How W.O. Bentley used motorsport to kickstart Bentley Motors

The father of the marque was of course the great Walter Owen Bentley – (b. September 16^th, 1888 - d. August 13^th, 1971) known to all his friends, peers and succeeding generations of enthusiasts simply as ‘W.O.’. The great man would confess towards the end of his long life that he did not even ride in a motor car until he was sixteen. He explained that “In fact my first ride was taken in a sort of omnibus. I sat in this vehicle on one side of the two facing wooden-slatted benches behind the driver. It was a Daimler, with tube ignition – and I remember the journey to Inverness as being thoroughly uncomfortable… It was a wretched journey…”.

He went on: “In 1904 I had no time at all for the motor car. It was the (railway) locomotive that held my devoted love… the sight of Patrick Stirling’s eight-foot singles could move me profoundly… A few weeks after that short, unimpressive journey, I was on my way to Doncaster from King’s Cross to fulfil dreams and ambitions by becoming a premium apprentice at the Great Northern locomotive works.”

As an apprentice he also had the chance to flex his muscles as a fireman on live steam: “My longest journey was London to Leeds and back, on the return journey doing Wakefield to King’s Cross non-stop for 175 miles. This was a total day’s run of 400 miles, about seven tons of coal, every pound of it shovelled. Not a bad day’s exercise…”.

But over time his interest in the railways palled. In 1906 he had bought himself a 3hp Quadrant belt-drive motor-cycle. With fellow apprentices at the Doncaster works he began trying his hand astride the ‘bike in trials, and won Gold Medals in the London-Plymouth-London and the Lands End-and-back Trials. He upgraded to a 3.5hp Rex, entered it for the 1909 Isle of Man TT… and crashed on his opening lap. He also rode at Brooklands, bought a powerful Indian motorcycle and tackled the famous Kop hill-climb, and another TT - this time failing to finish after his rear tyre burst and damaged the rim. He then won the following day’s Snaefell hill-climb. Back at Brooklands he rode a 5hp Indian, before part-exchanging it for a 9hp Riley car.

He then took a job with the National Motor Cab Company in Hammersmith, London, and found himself in charge of the maintenance and operation of its ultimately 500-strong fleet of Unic taxi cabs. But when his mother died he used £2,000 of inheritance money to buy into a London-French car concessionaire company, Lecoq & Fernie. Their favoured French marque was Doriot, Flandrin et Parent – DFP. The cars were quick, and well made, but W.O. found Lecoq an abrasive individual as did his brother Horace Milner Bentley – better-known as just ‘H.M’. The two Bentley Boys joined forces, H.M. put in £2,000 to buy out Lecoq and Fernie’s shares and – aged 24 and 27 – the boys restyled the company as Bentley & Bentley, taking over the showrooms in Hanover Street, London. H.M. took care of sales and business while W.O. handled technical matters, preparation and service. And to promote interest and sales W.O. entered a DFP in the Aston Clinton hill-climb. He set FTD in his class and broke the 2.0-litre record for the climb. 

During a visit to DFP at Courbevoie in France, W.O. noticed “…a little decorative piston, made of some alloy… obviously given to DFP as a souvenir paper-weight by the firm that did their foundry work. Doriot saw me pick it up… ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ He said, ‘Aluminium you know’…”.

W.O.’s imagination was fired. In tackling speed records his DFP’s very light steel pistons broke their rings, heavier cast-iron pistons cracked. He told H.M. about the aluminium piston “I’m sure it’s the answer… I’d like to have a set cast to try out…”.  He called the Corbin foundry, and had a set of pistons cast for him from 88 per cent aluminium, 12 per cent copper. Once the experimental set arrived he tried them, played around with them, lightened them, increased the engine’s compression. No trouble. Racing success followed at Brooklands. He built a single-seater DFP, starred again at Aston Clinton, and entered the 5^th RAC Tourist Trophy race, on the Isle of Man.  It was a Jack the giant-killer foray and – though unsuccessful on track – the company gained tremendous press coverage and good publicity. 

W.O. married his girlfriend, Leonie Gore, on New Year’s Day 1914. He was en route from Southampton to London that August when he stopped for lunch at the Bear in Farnham. “It was there, after the manager had politely refused to accept a five-pound note, we learned we were at war…”.

H.M. joined the Army. W.O. was left to run the Hanover Street company. Nobody was buying new cars. But W.O. had specialist experience of lightweight aluminium pistons, “… which I thought might be of value in aero engines and was still quite unknown to any other firm in England”. He found that a Commander Wilfrid Briggs at the Admiralty had been made responsible for expanding the Royal Naval Air Service. Briggs was impressed by W.O.’s aluminium piston expertise, saying “We must get you into uniform Bentley”. He was despatched to preach the new faith to E.W. Hives at Rolls-Royce and Louis Coatalen at Sunbeam. In short order both were using aluminium pistons. W.O. was then seconded to the Gwynne factory at Chiswick, making French-designed Clerget rotary aero engines. He toured the active Army Air Corps and RNAS bases in France, and design of a Clerget replacement engine grew in his mind. He was then detached to Humbers in Coventry where he struck up a good relationship with designer F.T. Burgess. They designed and put into production the BR1 – Bentley Rotary – aero engine, followed by the BR2.

Now 100 years ago, on January 20^th, 1919, W.O. sat down with Burgess and mutual friend and colleague Harry Varley in a tiny office on the top floor of a building in Conduit Street, London. For nine months they had worked drawing a brand-new car for a post-war market.  It had a 3.0-litre 4-cylinder engine, with a single overhead camshaft… “The market I had in mind for this car”, explained W.O., “was the fast sporting one. If the capital could be found I thought we could meet it as successfully as we had between 1912 and 1914 with the DFP… We were going to make a fast car, a good car, the best in its class…”. He had worked with Burgess for years, while Harry Varley was ex-Vauxhall. They and W.O. were in effect Bentley Motors, while brother H.M. “continued to look after DFP, making the money we were going to need. And he made a lot of it, about £20,000 in the first roaring boom twelve months after the Armistice… everybody wanting cars, everybody with money…

Every part of the new car had to be made by sub-contractors, before all was assembled – with a wooden crankcase – into Bentley EXP 2 in time for the Olympia Motor Show in November. W.O. and H.M. found clients “begging to be allowed to put down as much as £200 deposit on the strength of our semi mock-up; a seller’s market gone berserk”.

And by W.O.’s account 367 days after W.O., Burgess and Varley had first discussed the project, ‘The Autocar’ published its first road test of a Bentley car – and with production starting early in 1921, the Bentley legend took off, gathered pace… and a century of achievement stretched ahead…