GOLDEN YEARS

Deep in the Sussex Downs in 1948, something was stirring. Ben Oliver looks back at Goodwood’s inaugural race meeting, which heralded the start of a glorious era in British motorsport

Look at the black-and-white photographs of the first race meeting to be held at the Goodwood Motor Circuit or watch the footage shot by the BBC and you might struggle to recognise the location. In fact, it barely looks like a motor race at all. Goodwood’s hallmark white pit building hadn’t been built, nor had the famous chicane been installed. The “paddock” found behind the pits really was just a grassy paddock in 1948: the racing cars parked on the turf before taking their turn on the track. There weren’t acres of car parks around the circuit – because the crowd of 25,000 came mainly by bus and train. The men smoked pipes and wore suits and ties, caps or trilbies, and overcoats against a September chill. The women mustered as much style as the clothing ration allowed, and families came with wicker picnic baskets. Crowd control was relaxed: there were no grandstands yet, so for a better view some spectators inched up and over the hemispherical roofs of the blister hangars, which until recently had sheltered Spitfires and Hurricanes. The others watched obediently from behind simple, cheap, post-and-wire fencing, which would not have prevented a racing car getting among the crowd should it slide off the narrow, dusty track to which the fencing was set perilously close.

It was clearly a very different time, but the start of a new era. It seems almost too obvious to state but in September 1948 the cataclysm of World War II still distorted almost every aspect of British life. Post-war austerity was at its bleakest. Rationing was becoming tighter rather than relenting. Crop failures had seen bread and potatoes added to the ration list after the war. Less than a year before the Goodwood circuit opened, Hugh Gaitskell, then the Minister for Fuel and Power, cut the personal petrol ration completely, restricting it to official or essential use only, in an attempt to kill off the black market and avoid having to spend the country’s limited foreign currency reserves on oil imports.

“After November, all private motoring in this odd, sad little country is apparently to come to an end,” Motor Sport magazine lamented, before hinting that motorists would “find various means, according to their natures, of sustaining their motoring enthusiasm” – a clear hint that they would still resort to the black market. By June 1948, Gaitskell had relented and allowed drivers around 90 miles worth of petrol each month, a third of the previous ration. “Those who have been obliged to lay up their cars or motorcycles may bring them out again without excessive cost for a modest mileage,” he told the Commons. In response, Churchill bemoaned the “immense disturbance and heavy internal loss to this country” of Labour’s temporary ban.

But at Goodwood they got ready to go racing. The war at least provided the real estate for Britain’s new post-war circuits. RAF Westhampnett had been a Battle of Britain fighter base, later used by the USAF, built on land on the Goodwood Estate provided by Freddie, the 9th Duke of Richmond. When it was returned to him after the war it had a 2.4-mile perimeter road that his friend, Squadron Leader Tony Gaze, suggested might be repurposed as a racetrack. The Duke – a talented engineer, racer and aviator – didn’t need much persuasion.

Motorsport was beginning to reawaken from its wartime hiatus: there had been some hillclimbs and sprints, and some racing at an impromptu airfield circuit in Cambridgeshire. But of the pre-war circuits, Brooklands was still being used for aircraft production and Donington for the storage of military vehicles, so the first race meeting held at the Duke’s new Goodwood circuit on September 18 was also the first at any permanent motorsport venue after the war.

The earliest incarnation of what would become one of the world’s great circuits was a bootstrapped affair. The road surface was repaired and that rather flimsy fence erected; there was a PA system but no leaderboard; medical provision consisted of an old Austin Six ambulance. There were trophies and £500 in prize money provided by the Daily Graphic, whose return on investment was a banner strung on wires over the start-finish line. There were eight races, all held over just three laps, with the exception of the last one, the flagship Goodwood Trophy, which was held over five.

But brief races and basic facilities didn’t deter spectators desperate for a return to racing – or any kind of entertainment – after six years of war and three of austerity. You look at the faces in the crowd and wonder what those who served had seen and what those who remained at home had endured. The sight and sound of the Maseratis, Alfas and Bugattis at Goodwood that day – “a brave splash of colour on the grey road”, as Motor Sport put it – must have seemed impossibly exciting and exotic, and a foretaste of better times to come. Nor did the tight petrol ration and races lasting less than 10 minutes deter entrants. There were over 100, including three women, in an odd variety of pre-war racing cars. And not everyone was being ground down by austerity. Prince Bira of Siam, a talented racing driver, flew into Goodwood in his private twin-engined Gemini plane with his terrier, just to spectate when his Maserati couldn’t be readied in time for the meeting.

The very first race at Goodwood – for closed, non-supercharged sports cars of up to three litres – was won by the magnificently monikered Paul de Ferranti C Pycroft in his Pycroft-Jaguar special: a pre-war Jaguar SS100 with aerodynamic bodywork of his own design. And in a race meeting packed with firsts, one of the most significant might have been hard to spot at the time. Race 5, for cars with engines under 500cc, was won in a Cooper by Stirling Craufurd Moss, who had turned 19 the day before. It was his first major victory on a circuit, beginning a close relationship with Goodwood that would last until his recent passing aged 90. The style and ease of his victory should have been a clue. Nobody could challenge him, so his father indicated from the side of the track that he should slow and preserve the car. He still won by 25 seconds.

But on that day the five-lap Goodwood Trophy drew all the attention. It predominantly featured Grand Prix cars from just before the war, when racing car design froze. So they were still the fastest and most exciting cars you could watch. Thankfully, the race lived up to expectations. Of the nine drivers, three would go on to win Le Mans. The tussle between them that day was short but, according to Motor Sport, “an immensely exciting race”. Reg Parnell would win: the first in a series of victories that would earn him the nickname “Emperor of Goodwood”.

Goodwood’s monopoly on British circuit racing didn’t last long. Just two weeks later the first race was held on another hastily converted wartime airfield perimeter track near the Northamptonshire village of Silverstone. Together, the new circuits were central to the revival in British motorsport after the war, which resulted in British teams dominating Formula 1 and endurance racing – and bequeathed us a motorsport industry now worth £9 billion each year. Goodwood would go on to host some of the most dramatic and glamorous racing that Britain ever saw, before beginning another life in 1993 with Festival of Speed and then in 1998 – 50 years to the day after hosting its first meeting – as the home of the Goodwood Revival.

The broader British car industry had a similar watershed just a month after racing began at Goodwood. The first post-war British Motor Show opened at Earls Court in late October and saw the debuts of some of the first modern British models not based on pre-war designs: cars as varied as the glamorous, exuberant Jaguar XK120, the humble Morris Minor and the utilitarian Land Rover, which had actually made its very first appearance at the Amsterdam show earlier in the year, so eager was Rover to get it on sale. Together, this crop of brilliant new British designs would earn muchneeded foreign currency with their export sales and establish the overseas markets that would make the UK the world’s biggest car exporter by the 1950s.

For both British motorsport and British motoring in general, 1948 was a turning point, but it wasn’t obvious at the time. The crowds left on the evening of September 18 just grateful for “the return of the real thing” as one writer described it. “The advent of the Goodwood track opens up a new era in British motor racing,” Motor Sport wrote. “Many happy meetings should be possible at this very pleasant place.”