Windsor Castle article
The article about the race between the Corsair and the Windsor Castle is puzzling. It has the byline of a well-known motoring writer but I believe that he didn’t write it himself. He is a knowlegable person and the article contains too many errors to have been written by someone with his knowledge and attention to detail.
So how did it come to have his byline? I don’t know but maybe it was a compilation of material he had written in the past. This is strongly suggested by the fact that the article has a reference to an air lift that took place four years earlier on another continent – an event that the writer had also written about. And remember that the article was written forty years after the event.
Eric Jackson isn’t concerned about the erroneous information that’s out there about him. It bothers me though, which the reason for this analysis of this particular article.
It’s a fine piece of writing. It’s interesting, it reflects the excitement of the event and is very flattering about the drivers, the car and the ship. The first error comes along when it states that Eric Jackson and Ken Chambers drove in four-hour stints. This was the third marathon drive by the pair. They always – always – drove in two-hour sessions. They had done so when they broke the London to Cape Town record. They had done so when the drove round the world. This was a well-documented fact. They also drove in two-hour sessions during the Windsor Castle race – they had a system that worked.
Then we come to the unsavoury business of Edgy Fabris and a bunch of journalists and TV crew being thrown into jail. This is true, even though the story was suppressed at the time. It’s good that it’s mentioned in the article because it gives readers a flavour of the dangerous country through which the Corsair was travelling. Where the article goes badly wrong is when it describes these men as the ‘support crew’. It was a feature of Eric and Ken’s marathon trips that they were always done without a support crew of any kind. These epic adventures would have hardly been as noteworthy (or newsworthy) if they’d had that type of assistance. What made these trips so exciting was that the drivers had to rely on their own ingenuity and the worldwide network of Ford dealerships – few and far between, or non-existent in most of the areas they drove through. They had the same facilities, or lack thereof, as any ordinary motorist.
An interesting part of the article is when it mentions the fact that the car wasn’t allowed into Cameroon. The piece says that admission was refused at Fort Lamy after leaving the Congo. The quickest glance at a map will show you that Fort Lamy is in the north. The car was heading to Tamanrasset. The quickest route to Tamanrasset was to enter south Cameroon and drive diagonally north-west across the country. So here we have another ‘fact’ that could have been rectified simply by looking at Google maps. This lack of attention to detail is not what I’d expect from this meticulous author so I repeat that I don’t think it’s his work.
Then of course, we have the biggest nonsense of all which is that the car was airlifted over Cameroon. The article says that once he knew that the car wasn’t going to be allowed into the country, Eric Jackson ‘found’ a plane and had the car airlifted across. Imagine – you’re in a remote area in the inhospitable Congo. You need to find a plane large enough and capable enough to airlift a car. You need to find a willing pilot. You need to pay for the plane and the pilot. (And any self-respecting Congolese pilot would demand an enormous sum.) And remember that this was in 1967 – not at a time where air travel was as common a it is today; 0h, and you’ve got to find the plane and pilot, negotiate the fee, arrange for immediate takeoff, get the car aboard … within just a couple of hours. Don’t you think that would be difficult to do even today? Even in somewhere like Manchester or Birmingham, let alone the Congo? Patently, the airlift story is nonsense.
The article then goes on to tell us that the car returned to England on the night before the ship docked; Eric, Ken and the car arrived,it says, at Gatwick Airport. Gatwick had flights that carried cars in 1967, but the only route was to Ireland . I know that there was a car-flight service between Le Touquet and Lydd – which was the flight taken. I also know that the car and its crew arrived at Lydd on the same morning the Windsor Castle was sailing towards Southampton. What’s more, I have Eric Jackson’s passport in my hand as I write…
I haven’t pointed out these errors to in any way belittle the highly respected author who has his byline on the article. Quite the opposite; I admire his well-researched writing. Which I why I believe that the article was somehow a composite of his previous work. And I apologise for singling out this article in particular because it is one of many; it’s just that I happened to have a copy of this one on my desk when I started to write this.