In September 1905, Hugh Locke King and his wife Ethel undertook a motoring tour to Italy with a plan to see the Coppa Brescia race, subsequently better known as the Coppa Florio. The winner was Giovanni Raggio driving an Itala. The Locke Kings had purchased a 50/70hp Itala car themselves in August that had finished second in the touring class of the Mont Cenis Hill Climb in France. As it had incurred some damage to the bodywork during the event, they had ordered a new body to be made and fitted to the car in Paris, so collection of the repaired vehicle became part of their tour. Both Hugh and his wife were keen early motoring enthusiasts, although on this journey they were beset with mechanical problems and an accident that delayed their arrival in Italy, causing them to miss the race.

In their accommodation the night after the race they met some Italian drivers who had taken part in the event and were recounting their exploits, and enjoyed sharing stories of previous races. There were no English entrants in the Coppa, the drivers mainly French, German and Italian.

“The idea of the course dawned in Brescia after the Targa Florio meeting, as I sat among the owners of the French, German and Italian cars which had been competing,” said Hugh. “In reply to my question why there was not a single English car entered, the reply came quickly and unanimously: ‘You have no practice in racing, no cars with the speed – you would not have had a chance.’ He added ruefully, ‘Poor old England! – the cradle of sports as she used to be called – nowhere. Cars, men, all were ‘made abroad’.”

Hugh Locke King was stung by the comments. The drivers were right. Great Britain had a blanket speed limit of 20mph on its roads and all motor racing was banned. There were also no facilities for testing the few cars that the country produced. Continental countries had embraced motor cars and motor sport far more enthusiastically, literally leaving Great Britain in the dust, something he felt ashamed about. France alone was producing 50% of all the world’s motor vehicles at the time.

On their return journey to Great Britain, the Locke Kings discussed the implications of what they had heard and made a plan. Hugh and Ethel could foresee a future in which Great Britain would take a lead in this new sport and they decided that they could be instrumental in bringing this about. Back at home in Surrey, they walked round their substantial estate and decided that a racing circuit could be built on its grounds. As ideas went it was a big one and it was the genesis of what was to become Brooklands Motor Racing Circuit: a remarkably grand vision.

Hugh sought advice in the world of motoring. The secretary of the Automobile Club, Julian Orde, welcomed the idea and suggested that a circular track should be built so that racing cars could always be seen by spectators. He also proposed a narrow track and envisaged that it could cope with maximum speeds of 60mph.

With the Automobile Club supportive, Hugh didn’t hesitate on starting the project and, after Lord Montagu of Beaulieu wrote an article in favour of the project in The Car on July 25, 1906, trees were already being felled on the Locke King estate in preparation for the work to start, although no firm design plans had been drawn up.

In September 1906 Hugh organised a meeting of the leading sporting motorists of the day at his house. Two well-known figures who attended were Charles Jarrott, who was an experienced European open road racer, and SF Edge, who had won the 1902 Gordon Bennett Cup for the race from Paris to Innsbruck.

“The terrain lay in a ’swampy, rabbit-infested corner of Surrey’”

The meeting was very positive and, having inspected the possible location for the track, it was proposed that this should be four miles long and wide enough for 10 to 12 cars to drive abreast. After the meeting, Edge said that he would like to book the track as soon as it was finished as he wanted to attempt driving at 60mph for 24 hours. This was duly agreed as it would mean great publicity for the new circuit.

Most of the surrounding land that was to be transformed by the project had been in the Locke King family for generations. It was a quiet area of rural Surrey at the time and the neighbours could not have foreseen the disruption that the building of this motoring amphitheatre would cause, let alone the noise that the circuit would generate when in use.

Shortly after the meeting that effectively kick-started the building of Brooklands, Hugh appointed Colonel HCL Holden chief engineer and designer of the new motor circuit. He was a prominent member of the Automobile Club and the first chairman of its new competitions committee. He had good technical knowledge and an understanding of high-speed dynamics.

