Freddie March - Driving Ambition

THE STORY OF GOODWOOD IS INSEPARABLE from the stories of the Dukes of Richmond – their individual characters, interests and sensibilities. These, and the social changes they lived through, have collectively shaped both the house and the Estate as it is today. Just as a love of hunting explains why the 1st Duke first came to Goodwood, and why the 3rd Duke built the splendid kennels there, so the 5th Duke’s love of horse racing led to the establishment of the racecourse, forever linking in the sporting lexicon the words “Glorious” and “Goodwood”.

But the 20th century saw a different kind of horsepower come to the fore, in large part down to the passion and determination of one man: Freddie March, aka Frederick, 9th Duke of Richmond. A thoroughly modern aristocrat,he overcame the resistance of his family to become a racing driver, automotive and aeronautical engineer – and, ultimately, motor racing promoter. Without him, the crowds wouldn’t be flocking to this corner of rural Sussex to thrill out the roar of engines and the speed and elegance of great cars and planes.

Born in the early years of the century, Freddie wasn’t meant to become a duke at all. The heir to the title, his older brother, Charles, Lord Settrington, was also passionately interested in motorbikes and cars. So much so that in their last spring together in 1919, they drove in Charles’s Morgan to visit Sir Henry Royce at nearby West Wittering to ask if Charles could go to work for Rolls-Royce (odd to think that 84 years later the Rolls-Royce factory would open on the Goodwood Estate). It is uncertain whether he was offered a job, but it was Freddie who as a boy had made model cars and planes in his own workshop – having become obsessed with his parents’ Model T Ford Landaulette and his aunt’s Daimler, in this, the era when motor cars were a novelty. And it was Freddie who spent his wartime school holidays hanging around the Royal Flying Corps’ new base on the Estate at Tangmere, falling in love with planes and the idea of flying. And it was Freddie who would come to swap the life of an aristocratic landowner for the distinctly un-rustic world of engines and oil, workshops and factories.

When Charles was tragically killed during the 1919 British intervention in the Russian Civil War, Freddie – now, much to his initial distress, known as Lord Settrington, and unexpectedly his grandfather’s heir –seemed reluctant to take the path his heritage and family would seek to impose upon him. After Eton came Oxford, where he dutifully studied Agriculture – and crammed to pass his exams, only to fall in love with Elizabeth Hudson, the vivacious, red-headed daughter of the vicar doing the cramming. Freddie gave up his studies to spend more time with her – without taking his finals – and promptly took up an apprenticeship with Bentley, a truly revolutionary act for a young upper-class man of the era.

His grandfather had taken a dim view of his own son and heir joining the army – where he became a senior officer, serving as an ADC to General Roberts in the Boer War. So he took a considerably dimmer view of a Gordon Lennox becoming a humble apprentice. Likewise, the idea of Freddie marrying a mere vicar’s daughter added to the rift, and Freddie’s allowance was stopped. Undeterred, he qualified as a mechanic – in Cricklewood of all places, where he was known as plain Mr Settrington, before leaving briefly to work as a car salesman. He then rejoined Bentley, on a salary that meant, aged 23, he could now marry, with or without his family’s blessing. Happily, they relented, and the breach was healed shortly before the death of Freddie’s grandfather. And so, as his father inherited the dukedom and the responsibilities of running the family’s struggling Estates, Freddie spent the late Twenties and early Thirties enjoying the kind of work and life he had so wanted.

He was married to Elizabeth and living between a townhouse in London and Molecomb on the Goodwood Estate. He worked for Bentley, based at their Mayfair showroom on Cork Street, learned to fly, and took up motor racing, with pretty much instant success. In 1929 he took gold in a Brooklands time trial driving an Austin Seven; in 1930 he won the British Racing Drivers’ Club 500, before buying three MG C-type Montlhéry Midgets and leading his team to victory in two major races; while in 1931 he won the 24-hour race know as the Double Twelve. All this as “Freddie March”, as he was now next in line for the dukedom and was therefore the Earl of March. But what set Freddie apart from other gentlemen racers and fliers was the innovative and entrepreneurial turn his passion for all things automotive and aeronautical would take. For having started a car dealership, he took up coachbuilding, playing an important role in the evolution of the English sports car aesthetic of the era. He even launched March Models – making handmade model racing cars. And he co-founded the Hordern Richmond aeronautical business and helped to design the brand’s ground-breaking Autoplane – so called because its design enabled the pilot to control all of the plane’s key functions with just one hand. He was also motoring correspondent of the Sunday Referee – which, although largely devoted to all things sporting, described itself as “the national newspaper for all thinking men and women”, and indeed, Freddie’s fellow contributors in the Thirties included Dylan Thomas and Bertrand Russell, while Freddie himself would go on to become the founding president of the Guild of Motoring Writers.

But two things would impact on the fascinating and fulfilling life Freddie had forged for himself – so far removed from the pomp of a grand seigneur or the tweedy existence of the English country house owner. In 1935, his father died and Freddie inherited the four family dukedoms – and along with Goodwood, Gordon Castle in Scotland, the vast Gordon Lennox Estates, which were mostly unprofitable, along with dauntingly high death duties. Freddie had to part with sizeable amounts of the Gordon inheritance just to stay afloat, and then four years later came the outbreak of war. Motor racing stopped, Hordern Richmond went over to making Spitfire propellers (as the relaunched brand is once again making today), and Freddie did his bit too – joined the RAF, then working within the Aviation Ministry to boost aircraft production, including a stint alongside our American allies in Washington, DC.

And Goodwood did its bit during the war. The house became a military hospital, while as well as RAF Tangmere, which was first opened as an RFC base in 1917, came its new satellite station – also on the Estate – RAF Westhampnett, which played an important role right through the Battle of Britain and beyond. But once the war was won, it was this part of the Estate that would play such an important part in the evolution of Goodwood – and in restoring the Estate’s fortunes – as Freddie’s passionate love of cars and of motor racing and the independent, entrepreneurial spirit that had once put him at such odds with his family and their sense of the Gordon Lennox heritage, provided a much-needed lifeline for the Estate in postwar Britain.

Before the war, Freddie had held a casual, sporting event for Lancia owners. This became Goodwood’s very first Hillclimb – the first of many, clearly. But it was Freddie’s realisation that a perimeter road around the airfield might just make a great motor-racing course that transformed Goodwood, long associated with Thoroughbreds and flat-racing, into the automotive destination it is today. Races such as the Glover Trophy, the Goodwood Nine-Hour sports car endurance races and the Tourist Trophy captured the public’s imagination. And, of course, the drivers: Stirling Moss (still a frequent visitor to Goodwood, he won the 500cc race at the first meeting in September 1948), Graham Hill, Jim Clark and Donald Campbell, who first demonstrated his Bluebell land speed record vehicle at Goodwood in 1960.

Of course the racing ended in the Sixties, when the course no longer suited the constantly evolving sport, but needless to say the spirit Freddie March brought to Goodwood still endures – at the Festival of Speed and Revival initiated by his grandson Charles, and in the extraordinary cars that whizz around the Estate and the planes that soar overhead. As the current Duke of Richmond put it in The Glory of Goodwood, a history of the circuit, “My grandfather was a very remarkable man. It wasn’t until he died that I found out everything about his coachbuilding, his model-making and his race victories. He took his driving very seriously.”