Whitney Straight book review: cars, Cambridge and conflict

Racing Driver, War Hero, Industrialist reads the subhead to this family blessed biography. Consequently, it is only a motor racing book in part – and a small part at that. As Paul Kenny writes, American-born but English-bred Whitney Straight “established a legitimate claim to being Europe’s finest independent driver, and second only to Enzo Ferrari as a privateer team entrant”. His full-time racing career lasted all of two seasons, 1933 and ’34, before he disbanded his eponymous team to focus on the other great mechanical passion of his life. Straight was a thrusting pioneer in Britain’s civil aviation industry before the outbreak of World War II. As the author writes, he then experienced a “good war”.

Kenny became captivated by the standout story of Straight during research for his previous biography, on Charles Amherst Villiers. Straight was born with a silver spoon and into American entitlement, but his childhood was upended by the death of his father. Willard Straight survived World War I, only to be claimed by Spanish flu. Following remarriage, Whitney’s mother relocated to England where her son was educated at Dartington Hall School in Devon.

In some respects, the Straight story foreshadows that of another entitled trust-fund pre-war racer – Whitney’s friend and 1934 team driver Richard Seaman. Both were unconvincing students at Cambridge, Straight dropping out to plunge fully into motor racing. “No other teenager could have afforded Tim Birkin’s Maserati,” Kenny writes, “yet the very fact that he was immediately able to go faster in it than Birkin demonstrated that here was a rare talent.” Ambitious to explore far beyond the confines of Shelsley Walsh and Brooklands, Straight took on the continental might of Ferrari’s Alfa Romeos and the Nazi-funded Silver Arrows with gusto. The death of his Straight Stable driver Hugh Hamilton, killed at the 1934 Swiss GP, and impending marriage (although he turned out to be the polar opposite of a model husband) hastened the end of Straight’s racing career – and perhaps spared him from Seaman’s eventual fate.

Then again, aviation was hardly a safe option, and the most gripping pages are dedicated to Straight’s war. Somehow he survived serious injury in the disastrous Norway campaign, crash-landed a Hurricane in France and had success commanding an air operations support squadron in multiple corners of the war’s final years. A good racing driver? Yes – but this was a truly great aviator.

Inevitably, the post-war parts are a little drier, surely reflective of reality for such men once the guns were silenced. Having turned down Winston Churchill’s urging for a career in politics, Straight became entangled in first BOAC, then the decline into liquidation of Rolls-Royce – of which Kenny states: “It is no exaggeration to say that it killed him.”

Written with deep care and attention to forensic detail, this is a remarkable story of a remarkable man – for whom the definition ‘racing driver’ does little justice.

Whitney Straight
Paul Kenny
The History Press, £25
ISBN 9781803991115