He visited the site on several occasions and explained that the best approach to the design of the circuit was to include banked curves that would enable cars to travel as fast as 90mph. It was a revolutionary approach, but he was certain that the banking would allow cars to maintain maximum speeds without skidding.

Dame Ethel was closely involved in all the discussions; she shared her husband’s enthusiasm for the ambitious project and was to play a crucial part in the development of the track. Hugh also arranged for a distant relative, Ernst, Baron de Rodakowski, to help with the Brooklands enterprise.

Holden’s initial layout plans showed a 2½-mile oval track and estimated a three-month construction period. Rodakowski became the first clerk of the course until his role was taken over by Major Lindsay Lloyd in November 1908. He had helped the Locke Kings with the luxury Mena House Hotel situated at the base of the Pyramids in Giza, which they owned from 1886. During his time as its manager from 1887-96, it gained great prominence among the European social elite.

Much of the engineering needed to be innovative to deal with the terrain of the estate, which lay in a “swampy, rabbit-infested corner of Surrey”. What the track should be surfaced with engendered much debate. A new material, tarmacadam, was deemed to be untested and difficult to roll on the banked surface areas that were planned. Asphalt also seemed to present a problem as it would need the extra cost of a concrete base. After much discussion it was decided that a single layer of concrete to a depth of 6in would be the best option. It could be laid in small sections and made using materials from the local gravel quarry.

“People will view the construction of a racecourse with horror”

A railway engineer, Alexander Donaldson, was engaged to manage the growing number of contractors that would be needed to complete the work as there were considerable challenges faced in the building of what was to be officially called Brooklands (sharing the name of the Locke Kings’ house). Hugh’s first estimate of the budget required for the construction of Brooklands was £22,004, which he felt he could comfortably draw from liquid assets. Donaldson immediately doubled this budget figure when he had finished his first rough estimate of costs.

Things started to move quickly when Messrs Price and Reeves were appointed as main contractors and they soon came back with their own budget figure of over £60,000. Work forged ahead in spite of there being no consensus on what everything would actually cost.

An additional 1500 men employed by Price and Reeves bolstered the team of 500 farm labourers who had started the estate clearance. Most of the work was manual, supported by the use of two light locomotives and about 90 wagons operating on eight miles of railway line that had been laid within the confines of the outline track.

The look of the estate changed quickly during 1906 as over 30 acres of woodland were felled, 300,000 cubic yards of earth shifted and 200,000 tons of concrete laid. It is no wonder that the Surrey Herald of September 1906 commented, “the people of Weybridge will view the construction of a racecourse in their midst with horror and aversion, and no good can possibly derive from such an institution”.

The scale of the project was immense and it was to prove stressful and detrimental to Hugh’s health. His patriotic vision of a home for motor racing and the provision of testing facilities for the development of British cars was to be one for which he made great personal and financial sacrifices. Without the role that his wife was to play in the circuit’s development, it seems unlikely that Brooklands would ever have been completed.

“Ethel was a furious driver. Everyone got out of her way”

Ethel was definitely the first lady of Brooklands. As Hugh’s health declined, she stepped up from being a partner in the project to overseeing and managing all aspects of the epic endeavour. Aside from the ambitious scale of the circuit construction, there was the rapidly deteriorating financial situation that the Locke Kings had to manage as the ever-growing budget projections threatened certain bankruptcy. In fact, Hugh at this stage handed all these worries to his wife.

Ethel was clearly up to the job and cleverly managed discussions and financial agreements with the banks. Loans were arranged, creditors assuaged as much as possible and, when push came to shove, she did not hesitate to approach members of her wider family to ask for loans or donations to enable her to both service the growing number of loans and pay off debts. Many of the estate’s properties were mortgaged to raise necessary cash. Her approach was firm and when Donaldson’s £43,000 estimate of the cost of building the track was received, Ethel immediately wrote to Rodakowski pointing out the huge increase was unacceptable without discussion. She promptly followed up by calling at Carlton House, Regent Street, the headquarters of the newly formed Brooklands Automobile Racing Club, to speak to him in person. It was the first of a number of terse and often combative discussions between the two.

