Doug Nye: Geoff Goddard – legendary photographer, formidable character, fierce friend

The way she persuaded ‘The Management’ to tolerate her presence has been to appear one morning, way down at the foot of our steeply sloping weed-patch, not unaccompanied. In fact, there was a little person with her, suckling – a tiny speckled fawn. Oh bless – or excuse me while I throw up, what’s happened to Doug, this is meant to be a motor racing blog…

Well, it is really, because this kind of thing – adoption by wildlife – was one of the few icky, saccharine ways through the acceptability filter of a very old friend of mine – my photographer colleague for some 40 years – Geoffrey Goddard. 

Geoff was one of the people who introduced me to Goodwood in the first place. I had been there for a number of race meetings, and I had wandered all around the circuit’s spectator areas on foot, but I had not done a lap until we went there for the 1964 Guild of Motoring Writers Motor Show Test Day. “Come on the” growled Geoff, “…Come round with me”, and we selected Austin-Healey’s big 3000 and squeezed into its confined hard-topped cabin.

“Right” grunted my frustrated Formula 1 driver colleague, as he rummaged for the seat adjustment, slid the seat forward – right up close to the large-diameter steering wheel, and then flexed his considerable biceps. Here was a man truly set to wrestle the bejesus out of that poor long-suffering ‘Big Healey’. And then he flicked the starter, toed the throttle, spun the rear wheels and we rocketed off in a haze of tyre smoke and onto line for the first right-hander at Madgwick…

Geoff was a hard nut. As a man of steel with, in fact, the softest of interiors, he would have loved our deer and its fawn, and – I am sure – he would have been checking on their progress with us probably three or four times a week. And so, I have been thinking quite a lot about the old b****** in recent times, and flicking through his hundreds of Goodwood racing photographs, of course, concentrates the mind.

So how best to explain the extraordinary character of this pre-eminent motor racing photographer of the 1950s-1970s, Geoffrey Goddard?

I once wrote a part-biographical book with him, but when the text proofs returned they had been savagely edited. The publisher declared: “Frankly, we found the original text jingoistic, xenophobic, sexist and in parts, well, simply vulgar!”. “But that's just Geoff!” I insisted. 

He struck me as a cross between a grown-up William Brown, Dennis the Menace and Victor Meldrew. From a schoolboy receiver of stolen Home Guard ammunition – with which he and his chums inadvertently demolished the gents' lavatory block in an Ealing park – to the doyen of British motor racing photographers was a long stride. His formidable talent was totally self-taught; he would never have accepted tuition. Yet, beneath the often-crusty exterior, he was the most interesting, amusing, generous and good-hearted bloke you could meet.

Geoff, who died in April 2006, aged 76, loved animals, and particularly adored his Airedale dogs. It was always very apparent he had far more time for animals than for most people. He lived in a state of exasperation with the world and was especially – joyfully – phobic about the French. I once took a French magazine editor and his wife to buy some photographs. Geoff knew we were coming. He answered the door wearing a bright yellow cardboard badge, freshly made, with the slogan: "Death to the French!" Fortunately, my pal Serge saw the funny side. Geoff warmed to him and concluded he must really be Belgian. 

One day in Paris on a road-test run we were trapped in a jam on the dreaded Peripherique. Abruptly, we were nudged gently from behind by a Renault 2CV full of young people. The traffic edged forward, we stopped and were nudged again. Geoff began to growl: “If he does that again, I’ll 'ave ’im.”

It happened again. Nudge. For an instantaneous response, Geoff surged forward a couple of yards, crunched our car into reverse, hit peak revs and sidestepped the clutch. We smashed straight back into the 2CV. 

Its doors and bonnet popped open and its headlights fell out. At that very moment, the road miraculously cleared, and Geoff was off like a rocket for the ferry.

Though so spectacularly explosive, Geoff was also the most honest man I've ever known. Once en route to the Geneva Salon he lost his passport. I had started an attempt to bamboozle the Swiss border guard when Geoff declared: "I've lost my passport. What are you going to do about it?” – and fessed up. They took him into custody while I went see the British consul. When I got back it was dark. I parked a few hundred yards short and a familiar bald head rose from the roadside bushes.

“Take me to Geneva”, he hissed. The police had left him alone in their office and seeing his chance he had literally dived into the shrubbery. And if the guard reported him missing? “If he's got any sense, he'll just keep schtoom!” I found a notebook in which he'd logged our best-ever day's motoring. It was after another Geneva show, in an XJS. On our way home, we explored the old circuits at Berne, Strasbourg and Reims, plus the Bugatti works at Molsheim, yet our average speed from Geneva to Farnham – via the Channel ferry – was 62.9mph.

Geoff loved comedy and music – Hancock's Half Hour, Round the Horne, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, Ella Fitzgerald, Jelly-Roll Morton, Kid Ory, King Oliver, Chris Barber – so the car tape player worked overtime. I will never forget him driving the XJS on a German autobahn in the rain. As we crested a brow at 130mph, the next track thundered out – The Ride of the Valkyries. Oh, my goodness. How perfectly apt.

Around the world's racing circuits, he quietly got on with his life's work between deafening fracas with anyone who could impede him. Things just seemed to happen to ‘Irascible of Ascot’, as he was known. Like the day of the exploding trousers – at Silverstone.

Geoff was puffing along under all his camera gear while I struggled with a single Biro and a fold of note-paper. That always wound him up. Suddenly he cried: "Oh 'ell! What's happening now?" He pointed down – the knee had just fallen out of one of his trouser legs. Five minutes later, the knee dropped out of the other trouser leg. Ten minutes more and the bottom of one trouser leg just fell – looped around his ankle.

By this time – I promise you – I was in tears, fighting to draw breath, while poor Geoff ended up wearing frayed cavalry-twill shorts. How on earth could this have come about? 

The answer was that the night before, coming upon a road accident, he had knelt beside an overturned car to winkle out the drunk driver. He had been kneeling in battery acid…and he’d come to Silverstone was wearing the same trousers. 

He was a man who never sought celebrity, but everybody knew him. He was on nodding terms with Villoresi, Ascari, Fangio, Farina, Peterson and Lauda. He got to know Hill, Brabham, Clark and Surtees very well. He became a fan of Moss in particular, and it was mutual. 

Sir Stirling would recall: "He sent me great pictures from the earliest days, and we eventually became friends. We worked on several books together, on which I found he was a great team-mate."

And how ‘Irascible of Ascot’ – always a closet racing driver – and one of the greatest recorders of major-league proceedings at Goodwood – would have liked that.

Photography courtesy of The GP Library