'The Germans said if I raced, they'd kill me': the GP driver who defied Hitler

There are anniversaries that arrive with a fanfare, and there are anniversaries that pass almost unnoticed, observed only by those of us who are fond of history’s quirkier annals. This week marks the latter sort, for it is almost exactly 25 years since the death, on July 27, 2001, of Thomas Pitt Cholmondeley-Tapper, who was just about to attain the fine old age of 91 before he quietly slipped away.

I am well aware that his magnificently florid name makes him sound less like a grand prix driver than a minor character from an Agatha Christie mystery, perhaps an unfortunate Reverend Thomas Pitt Cholmondeley-Tapper, discovered face-down in the vestry in the fictional village of St Mary Mead after having been bludgeoned with a chalice by the verger. Yet behind the bizarrely elaborate appellation lay an altogether more interesting reality, for Thomas Pitt Cholmondeley-Tapper was born in 1910 not in a neatly thatched cottage surrounded by prettily clipped hedgerows in Home Counties England but in a large but ramshackle wooden villa surrounded by eucalyptus trees in Wellington, New Zealand.

His father, George Albert Tapper, a businessman of Norwegian heritage, was well-to-do — as, independent of her husband’s success, was his mother, Lena Cholmondeley, the only daughter of the Venerable George James Cholmondeley, the Archdeacon of Christchurch. An intrepid and mechanically minded boy, young Thomas thrilled to the sight of what few cars and motorcycles he encountered among Wellington’s ubiquitous horses and carts – French Darracqs and American Buicks (cars) and British Douglases and American Indians (bikes) teetering along crushed-stone streets that became impassably muddy in winter and chokingly dusty in summer.

When he was 13 he asked for and received an advance on his pocket money and for £3 (yes, really) he bought a beaten-up Douglas W-20 — a lightweight bike propelled by an 8bhp side-valve boxer-twin engine — which he dismantled, rebuilt, and got going again. Accompanied by his Airedale terrier lying on and clinging to the Douglas’s petrol tank, he would ride it to nearby Lyall Bay, to enjoy an afternoon’s swimming and fishing, outrunning any police cars whose occupants had spotted that he was too young to ride motorcycles legally. He raced that Douglas from time to time, too.

The following year, by which time he had turned 14, the family moved to England, and the young New Zealander adapted to his 12,000-mile displacement with surprising ease. He did well at school, both academically and on the playing fields, excelling in Latin and becoming an able batsman. He also acquired something that would remain with him for the rest of his life: the polished, upper-class English accent that, a century ago, served almost as a passport to the British establishment. It was an acquired voice rather than an inherited one, but he wore it so naturally that few who encountered him later would ever guess that he had first opened his mouth on the opposite side of the world.

His education then took him to the University of Grenoble, in the foothills of the French Alps, where yet another talent revealed itself. Skiing became not merely a pleasant diversion but a serious competitive pursuit, and he developed into an accomplished racer on snow as readily as ever he had on two wheels. Returning to England, he read law at Jesus College, Cambridge, and he looked well set for a career at the bar until, encouraged by a sporty chum, he took a trip from Cambridge to Brooklands that redirected the course of the next phase of his life. Like so many before and since, he arrived as an interested observer and departed hopelessly infected by motor sport’s incurable virus.

Brooklands in those days was imbued with a unique atmosphere. It was not only a race circuit, for it was also a meeting place for daredevils, toffs, and eccentrics of all kinds, united by the shared conviction that automotive speed represented not only derring-do but also post-World War One progress. The great concrete banking echoed with the rorty clamour of cars whose drivers were still in the process of discovering what cars might become, while the paddock buzzed with characters every bit as colourful as the machines they drove. Cholmondeley-Tapper quickly found himself at home there, and throughout the 1930s he established a formidable reputation. Together with Eileen Ellison, a gifted driver who won ladies’ races at Brooklands and with whom he was widely rumoured to enjoy rather more than a professional friendship, he raced extensively across the UK, continental Europe, and even South Africa.

Their successes accumulated impressively. Victories came at Brooklands, at Shelsley Walsh, and at Donington, each venue demanding different skills yet each rewarding precision as well as bravado. For example, the thick end of three-quarters of a century before drivers would turn up to grands prix armed with laptops, accompanied by race engineers backed by detailed simulations, Cholmondeley-Tapper revealed an unusually analytical approach to his craft, for he was one of the first competitors to insist on walking every circuit before driving it, studying its track surface with painstaking care, noting bumps, potholes, cambers, and any likely grip variations that others might have either overlooked or dismissed. Today every Formula 1 driver conducts meticulous track walks as a matter of routine, accompanied by engineers discussing kerb profiles, drainage patterns, and asphalt characteristics in forensic detail. In the 1920s and 1930s such behaviour was far from common, but Cholmondeley-Tapper regarded it as common sense.