Ethel had been very hands-on in the management of the estate’s properties and the farms that they owned, and she now also demonstrated a calm and clear head for business. She was a strong, independent character and was respected by the men she had to deal with. As her husband’s health deteriorated, she took the reins on the project, balancing the books and guiding progress on the construction that would ensure the track opened in 1907 as planned.

She was faced with tough decisions. It became clear when spending was at its highest that she had to consider stopping the construction of the track completely as she and Hugh faced possible financial ruin. The alternative was the brave decision to have faith in their original vision and risk all to complete the ambitious project. This is exactly what she did, and is the mark of a brave, clear-thinking woman without whom the Brooklands estate would have remained without a track that was to foster British motor racing, and then become home to aviation and manufacturing of aircraft critical to both future world wars.

Ethel was born in 1864 and her childhood was spent in Tasmania and Bermuda, where her father had been colonial governor. Returning to England, she met Hugh and was soon to be married to him. They had no children and devoted their time to running the Brooklands estate.

Writer and historian Antonia Scott, in an article for Community Life Magazines in March 2025, said of Ethel: “She was a strong character and a great lover of motor vehicles. You think of her as your classic society lady, but she’s just this incredible woman. She was really pivotal in having the track constructed. She was a forceful woman and very vibrant and generous.”

Ironically, her husband, Hugh, didn’t enjoy driving and, although he had owned the fourth car registered in Great Britain, he engaged a driver and increasingly relied on Ethel to take the wheel. The year after the visit to the Coppa Florio, Ethel decided to buy a second Itala, which she christened Bambo; it was the car that had reputedly won the 1906 Coppa Florio race. Ethel was the true motoring enthusiast in the marriage at a time when seeing a female driver at the wheel of a car was something of a novelty; to see an Englishwoman on the roads of the continent on their 1905 trip to Italy would be a rare sight indeed. Her great nephew, Dr Frank Hanford, recalled: “She was a furious driver. Frightful. Everyone in Weybridge got out of the way.”

She was one of the first women to fly an aeroplane and very professionally managed what was to become the Brooklands Estate Company, the organisation responsible for the track, airfield and other projects. In name she shared this responsibility with her husband, but his withdrawal from the day-to-day activities and inability to cope with the stress of the huge building project meant that she was firmly at the helm of a much-troubled ship.

Towards the end of 1906, Brooklands Automobile Racing Club (BARC) was formed, made up by a group of distinguished men from the English aristocracy. Under the auspices of what was to become the RAC, the board included the Duke of Beaufort, Lord Northcliffe, the Duke of Westminster, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Lord Lonsdale. From their offices in Carlton Place, they planned how motor racing would take place for the first time in Great Britain, how races should be run, and how this new circuit was going to be a triumphant demonstration of British endeavour, attracting the best of international cars and drivers. Not completing the circuit on time was not an option at this stage and they, like Hugh Locke King, were also motivated by the thought that the Brooklands circuit could generate significant money from spectator attendances. Plans duly went ahead for an official opening in 1907.

The main outer circuit or oval was approximately 2.75 miles long and 100ft wide, and was to be primarily used for speed testing and record attempts. It featured two huge banked curves: the Members’ Banking (Home Banking) and Byfleet Banking. The banking reached nearly 30ft, with a maximum inclination of around 26.5 degrees that allowed cars to maintain high speeds without slowing down in the corners, assuming the car and the driver were up to this vertiginous challenge.

The Finishing Straight was a separate, additional section, approximately 0.5 miles long, that diverged from the oval at the ‘Fork’ near the River Wey crossing and passed the Clubhouse and grandstands, providing a grandstand finish (a tradition borrowed from horse racing). The Fork was a split in the track where a driver could continue on the outer oval or turn left onto the Finishing Straight. This junction was essential for the handicap races that were the staple of Brooklands.