Formula One and Beyond Read online

  To begin with, we weren’t sent to school but were taught by an elderly man my parents found living on the Crowood estate. His house was two miles away across the fields, and I would spend the time walking there dreaming of perpetual-motion machines (sadly, when I modified one of my toys, my concept proved flawed). When my brother was eight, he was sent to a prep school near Faringdon in Oxfordshire. He hated it so much that my parents took him away and hired a tutor at home, which benefited me, allowing me, too, to escape the horrors of an English boarding school in the 1940s. Living on the estate, I was given my first shotgun at the age of nine and allowed to go shooting with the gamekeeper; and every other Saturday I would head by bus to the County Ground to watch Swindon Town’s home games in the Third Division.

  After the war, the authorities had rather pettily refused to allow my parents passports. However, they could not lawfully stop a British subject leaving or returning if he could find a country that would let him in without a passport. Spain was prepared to admit my father, so all he needed was a yacht to get there. In 1949 we were all about to set sail when the authorities gave in and issued passports for the entire family rather than look foolish. We set off for Spain and the South of France via the Bay of Biscay and inevitable seasickness.

  The dying wish of Katherine Maud, my Mosley grandmother, was that my brother and I should be christened. Aged nine, I was not in favour but was told it wouldn’t really change anything. A bigger problem was finding someone religious to be a godparent. Happily, John Betjeman, a close friend of my parents who lived nearby, was glad to be asked.

  Apart from the passport problem, the authorities in the UK made other difficulties for my father. He kept pigs at Crux Easton and when they mysteriously started to lose weight and the local vet could do nothing, someone decided to prosecute him for starving them. Using his resources to get expert help, the source, an obscure bug, was discovered. Having studied all available literature on the subject, he defended himself in the local magistrates’ court and had a most enjoyable time cross-examining the government vet about the bug and his failure to identify, or even suspect, it. My father followed this with some heavy comments to the court about the decision to prosecute rather than investigate properly. The local magistrates appeared to agree with him.

  The case was thrown out but it should never have been brought. On top of this, he had a dispute with the Inland Revenue, which leading counsel told him he would have won for any other person in England. No doubt irritated by all this, my father sold everything in 1950 and moved with all his financial assets to Ireland, which back then was still in the sterling area.

  It was a big step. The family had always lived in England and part of its fortune had been the chief or ground rents for large parts of Manchester (hence Mosley Street, one of the main Manchester thoroughfares). My brother and I were very sad to leave Crowood.

  The Irish government was much better disposed towards my father. His opposition as a young MP in the early 1920s to the excesses of the Black and Tans during the Irish War of Independence was well known there and by no means forgotten. For me, too, this was the start of a whole new life because the tutor who accompanied us stayed only for a short time. When my brother turned 13, he was sent to school in France by my parents, who wanted us to learn the two main languages of continental Europe.

  It was thought extravagant to keep the tutor on just for me, so I was left to my own devices, with no school or lessons at our house in Clonfert, County Galway. I had learned to ride properly at a Dublin riding school when we first arrived in Ireland and became completely obsessed with horses. For nearly two years, my life was riding, hunting, snipe shooting on the bogs and playing hurling with the local lads.

  That corner of Galway had some inspirational hurling players at the time. The sport is a sort of aerial hockey in which there’s no restriction on hitting the ball in the air and you are allowed to catch it. It’s extraordinarily fast and, since there was no head protection in those days, quite dangerous. I’ve always thought it the best ball game ever invented, and never understood why it did not achieve the international recognition of soccer, rugby or cricket.

  When I too reached 13, I had to join my parents in a house they had bought near Paris, shortly after leaving England. It was Palladian in style and rather embarrassingly called the Temple de la Gloire. I was supposed to learn French but made little progress and took lessons in other subjects given by a friend of my parents. There was much discussion of Nietzsche, Spengler and the like between my brother, father and the teacher in Paris. It all seemed rather pointless to me. Likewise when my parents’ friends came for dinner parties, I would sit in silence, noticing how everyone became less and less coherent as the evening wore on. I always thought these political and philosophical discussions were a waste of time. No one was actually going to do anything.

  As we were growing up, my father did try to point my brother and me in what he saw as the right direction. When I was 13 and Alexander nearly 15, he took us both to a sort of music-hall show featuring naked ladies near the Place Pigalle in Paris. My mother (very surprisingly) came too, but (very unsurprisingly) didn’t like it, saying it smelt like a stable. Much later, when I was in my early twenties, he took my wife Jean and me to Madame Arthur’s, a famous transvestite nightclub in the same neighbourhood. Presumably by then he thought my tastes were settled. There was even a political element to his approach – when, as teenagers, my brother and I complained that we had sometimes to wait outside a luxury restaurant while he and my mother were having dinner, he would say (only half-jokingly) this was to make us more politically aware.

  In September 1953 I was sent to school in Germany to learn the language. The school belonged to an acquaintance of my mother’s friend Frau Wagner, the composer’s daughter-in-law. She had been more or less the queen of Bayreuth before the war and was close to Hitler, who adored Wagner. I was put alone on a train to Munich, with a vocabulary taught by my mother comprised solely of ja, nein and wo ist mein Gepäck? She presumably thought that would be useful should I lose my luggage. With some difficulty, I found the connecting train to Traunstein.

