From Colditz to Le Mans Winner
Next Tuesday marks the centenary of the birth of not only a fine British racing driver and Goodwod great, but one of the bravest people it was ever my privilege to meet. Few drivers ever earned the title ‘hero’ more than Tony Rolt. And you’ll know it when you read his full title: Major Anthony Peter Roylance Rolt, MC & Bar. A Military Cross is not the kind of medal you get for just turning up, and he earned two.
But he’d already made his name before the war, when he won the British Empire Trophy in 1939 aged just 20. A year later he’d earned his first MC for his role in delaying the advance of the Panzers on Dunkirk, and found himself incarcerated at the Germans’ convenience for his troubles. Regarding getting home as nothing less than a duty that would enable him to return to active service, he made a complete nuisance of himself in a series of attempted departures from a number of camps and prisons until, somewhat inevitably, he ended up in Oflag IV-C, which had been cherry-picked by the Wehrmacht for serial escapers because it was reputed to be impossible to break out of. You will know it better as Colditz.
The war ended before he had a chance to leave from Colditz by surely the least orthodox means of escape ever conceived. It was Rolt’s idea to construct a glider in the attic, he helped supervise its construction and was at least in the running to be one of two people on board when it was catapulted from the castle roof by dropping a bath full of concrete over the side of the building.
After the war and with a bar to his MC awarded for being such a splendidly disruptive influence to the enemy, he returned to racing. His most famous win was at Le Mans in 1953 and the story of how it came about – his Jaguar C-type being slung out of scrutineering, Rolt and team-mate Duncan Hamilton drowning their sorrows literally all night, the car being re-admitted and the two thoroughly plastered drivers being pulled out of the pub to do the race – has passed into racing folklore.
Sadly, at least for me, the story was a fairy tale, a figment of Hamilton’s at times over-active imagination. Why for me? Because back when I was editor of MotorSport magazine, I naively took the word of Hamilton’s autobiography as truth, and published the tale in the magazine under the headline ‘Drunken Charge’. Shortly after publication there came a call from Rolt’s son Stuart, a former chairman of the British Racing Drivers Club, not only informing me of my error but letting me know how much I had upset his father. Twenty years on, the memory of that call still makes me cringe.
He and Hamilton damn near won Le Mans again the following year in the brand new D-type but his international competition career was soon over, reputedly as a result of witnessing the 1955 Le Mans disaster. He then went into engineering, first with Freddie Dixon, then Harry Ferguson and, fascinated by the potential of four wheel drive, was instrumental in the creation of the Ferguson P99 Formula 1 car. When Stirling Moss used it to win then Oulton Park Gold Cup in 1961 he scored both the first and most recent win in a Formula 1 race by a car with four wheel drive, and the last to place its engine in front of its driver.
The innovations that came out of Ferguson Research and, later, FF Developments on Rolt’s watch have had an enormous influence, particularly on road cars where four wheel drive is now so commonplace not just for off-roading, but all round stability and ease of use.
I only met him once, and probably not long before he died in 2008. I’d come somewhere in something in a race at, I think, Silverstone and, unbeknown to me, the organiser had asked Rolt to hand out the prizes. I was late to prize-giving, rushed in with my overalls still tied around my waist just in time to hear my name being read out. So I went up to collect the pot and have my photograph taken next to the nice old gentleman in the tweed suit who’d been kind enough to shake my hand. It was only then that I realised who it was. Someone sent me the image, a scruffy, sweaty half-dressed bloke in a Nomex vest grinning like an idiot next to the immaculately turned out war hero. I could not bear to look at it more than once.
Forgive me if some or more of my tales of Rolt’s life are familiar to you. To the wider world I think he is almost unknown, which given all he achieved – the British Empire Trophy before the war, Le Mans after it and the Colditz glider in the middle to name but three – seems a shame. But perhaps only to us: from what very little I know of the man himself, I don’t think it would have bothered him at all.
Photography courtesy of Motorsport Images