Doug Nye: Archie Scott Brown – Motorsport's first disabled hero?

One of the great characters of British motor racing just postwar was, of course, John Vary Bolster. He had achieved considerable fame as the constructor, pre-war, of his twin-JAP engined Shelsley Special ‘Bloody Mary’. Postwar he re-emerged as quite an accomplished racing driver, most notably in an ERA which – sadly – he up-ended in an extremely serious accident at Silverstone in 1949. The car somersaulted after sliding into trackside straw bales – which were merely livery-stable sized and therefore little real use other than as trackside trip-hazards for high-built racing cars. Poor John was thrown out of the cockpit of his car which then rolled and bounced on top of him. He would say that, ever after, his back bore the imprint of the ERA’s filler cap.

John survived after a long spell in the krankenhaus – as he would put it – emerging with a characteristically ramrod straight-backed stance. Clad in his favourite sports jacket and inseparable deerstalker hat, with a droopy moustache and ear-splittingly cut-glass Oxford-English accent, he was exuberant, extrovert, fiercely independent and entirely distinctive. With his engineering and driving experience – not to mention the enthusiasm for good food, fine wines, and generally convivial repartee – ‘Bolster’ became a great friend of another genial racing enthusiast, named Gregor Grant. When Gregor found the backing – largely from industrialist/driver Dennis Poore if I recall correctly – to set up a weekly racing magazine they entitled ‘Autosport’, John Bolster became its technical editor.

The British Broadcasting Corporation also picked him up as its regular pits reporter on the all-too-rare occasions that it covered motor race meetings on radio, and on the budding medium of television. Of course deer-stalkered Bolster, with a roving radio transmitter pack strapped to his ramrod back, and holding a lip microphone clamped to his mouth, made good TV. His vocal tone – which I always thought was about as sharp as a Bugatti Type 35’s crackling exhaust at around 7,000rpm – was certainly distinctive.

Very early on, around 1953 or ’54, John found himself called up to report why a 500cc Formula 3 car had just pulled into the Silverstone pits at either a May Meeting or at the British Grand Prix. It was rare exposure for the supporting races, and John – who also demonstrated the then stereotypically-expected upper-class-twit inability to pronounce his ‘r’s – crackled into life from the pit lane, bawling “Oh what tewwibly bad luck – I’m afwaid his chain’s bwoken!”.

Worse would follow, and when he was taken on as circuit commentator at Brands Hatch, he ended up being fired – I believe – for describing Jack Sears’ Austin Cambridge overtake of rival driver Jeff Uren’s Ford Zephyr as “Oh and Jack Sears has just passed U-wen…for the first time today…wah-hah-haaaa….!”.

In particular, John loved France and Paris with its bars, restaurants, and clubs. The annual Paris Salon motor show would see him and Gregor Grant both in attendance, enjoying the simply splendid International social scene to its absolute maximum. The motoring press Test Day at Montlhéry Autodrome would follow, and Bolster would be there, stuck into the thick of it, deerstalker at a jaunty angle, moustache bristling, driving anything and everything that the manufacturers had available for journalistic evaluation…like an absolute demon. He was, in short, a Brockbank cartoon character come to life. Indeed, ‘Brock’ was a friend, and I am sure that John Bolster was the real-life prototype for many of his wonderful drawings…

But that 1950s period was jam-packed with personality and character unrestrained. And it’s now, as usual, that I finally get to the point. John told me once how he was driving over the Downs for another day’s racing at Goodwood when he was overtaken by someone driving even faster. That was, of course, an instant affront, but then an arm was thrust out of the driver’s window of the car which had just shot past him, and he realised there was no hand being waved – the arm ending in just a vestigial knob halfway along what would have been a forearm.

There was only one person that could be – it was diminutive Cambridge racing driver Archie Scott Brown. He stood barely five feet tall and had been born with a malformed right arm, and very short legs. His shoulders were broad and strong, his trunk was normal, and at the dinner table, he sat as tall as most men, even though his feet might not reach the floor.

All who knew him came to regard little Archie as a giant among men. He was an always friendly and cheerful extrovert without the brash irresponsibility so often connected with great big tall Mike Hawthorn or impossibly handsome Peter Collins. I have never encountered anyone who had a bad word to say about Archie Scott Brown. He is remembered as “a man totally without enemies” and “the nicest bloke I ever met in motor racing”.

One engaging trait was his complete acceptance of what some regarded as his deformity. Today he would have been a leading Paralympian – of that I have no doubt. Upon meeting him for the first time people would be taken aback when he reached out to shake hands with his left arm. His pre-emptive move led those he met to respond instinctively by reaching out with their left hand to return the greeting, so in effect, he had saved their embarrassment – not his own. John Bolster told me of the arm waving incident “It never embarrassed him, you see, he was perfectly adjusted to the way he’d been made”.

Archie had made his name in racing driving sportscars built by his great Cambridge friend, Brian Lister. Brian told me: “Nature always compensates, and in Archie’s case I believe it had given him the most incredible sense of balance which is what made him such a superb driver… He used to say he’d won all the slow-bicycling races at school – just by balancing there completely stationary while everybody else fell off. I never doubted it”.

Early in 1954, Archie was due to drive Brian’s new works Lister-MG in the British Empire Trophy race at Oulton Park. He qualified third in class during practice, but then the RAC Stewards announced he was considered unfit to drive “owing to a disability”. It came as a devastating bombshell, and Ken Wharton drove instead next day.

Fellow-Scot Gregor Grant was as shocked as Archie and Brian, and he pressed noisily for the restoration of the little man’s licence. They found an ally in Earl Howe – that wonderful elder statesman of British motorsport – and he called in former Bentley Boy and Le Mans winner Dr J.D. Benjafield to bat on Scott Brown’s behalf.