His willingness to think independently characterised many of his decisions and actions, although they would not all appear equally wise at the time. For instance, in 1936, at the age of 25, he and Ellison bought a Bugatti Type 37, a machine of considerable pedigree, then they quickly replaced it with a Maserati 8CM acquired from Francis Curzon, the fifth Earl Howe, for the remarkably modest sum of £300. The story goes that the great Tazio Nuvolari had warned Howe that the Maserati was, in Cholmondeley-Tapper’s memorable recollection years later, “a murderous thing”. That description would scarcely enhance the resale value of any racing car, yet Cholmondeley-Tapper saw not a death trap but an opportunity.

Powered by a supercharged 3.0-litre straight-eight engine producing a deafening 240bhp, a power output that caused its chassis to flex alarmingly, that Maserati demanded respect — caution even — yet it was also formidably fast, so in July 1936 Cholmondeley-Tapper decided to take it to Nürburgring and enter it for that year’s German Grand Prix. Modern race drivers rightly regard the Nordschleife with reverence despite never racing F1 cars there, but those who tackled its daunting 170-odd corners in pre-World War Two grand prix cars confronted something truly savage. The circuit twisted through the Eifel forests with nary a concession to safety, every crest concealing uncertainty and every turn threatening catastrophe.

“I didn’t like Hitler, you see? I was the only driver who didn’t meet him or salute him or shake his hand.”

Even against such a daunting backdrop Cholmondeley-Tapper’s 10th-place finish might appear modest – until one remembers the opposition. The first seven positions were taken by the mighty Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz Silver Arrows, those astonishing state-supported machines that represented the absolute summit of contemporary automotive engineering. To finish immediately behind such a phalanx, in a tricky car, on a treacherous racetrack, on an unseasonably cold and windy afternoon, required talent and courage of a very high order indeed.

Yet the race is significant for reasons extending well beyond lap times or finishing positions. Adolf Hitler attended it, as he frequently attended big races in Germany, delighting in motor sport’s utility as political theatre and intending personally to congratulate the successful competitors. The drivers would comply with such rituals, but Cholmondeley-Tapper did not. He refused to speak to Hitler, he refused to shake his hand, and he refused to offer him a Nazi salute.

It is easy, from the comfort of the 21st century, to offer an approving nod to such a refusal without appreciating the atmosphere in which it occurred, but in 1936 it was a very big deal. By that time Hitler’s grip on Germany was tightening rapidly, any dissent carried potentially frightening consequences, and a young sportsman from a foreign country could have been forgiven for concluding that discretion represented by some margin the better part of valour.

Decades later, recalling the episode during an interview with BBC Radio Oxford, Cholmondeley-Tapper explained his reasoning with characteristic understatement. “I didn’t like Hitler, you see? I was the only driver who didn’t meet him or salute him or shake his hand, and — my goodness me — the Germans were pretty angry with me about that. They even tried to stop me racing because they said that, if I raced, they’d kill me — they’d try to run me off the road — but that only made me more antagonistic and determined.” To my mind the calmness of that recollection somehow makes the story all the more laudable. There is no theatrical self-congratulation, and no attempt to portray himself as a hero; merely the quiet matter-of-factness of a young man who believed that principles were not negotiable. For the record, two years later another young non-German driver, Sussex-born Richard Seaman, did indeed offer Hitler a Nazi salute.

If Nürburgring 1936 demonstrated Cholmondeley-Tapper’s mettle both on track and off it, the remainder of that season further illustrated both the driving ability and the strength of mind that made him such a remarkable man. In October 1936 he arrived at Donington Park aboard his Maserati 8CM and promptly demonstrated that, murderous reputation notwithstanding, it possessed speed enough to trouble machinery of far greater reputation. For one glorious lap he led the Donington Grand Prix, briefly pushing his vicious Italian thoroughbred to the head of an illustrious German field, before fate intervened in the familiar guise that so often stalked pre-war motor sport. Steering failure ended his run, leaving only speculation about what he might have achieved had the Maserati’s mechanical components proved equal to its driver’s skill and ambition. Bernd Rosemeyer and Hans Stuck delivered an imperious Auto Union one-two.