  It was the wrong kind of school, a humanistisches Gymnasium, meaning it specialised in Latin and Greek. I found these difficult to learn in a language I didn’t understand and, anyway, such modest ability as I had was in maths and science. I should have gone to a different type of school entirely, but at least I was ahead of the class they put me in at maths despite my long fallow period in Ireland.

  In the autumn of 1954, my parents’ house in Ireland burnt down. My parents were already spending much more time in France than in Ireland. As far as Ireland went, they decided to buy a house jointly with my mother’s eldest son, Jonathan Guinness, and his then wife, Ingrid. It became a sort of holiday home for both couples, but my parents’ base was now their house at Orsay, near Paris. France was their permanent home and the Irish house was later sold.

  I was expelled from the German school after about 18 months when I was caught climbing across the roof into the girls’ part of the building. Alexander, who had joined me there after his two years in France, also had to leave after going to the local Gasthaus with some friends and urinating drunkenly outside the school’s main entrance. My father was annoyed. I don’t think he objected to me trying to get into the girls’ part of the school – he had, after all, encouraged an interest in girls – nor did he see much wrong with what my brother did, but he didn’t like the disturbance our expulsions caused to his way of life.

  We were sent to stay with his eldest son, who is a sort of saint and put up with what must have been an extraordinary inconvenience for him and his wife. Nick started trying to find a school for us in England. There were lots of brochures, some of them from establishments that sounded very sinister indeed, particularly in light of what we now know about what went on in those days. This was the 1950s, after all, and most people did not suspect the motivation of some in the teaching profession. In the end, sup
ported by Nick, Alexander and I settled on Millfield in Somerset. It seemed the most civilised and my parents did not object. Being expelled in Germany and sent to an English school turned out to be a stroke of luck, as without some sort of basic English education I would never have got into Oxford.

  Millfield was a strange school. It gave sports scholarships and had some exceptional athletes, but in those days it was mainly somewhere for people like me who had experienced difficulties at other schools. But it did have some outstanding teachers, including a lady who got me interested in physics and an English teacher, Robert Bolt, who went on to write A Man for All Seasons and the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago among others, and win two Oscars.

  After two terms there, I set out to persuade my father to let me leave, live on my own in London and go to a crammer. I waited until he was in a benign mood and broached the subject. To my delight, he agreed and a few months later, in 1956, I was free. I think he agreed because his own parents had turned down a similar request. He was an outstanding fencer and won the public schools championships in all three weapons aged only 15, but his parents refused to let him leave Winchester and pursue his fencing in Budapest. As an adult he was nevertheless on the British national fencing team for several years, despite having a permanently injured leg as a result of a flying accident in the First World War.

  I was 16 years old and alone in London, living in Bloomsbury and spending most evenings in Soho at the 2i’s Coffee Bar, supposedly the birthplace of British rock’n’roll. Certainly, several of the regular performers became famous later. Being in London, I had some contact with my father’s political associates and was taken round the East End. I supported my father generally but had other interests, preferring to spend my time in the 2i’s.

  My father owned an empty flat near Victoria station and for a brief period in late 1957 he let me hold parties there. It was cold and squalid but no one interfered with us. One of my acquaintances went to a school in south London with connections to nearby St Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls. Some of the more adventurous pupils came to our parties, and I started going out with one of them, Jean Taylor, whose father had been in the Coldstream Guards and was now in the City of London police. Just over two years later she became my wife.

  In March 1958 I took the entrance exam for Christ Church, Oxford, hoping to read physics. Although by then I had some relevant A-levels, I was still very weak academically, speaking excellent German but never recovering much of the ground I had lost in the years missing from my education. At the time there was pressure on places at Oxford because of the abolition of national service. Applicants who had done their two years in the armed forces were still taking some of the available places. I think Roy Harrod, a major Christ Church figure and friend of my parents, must have put in a word for me, or perhaps they didn’t have that many people wanting to read physics. For whatever reason, they accepted me, but the senior physics tutor did once tell me, ‘We were scraping the bottom of the barrel, Mosley, when we took you.’

  He was right because, when I arrived there, I had done very little physics. I should have spent at least another year at school, but my parents had not been to university so had no idea of what was involved. One of their great friends was Derek Jackson, who had been married to my aunt Pamela for several years. He was a world-class physicist and had been professor of spectroscopy at Oxford. He was an eccentric figure, a leading amateur steeplechase jockey as well as a very serious scientist, and was now their neighbour in France. I think he made them think physics was easy and that an undergraduate probably just read a book or two with a little guidance from a tutor. As for me, I was in too much of a hurry and did not stop to think about my academic shortcomings.

  2

  OXFORD AND AFTER

  Oxford was in a state of transition when I arrived in 1958. Some of the undergraduates had done two years’ national service and were relatively grown-up, but most had arrived straight from school. Everyone wore jackets and ties. I didn’t fit in with either group after my two years in London, and wore jeans, which was almost unheard of then. I couldn’t wait to get back to London whenever I had the chance.