Jack Sears stood in as Lister driver while the controversy raged. On Whit Monday 1954 Archie returned to racing, having proved his fitness to drive to the satisfaction of an RAC medical board. Even so, the Dundrod TT organisers would never accept his entry.

In 1955-56 Archie’s talents were adopted by Rodney Clarke of Connaught, and he began to shine in the Send-built Formula 1 cars – driving them more quickly than the down-on-power machines should really have been capable. In 1957 Brian introduced the works Lister-Jaguar prototype which became famous that season, with Archie streaking around home circuits to humble far more costly and sophisticated beasts – up to and including the factory Aston Martins. He simply scorched around Goodwood, Silverstone, Snetterton, and Oulton Park in a series of apparently lurid but in reality supremely well-judged and perfectly balanced, and sustained drifts and slides. To see Scott Brown in his pomp with that works Lister-Jaguar was to see tiny genius at work.

At the Goodwood International meeting on September 28, 1957, Archie Scott Brown contested the 21-lap Goodwood Trophy race. He headed the Le Mans-type start line-up and drew away throughout from a top-class field, winning at 88.8mph and setting fastest lap at 90.38mph. This was the grand finale to a shattering first season for the works Lister-Jaguar during which the little man had driven it in 14 events, of which he won eleven, finished second in the 12^th,m retired just once and set the fastest lap after a long pit stop in the other. On every circuit upon which the duo appeared they either broke or equalled the class lap record during practice or in the race.

Such a season set the world beating a path to Brian Lister’s factory door in Abbey Road, Cambridge – placing orders for Lister-Jaguar cars for 1958.

It was then that Brian introduced what became his immortal ‘Knobbly’ Lister-Jaguar design, and while a couple of dozen would be built for customer sale, two were completed for works team use. 

Meanwhile, Archie Scott Brown’s physique had caused him some difficulties in being accepted to drive in Continental races. He had been entered as an Ecurie Ecosse Jaguar D-Type driver for the 1957 Nurburgring 1,000Kms, and he and Brian took their 1957 prototype Lister-Jaguar down to New Zealand in the winter of 1957-58, and raced it there (before breaking it up – such a great loss for such an iconic prototype). Archie also drove in America at the Sebring 12-Hours. But in May 1958 Brian entered the latest works ‘Knobbly’ Lister-Jaguar for him in the Spa Grand Prix, in Belgium.

Archie had come under some pressure earlier that year from American driver Masten Gregory who was handling a customer ‘Knobbly’ run by David Murray’s Ecurie Ecosse team. They had suspected that the abrupt down-curve at the rear of the front-wheel-arch bodywork created aerodynamic lift about their car’s front-end, and had modified the bodywork with fill-in panels to provide instead a gently descending upper surface there.

Masten Gregory had been engaged as a truly frontline International driver, so for the first time Archie was up against a true talent in not just a matching Lister-Jaguar, but perhaps one which had a slight advantage, particularly at high speed. At Easter Monday Goodwood the lateral loads generated by the works Lister-Jaguar’s latest nylon-carcass Dunlop R5 racing tyres caused the steering rack retaining bolts to shear. Brian issued a safety warning to his Lister customers. He ran a most respectable company, and his clients were impressed… Safety bulletins were a real rarity within the racing world of the 1950s (ask most Tojeiro or Lotus customers).

At Oulton Park, the works Lister’s tyre loads broke one of its basically Morris Oxford steering arms. Back at Abbey Road Brian designed a fix and again circularized his customers. At Aintree Scott Brown won convincingly, beating Salvadori’s works Aston Martin, but Gregory was third in the new Ecosse Lister, despite a spin. 

On May 3 at the Silverstone International it was then Scott Brown versus Gregory in works and Ecosse Lister respectively. And Gregory caught him, and passed him, and drew away to win by nearly half a minute, and to set the fastest lap.

The Lister works team’s engine builder Don Moore told me: “When Archie brought the car back into the paddock after the race we asked him what was wrong and he shook his head and said ‘There was nothing wrong, nothing at all – I drove as hard as I could but I just couldn’t win!”.

On May 18 at Spa, Scott Brown and Gregory went at it once more, but the great road circuit there was half wet and intensely treacherous. A young Jim Clark was driving a D-Type Jaguar there in his Continental debut. He would later recall: “Suddenly there was an almighty howl of sound, a blast of wind, the whole car shook, and Masten went steaming past like a bat out of hell. He was well out in the lead with the Lister-Jaguar all sideways, his arms crossed-up and fighting the steering. I remember having a sudden twinge of shock and thinking: ‘To heck with this, if this is motor racing I’m going to give it up now’….it really put me off. I didn’t think anyone could drive as quickly as that…”.

Gregory and Scott Brown had been contesting the lead all round the course. The Lister already had a dent in its nose, caused by clipping the Ecosse car, when Archie shot round the Clubhouse Bend before La Source hairpin, just above the paddock. A sudden rain shower had slicked the surface, and the works Lister lost adhesion. It grazed the Dick seaman memorial stone, marking the site of the British Grand Prix driver’s fatal accident when leading the 1939 Belgian GP there in 1939, glanced along the Clubhouse wall and then clouted a road sign on the verge. The sign stanchion snapped the car’s right-side track-rod, folded the suspension back on that side, and the Lister-Jaguar was beyond control.

It nose-dived down the roadside slope, and rolled over, trapping its tiny driver underneath. Fuel gushed from the inverted tank, and ignited. A brave gendarme dragged Archie out, but he had been burned terribly. And at around 4 o’clock the following afternoon, he died. That’s the way motor racing could be – back in the 1950s…but in our esteem such warriors unforgettably survive…

Photography courtesy of The GP Library.