By the end of that year, 1936, fortune duly appeared ready to smile on Cholmondeley-Tapper, and in spectacular fashion: Mercedes-Benz, whose Silver Arrows represented the absolute pinnacle of four-wheeled engineering, invited him to test its formidable W25K grand prix car. It was precisely the sort of opportunity for which ambitious drivers spend entire careers waiting. Even in our own era, when F1 grids are populated by athletes who have been groomed almost from infancy for the highest level of competition, an invitation to test an F1 Mercedes would be regarded as the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. Imagine, then, the reaction if an aspiring F1 star were to telephone Toto Wolff and politely explain that, much as he appreciated the offer, he had booked a skiing holiday for the dates concerned and would rather not cancel it. The thought is so gloriously absurd that it borders on comedy, yet that is precisely what Thomas Pitt Cholmondeley-Tapper did.

Was there a calculated anti-Nazi snub involved in his rejection of the opportunity? Well, possibly. But, even so, I like to think that it also reflected a personality refreshingly free from the relentless careerism that was already becoming all too common in elite motor sport. He enjoyed skiing, he had made a commitment to a group of friends, he intended to honour it, and the racing world would simply have to wait – except, of course, that it did not. Mercedes-Benz moved on, as big teams invariably do, and the opportunity never returned.

With hindsight it is impossible not to wonder what might have followed had he accepted. Might he have secured a works Mercedes-Benz drive? Could he have established himself among Europe’s foremost grand prix drivers? In 1937 might he have mixed it thrillingly with the cream of Germany’s Silver Arrows aces, Bernd Rosemeyer, Hans Stuck, Rudolf Caracciola, Manfred von Brauchitsch, Hermann Lang, Christian Kautz, Rudolf Hasse, et al? Sadly, history can offer us no answers to the ‘what if?’ questions that often fascinate us most.

On the other hand, perhaps it is fitting that the defining episode of Cholmondeley-Tapper’s engagement with the 1930s German establishment should not concern a race but a moral choice. His refusal to acknowledge Hitler at Nürburgring has acquired greater significance with every passing decade because it represented and represents something that we still regard as admirable: the willingness of an individual to risk personal disadvantage in defence of principle. It is also worth our remembering that Cholmondeley-Tapper’s plucky act of defiance occurred before the full horrors of the Third Reich had become apparent to the wider world. There remained many in the UK who favoured appeasement over confrontation, or had persuaded themselves that the threat of Nazism was exaggerated or that diplomacy would somehow tame it. Cholmondeley-Tapper belonged to neither camp.

Indeed, soon afterwards, as his motor sport career drew quietly but suddenly to a close, he embarked on what at first appeared to be a much more conventional chapter in his life. Joining Lloyd’s of London as an insurance underwriter might have looked like a dramatic retreat from the glamorous braggadocio involved in tackling dangerous race circuits in devilish race cars, but it also brought him into the orbit of a group of influential London society figures, some of whose members were becoming ever more concerned by the gathering political storms across Europe. Among those with whom he became friendly was a back-bench Member of Parliament, Winston Churchill, whose warnings about Nazi Germany were still often being dismissed in respectable circles as irresponsibly alarmist and unnecessarily provocative.

By contrast, Cholmondeley-Tapper recognised in Churchill a man whose reading of Europe’s worst-case scenarios chimed closely with his own. Churchill played no direct part in what followed, but he encouraged it. Acting on his own, and not yet 30, Cholmondeley-Tapper purchased an aerodrome at Haddenham, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, convinced that such a facility would prove valuable should the worst happen. It was an investment born not of shrewd commercial calculation but of selfless political foresight, and it demonstrated yet again that the qualities that had made him such an intelligent racing driver — observation, preparation, and a refusal to ignore uncomfortable realities — were also going to inform the rest of his life.

The worst did happen, of course. Europe descended into war in 1939, and Haddenham became exactly the strategic asset that Cholmondeley-Tapper had anticipated. A Royal Air Force Spitfire squadron was stationed there, transforming what had once been a speculative acquisition into an important operational base. Nor did its owner remain a spectator. Just as he had sought speed on the ground, he now took to the skies, delivering military aircraft around the country as an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot during a conflict that would reshape the modern world. It is a remarkable progression when viewed in retrospect: motorcycle racer, skier, grand prix driver, lawyer, insurance underwriter, and wartime pilot, each role embraced with the same quiet competence and absence of self-advertisement. Or, to put it another way, there is an appealing lack of showmanship about Cholmondeley-Tapper’s life. He simply did what he thought circumstances required, moving from one chapter to the next without pausing for either permission or applause.