  I was struggling academically, being nowhere near the necessary standard in physics and maths, and was a trial for my tutor. We spent our weekly hour with me thinking about another week of relative freedom before the next tutorial, while he was no doubt dying to get back to his research. I somehow survived the exam at the end of the first academic year and was off to London with a long summer vacation in prospect.

  Jean and I moved into a flat together, which was very unusual for teenagers in those days. We realised that her father would be wondering where she was, so when we heard he had asked my father if he knew anything, we decided it was time to leave. I spent my entire savings on a motor scooter. We set off with minimal luggage, found a boat to France and watched the scooter being loaded by a crane.

  We eventually reached my parents’ house near Paris and spent a few days there before heading to Spain. Jean and I both disliked my red hair, so during our stay with my parents we tried to dye it brown. The result was awful, but my parents were tolerant and didn’t seem to mind being seen out and about with a sort of freak. ‘The devil makes work for idle hands,’ said my father quietly when he first saw the results. His soft, half-joking tone made Jean laugh so much she felt she had to leave the room.

  My mother insisted on buying us both crash helmets although they were not compulsory in those days. It took us three days to reach Valencia, where we abandoned the helmets. The local couples all rode scooters like the Spanish traditionally ride horses, with the girl sitting side-saddle on the back. This meant they could wear any kind of dress and Jean was soon doing the same. Society was quite nanny-free in those days, but the combination of no helmets and riding side-saddle was of course very unsafe.

  Back in London, my father had decided to stand for parliament in North Kensington at the 1959 general election. Until then, his politics had been largely peripheral to my life. I knew some of his followers and I supported him, but one of the reasons I wanted to be a scientist was because scientific ideas could be tested by experiment, whereas in politics it seemed there was no proof, merely opinion; proof, if it came at all, was after the event, often in the form of some catastrophe. My brother and I both tried to help, but members of his party conducted the campaign. The result was very poor, a pity in a way because he would have livened up the House of Commons.

  I can only describe my father as I saw him. He was an excellent if rather distant parent who was always interesting, as well as interested, and I enjoyed his company. My political instincts from an early age can crudely be described as liberal and slightly left. To me, freedom and liberty of the individual have always been paramount. The imprisonment of my parents without charge or trial certainly had an influence on my thinking. When I first heard about the rule of law and discovered John Stuart Mill and his writings, I found some sort of intellectual basis for my instincts. But in my youth I nevertheless agreed with my father’s ideas. If this appears contradictory it might perhaps seem less so to anyone who reads his books.

  My father’s campaign in North Kensington had effects within the family. His eldest son, Nick, was horrified by what was going on. He was an associate of Father Trevor Huddleston, a well-known anti-apartheid campaigner in South Africa as well as in England. The rift with my father became more serious when Nick encouraged my brother Alexander to get away from what was happening, and provided the money for him to go and live in Chile.

  Nick had been close to my father in the years after the war and used to come to Crowood with his friends to shoot. They were natural allies. My father liked Nick and was very pleased about his excellent war record, but politics divided them. They were two very clever people, but it always seemed to me that they overreacted to their differences, Nick perhaps more than my father who was well used to being friends with people who disagreed with him politically.r />
  There may have been factors I was unaware of. I knew little of their quarrel at the time. Nick later wrote about his parents and I was very much against when he did it back in the 1980s. I felt he was raking up things that were largely forgotten and this would be to the detriment of his children and mine. I felt there was no need for it, nothing to be gained, and we should all be getting on with our lives, not worrying about our parents. But Nick’s efforts will be important to historians who want a complete picture of my father and what motivated him.

  Back in Oxford, I went to great lengths to avoid moving into college as one was supposed to in the second year. I thought it too much like going back to school. I liked to spend the weekends in London with Jean, and in lodgings I could come and go as I pleased.

  Towards the end of my second year someone told me I would never survive in the Oxford Union because of my father. They would all take me to pieces in argument. I found the challenge intriguing and started going to debates. Until then, insofar as I had any Oxford life, I had mixed only with scientists. As I started to get to know non-science contemporaries, a new world opened up. They were mainly slightly older than me and clever, among them Peter Jay, Phillip Whitehead, Paul Foot and Robert Skidelsky. I was invited to join the supposedly secret ‘P’ dining club in Christ Church, whose members were a mixture of dons and undergraduates. They were all clever, but at that time not one of them was a scientist. I began to think I should perhaps have read a different subject, but in fact some knowledge of physics proved invaluable later in life.

  In the 1960 summer vacation, Jean and I got married. We spent all our wedding presents on a car and moved into a flat in Oxford. We had very little money, just subsistence from my father, but Jean got a job and we managed. Because we had a flat, almost a home, it became a magnet for friends. Paul Foot and Robert Skidelsky were regular visitors, and Jean used to make them egg and chips in the evenings. Now that I was spending all my time in Oxford, I was able to participate in university life, including the Oxford Union. At the end of that Michaelmas term, I decided to stand for election in the Union.