Review: Two new titles shedding fresh light on Irish motor sport history

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Book review

Cultra — Motoring With Panache: The Royal North of Ireland Yacht Club Motor Meet and Hill Climbs, 1905 to 1911

Author: Paul Robinson
Publisher: Paul Robinson. www.robinsonbooks.co.uk
Price: £10.00. Softback. 54 pages with 26 black-and-white illustrations

What is Cultra, and what exactly has the Royal North of Ireland Yacht Club got to do with motor racing? They were the questions on my mind when I first became aware of Paul Robinson's Cultra. Robinson approached this decidedly obscure topic not as a professional writer or historian, but simply as an enthusiast who has competed in several hill-climbs with the Thoroughbred Sports Car Club of Northern Ireland at the Ulster Folk Museum since 2000, and was intrigued by references made to the R.N.I.Y.C. meetings held there a century previously. Considering the rather narrow confines of the topic, he has explored it extremely thoroughly.

Cultra, it transpires, is a very affluent suburb of Holywood, near Belfast, bordered to its north-west by the Irish Sea. It is best-known as the home of the Royal North of Ireland Yacht Club but has some surprising motoring connections, too. It was the birthplace of Desmond Titterington, one of Ireland's star drivers of the 1950s, and is today home to the Ulster Transport Museum, but we are concerned just with the R.N.I.Y.C. Motor Meets and Hill-Climbs. Motor racing on public roads was actually illegal across all Ireland until the creation of Northern Ireland in 1922. Occasionally, the authorities and local constabularies gave their consent to hill-climbs, hence there was the Ballybannon Hill-Climb in 1903, the Craigantlet Hill-Climb in 1913 and the Irish Automobile Club Belfast Hill-Climb in 1914, all of which Robinson covers in his second book. The most famous early Irish motor race, the 1903 Gordon Bennett, was made possible by an Act of Parliament which saw the ban lifted for one year only.

Three clubs were responsible for regular smaller hill-climbs between 1905 and 1911, namely the Irish Automobile Club, the Ulster Centre of the Motorcycle Union of Ireland and the aforementioned Yacht Club. The Yacht Club's events, however, were rather different. While other events were explicitly competitive, the R.N.I.Y.C. meets were more of a social occasion, where the hob-nobbing was as important as the racing. Consequently, the entry lists are bereft of the usual famous names of early motor sport and the thundering leviathans they drove, and instead are filled with captains of industry and their wives and heirs, with dainty voiturettes and heavy touring cars in which to make their stately progress up the hill. At the extremes, the smallest cars to take part were some 5hp Oldsmobiles belonging to members of the Craig family and Capt. J. R. Mitchell in 1905 and 1906, and the largest was Mr. Edwin Craig's 60hp Itala in 1909. A number of motorcycles also competed. The Craig brothers of east Belfast, incidentally, were typical of the class of people who raced with the R.N.I.Y.C. Their father, James Sr., had made a fortune as a director of Dunville & Co., the whisky distillery, and two of their other brothers went into politics, James Jr. becoming the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.

These meetings were, as stated, of an informal character and sometimes profoundly Irish: another event which took place was the potato-throwing contest, in which ladies' were required to sling their earthy projectiles into cars as they passed. Quite how scoring worked is not explained...

At 54 pages, Cultra is a slim volume and its content relies very much on entry lists, results and complete reports from papers such as the Belfast News, Irish Times and Northern Whig, which is all to its credit—Robinson has done the hard work of poring through newspaper archives and granted the reader access to the original sources. The book is also amply illustrated with photographs of the cars, people and scenery, some of a very high quality and all sourced from the Royal Irish Automobile Club Archive.

From Ballybannon Hill to Magilligan Strand: Hill Climbs, Sand Races and a Cancelled Grand Prix, June 1922 to June 1933

Author: Paul Robinson
Publisher: Paul Robinson. www.robinsonbooks.co.uk
Price: £30.00. 304 pages with dozens of black-and-white photographs

For his second work, Robinson's research yielded a lot more information, as would be expected given its broader scope; From Ballybannon Hill to Magilligan Strand is a substantial 300 pages and looks chronologically at the major hill-climbs and sand-racing events up to 1933, namely Ballybannon, Craigantlet, Croft, Red Brae ("no freak cars permitted") and Magilligan Strand. The cancelled Grand Prix referred to in the title was the 1924 Ulster Motor Grand Prix at Clady, the established home of the Ulster Motorcycle Grand Prix, which was called off following Stanley Pyper's fatal accident in an Alvis during an "unofficial practice."

As mentioned above, a few early, pre-Great War hill-climbs are outlined in brief. These show that Ballybannon was a major event in 1903, when participants included S. F. Edge with a 40hp Napier, Herbert Austin with a 50hp Wolseley, C. S. Rolls with an 80hp Mors and, most notably, the 100hp Gobron-Brillié of Louis Rigolly, who would become the first man ever to exceed 100mph in 1904. These race meetings, of course, were only able to become regular occurrences once motor-racing on public roads was officially authorised in 1922, with the creation of Northern Ireland, and the rest of the book runs from there to the final Ballybannon meeting in 1933. With the exception of inventor, tractor-maker and front-wheel drive pioneer Harry Ferguson, who was a vocal advocate for the advancement of automobilism in Ireland, these later Ballybannon meetings were comprised largely of privateers whose names have not made the history books, but the revived Craigantlet Hill-Climb of 1925, which remains in use today, was of sufficient importance by the early '30s that it attracted the likes of Earl Howe, Dudley Benjafield, Tommy and Elsie Wisdom and Cecil Kimber. The book does not just consist of reports of race meetings; where applicable, Robinson has also provided context by examining changing legislation and the rôle of the short-lived Ulster Automobile Club.

Some of the photographs used illustrate just what a wonderful variety of machines participated in the various events. At the June, 1928, Magilligan Speed Trials, for example, the square and upright frame of W. Noble's Morris Cowley coupé makes for quite the contrast with G. C. Strachan's little torpedo of an Amilcar. The same event yielded the charismatic cover picture, of W. H. Connolly flashing a mischievous grin from within his racing Star. A few of the photos really capture the excitement, and occasional horror, of those brave days. One depicts the Rhode of Charles Wilkinson flying sideways through the air at the Magilligan races of 1926. Remarkably, when the car landed, Wilkinson emerged with only minor injuries, but Charles N. Norris was not so fortunate; he appeared as the headline driver "with two Brooklands successes," but died that day when his works-prepared 1½-litre Lea-Francis was involved in a similar accident. We also see the aftermath of R. G. J. Nash's hair-raiser at Craigantlet in 1932. Driving his famous Frazer-Nash, The Terror, he shot up a bank and stopped perilously short of the rows of spectators.

Once again, much of the book is made up of reprinted entry lists, results and newspaper reports, and the R.I.A.C. Archive and British Newspaper Archive have supplied many of the photos, but Robinson has done a sterling job of tracking down unseen photographs held by the families of the drivers who raced in the period, and a dedicated motor sport enthusiast might find it worth investing in the book for these alone.

The appeal of both works is admittedly niche, but it must go without saying that anyone with a particular interest in Irish motor sport history shouldn't be without them. Furthermore, anyone planning a visit to Northern Ireland ought to find them fascinating holiday reading, and useful, perhaps, for the purpose of pre-war motor sport tourism. As reference works they are extremely valuable; the information contained within is not easily accessible by any other means and they are in no way unreasonably priced. Robinson has done us a great service by making this information available, and readers will do well to look out for his next book, about the County Down Trophy Races of 1934-36, which is due for release in November.

Words: Zack Stiling

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