Beyond the Checkered Flag: St John Horsfall's Thrilling Double Life in Racing and Intelligence

St John ‘Jock’ Horsfall’s name is famous in Aston Martin circles, but he had a secret. A successful works driver before the war, he went on in peacetime to twice win the Spa 24 Hours but kept quiet his wartime life in MI5, including driving a corpse packed in dry ice to Scotland. Why? To drop the body in the sea carrying fake documents to fool the Germans about British plans – the real-life ‘Man who Never Was’ story. But there was more. Ian Girling worked with Jock Horsfall from 1947 until Horsfall’s death racing an ERA in 1949, and recalls their time together.

“I actually lived with the family for some seven months while he and I built his second Speed Model Aston into a Formula B car, running on methanol. It was eventually modified back into a sports car, now known as ‘the Spa Special’. As Jock was financing it himself, money was not too plentiful, but it was a labour of love. He was such a nice guy, quite quiet, but always full of fun. When his cousin Kath came to visit, we wired up the lavatory seat to a Scintilla magneto — it gave her quite a shock.

“I had a hand in the preparation of the car for the Spa race in ’49. Jock was worried that Paul Frère had not had experience in the car, so he drove the entire 24 hours on his own. He would have been even further up if we hadn’t had to tie the front wings up with rope.

“He spent the whole war in MI5, and one of his duties was testing the defences of airfields, army camps and naval establishments. When he found weaknesses he would take the CO to task with the equivalent rank of a full Colonel. He would also transmit fake radio messages from all over the country to see if they were intercepted. Once he was standing in the grass on an airbase, photographing Mosquitoes landing, and an eagle-eyed pilot spotted him. When the base police arrived he threw his Minox camera into the long grass and claimed he had just been shading his eyes. Of course he had to come back at night and find the camera. He rarely carried ID, he just talked his way out of trouble. Only once did he fail to satisfy an army corporal, and had to divulge a War Office number to vouch for him.

“He would try to get port officials and the like drunk to see what they would reveal, and he actually had a special butter ration for this. He would eat ¼lb of butter beforehand to line his stomach, so that although they got more and more drunk, he would stay sober.

“Often he went off to collect our agents returning from abroad, and was also involved in ‘disinformation’, passing misleading information to the Germans. I have documents which show that the department even spied on the Americans, copying details of their new ’planes, downgrading the performance figures, and then releasing that to the Germans via our double-agents.

“I was with Jock after he had agreed to drive Peter Bell’s ERA following John Bolster’s accident. He was very worried that John had encouraged Bell to produce more and more power from the ERA’s engine without improving the handling, and that you just could not use the power. However, with just two weeks to go before the Silverstone race, even with Jock’s skill and experience there was just not the time to make worthwhile improvements to the road-holding. The result we all know. I was so stricken that I couldn’t bear to visit a race at Silverstone for years afterwards.

“The other brothers weren’t really interested in racing, though Jeffrey worked with Freddie Dixon and Harry Ferguson on the four-wheel-drive project. His mother was very keen, though. And brave — she once leapt into the sea to save someone, even though she was 60 and recovering from flu. The butler followed with her bathing-suit, and she was so exhausted he had to propel her back up the path.

“As to women, Jock said, ‘I will never get married until I stop racing. I’ve seen the look on wives and girlfriends in the pits when their man doesn’t appear’.

“Jock was a very special person, a fine engineer and a really wonderful man to work and be with. I still, at times, visit his grave and am still saddened at the loss to the sport and his many, many friends.”