been given the news that he had successfully broken the water speed record, clocking up an average speed of some 98.8mph over his first two completed runs. Only the following year the American Gar Wood would regain the record.

The cause of the accident has never been fully established. When the wreckage was recovered a couple of weeks later, a large hole was discovered in the boat’s hull, implying, perhaps, that whilst travelling at top speed the Miss England II had collided with a large object, such as a tree branch, floating on the water’s surface. It has also been suggested since that the tragedy may have been caused by a defect in the boat’s design.

At the opening of the inquest into Segrave’s death, the Coroner commented that, “Some may think this is a case of a life being recklessly thrown away, and perhaps there may be something in that.” There seems little doubt that Segrave himself would have vehemently disagreed with this remark. Shortly before his death he is known to have been making plans for his own attempt on the air speed record. Possibly his only regret would have been that having achieved the distinction of holding the land and water speed records simultaneously, he did not live long enough to fulfil his ambition of holding all three records at the same time.

Above: Sir Henry Segrave pub in Southport