Innes Ireland* giving Gauld a lift back to the paddock in the factory Lotus 19 after winning the sports car race at the 1961 British Grand Prix at Aintree.
Last week while Graham Gauld was giving Toly Arutunoff a nice birthday greeting on September 22, we missed Graham’s 92nd birthday, which was on September 24. We can’t let that pass without notice! Below, we offer up a few memories from his new autobiography as well as a few thoughts from our own Graham Gauld archives.
Born in Edinburgh in 1934, Graham still can recall WWII. “My most vivid memory was about a week into the war, standing on the roof of our house in Edinburgh with my father hanging on to the chimney pots watching the Junkers Ju88s trying to bomb the Forth rail bridge** and the Spitfires trying to shoot them down.” Fortunately for us, young Graham’s attention soon turned to cars.
Even that wasn’t easy. “I was brought up in a family where ownership of a motor car was never considered for the simple reason that few of our family could ever afford to own a car far less tax, insure and run one,” recalls Gauld in his forthcoming autobiography.
Part of just one of the John Player Car series Graham avidly collected.
“Looking back on it, my interest in cars was probably thanks to a promotional idea at the end of the 19th century to protect cigarettes from being crushed in their flimsy packets. Both my mother and father smoked and I managed to manipulate things so they mainly bought John Player cigarettes. I was hooked on the automobile and race car cards. At primary school I found it was like a forum where cards were traded with your friends to make up complete collections.”
From cigarette cards to motoring magazines was a natural. Remarkably, Graham found that the series of Fawcett books published in the U.S. expanded his interest in cars and racing. “For some reason a book shop near Edinburgh University stocked them and I later found out that many of these thin booklets would come from the U.S.A. as packing for the delivery of more serious magazines like Time and Look and they found their way into this niche University-themed bookshop!” They introduced him to Italian coachbuilders, hot rods, and sports car racing in the States.
The American booklets mainly published by Fawcett that inspired Graham’s move into motor racing journalist.
Things happened fast as at the age of 16, Gauld left school and began working as a junior reporter for the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. After two years of National Service, he began to work for the Scottish magazine, Motor World in 1954. Inspired by the Italian Quattroroute magazine, in 1968 he made a proposal to the board that they change Motor World to reflect a wider audience, but the idea was turned down and Graham resigned. He then created his own PR firm, Graham Gauld Public Relations, and ran it for over 20 years alongside his freelance motor writing. “Also, I was made Chairman of the Institute of Public relations in Scotland for two years. My main client was Fiat Auto UK, the British importers for Fiat, where I was brought in as a consultant.”
This was followed by an adventure and opportunity in Hong Kong, then a period of living in France before he once again settled in the U.K., in Cornwall.
Claviers was to be Gauld’s home in the south of France.
Gauld has authored twenty books, including biographies entitled Jim Clark at the Wheel; Jim Clark, Portrait of a Great Driver; Reg Parnell, Cliff Allison and Jack Sears. He was the founding editor of China Car, China’s first motoring magazine, and of the Historic Motor Racing magazine. Prancing Horse readers are familiar with his informative and interesting vignettes from the past in his column, ‘Gauld Mine’. In 2011 he began submitting column to VeloceToday and we archive over 170 columns posted since that time.
In his first column for VeloceToday, Graham pondered getting old. “One of the advantages of having lived through perhaps the most eventful years of motoring and motor sport is that you have experienced these changes as they have happened and hopefully can put them into some kind of perspective. Another advantage of aging is that you not only have many memories but many experiences and meetings that will never come around again and, if they have not been written down, will be lost forever. Now your Editor, Peter Vack has offered me the chance to roll out stories that have been triggered by events over the years and to share some of these moments. Trivial, though they might sometimes appear at first glance, they are nonetheless dropped threads in the fabric of a motoring journalistic life that started out a long time ago.”
Graham can look back on a long life devoted to writing about cars, and even more importantly, the people. As he writes in his forthcoming autobiography, “I was not born with a mechanical mind so have never claimed to have the depth of technical knowledge one would assume someone in my position should have had. However, the one advantage I might have was summed up by Kurt Vonnegut when he wrote: ‘One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists.’” Here Graham chats with Romolo Tavoni in 2006.
You can still look forward to new columns from Graham at least each and every month. Now, go to our homepage, find the box that says “search this website” on the right column, and type in Graham Gauld. Then look a the column on the left. We wish Graham a very Happy Birthday!
Those journalists get all the breaks! Graham learning a repair technique taken this year at the opening of the new Ferrari Training Center in Maranello. Photo courtesy of Graham Gauld.
*Recently readers had some thoughts about where Innes Ireland hailed from. Gauld cleared up the confusion: “His dad was a vet that covered the Scottish border farmers. As a vet he used to visit Ian Calders farm in Duns for checkups. Ian was the husband of Mattie, Jim Clark’s oldest sister. Ian raced a Brooklands Riley and when he retired Innes’ dad bought the Riley that set Innes on his way. Innes was very Scottish; he was just born in England, where his dad was vetting at the time. I had an arrangement with him and Jim Clark that if I was stuck photographing out on a circuit and needed a lift back to the pits I would go to the side on the last lap and give the thumb, if it was ok the would nod and slow down on the slowing down lap and pick me up. Regarding the pic Innes had won the race so he stopped at the corner where I was taking pics, I climbed into the Lotus 19 and off he went like a mad thing.”
** The Forth Bridge is a cantilever railway bridge across the Firth of Forth in the east of Scotland, 9 miles west of central Edinburgh.
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First Column for VeloceToday
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