Donald Campbell

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Donald Campbell (disambiguation) .

Donald Malcolm Campbell CBE (born March 23, 1921 in Horley , Surrey , England , † January 4, 1967 on Coniston Water , Lancashire ) was a British motorboat and automobile racing driver . He was the son of Malcolm Campbell .

Life

Childhood and youth

He attended Manor House in Sussex , S. Peter's Preparatory School, and Uppington Public School, a school his father had already attended. He repeated a grade twice because he was more interested in sport and craft activities than theory. Leo Villa, Campbell senior's chief mechanic, explained how to dismantle a motorcycle engine. When Malcolm Campbell wanted to break Ray Keech's land speed record on the South African Verneuk Pan , the bed of a dry lake, in 1929 , his son accompanied him. Sharp-edged slate in the ground made it necessary to prepare the route with mud. The onset of rain complicated the procedure and many of the workers brought in became ill. Donald himself was found to have contracted typhus on the return journey and almost died from it. At the age of 16 he was infected with rubella , which developed into a rheumatic fever that confined him to a wheelchair for months . At the age of 17, he crashed his motorcycle ; two skull fractures were the result. Soon after, he collided with a Canadian Army truck on a motorcycle and fractured his arm, shoulder and two ribs.

Time in the war and the way to chasing records

This was already in the days of the Second World War . Donald Campbell wanted to become a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force , but was found unfit because of the past rheumatic fever, which can permanently damage the heart valves. So he went to Briggs Motor Bodies Ltd as assistant to the sales manager in the aerospace division and later took on the position of a maintenance technician in this company. In 1945 he married Daphne Harvey; their daughter Georgina was born in 1946. Campbell's obsession with racing led to marital problems and eventually divorce. His second marriage to Dorothy McKegg in 1952 also suffered and led to a divorce. In 1958 Campbell married the Belgian entertainer Tonia Bern. This coped better with the whole situation of Campbell, as the racing profession was increasingly becoming part of show business. Donald Campbell started out on a modest career, starting at £ 1 a week as a clerk at Lloyd’s , his father ’s industry, who also arranged the hiring. During the war, Campbell saved £ 1,200 which he used to invest in Kine Engineering . If Sir Malcolm Campbell was to be regarded as wealthy and could afford racing as a hobbyhorse, things were different with Donald: he first had to raise the money for his activities from sponsors . For the attack on the water speed record, he sold his stake in Kine Engineering and took out a mortgage on his house.

Campbell senior had unsuccessfully experimented with a jet engine in his record boat Bluebird K4 after the war . Donald bought the boat and, with the help of Leo Villa and Peter du Cane from Vosper , it was restored to its pre-war screw-propelled condition. Donald never competed with his father, but the news that the American Henry Kaiser was planning to attack his world speed record on the water was the decisive factor in starting his own career as a record hunter. The old boat underwent a number of changes from 1949 to 1951 and was good enough to win the Oltranza Cup in 1951. It sank that year, although it was not clear whether it collided with driftwood or a structural weakness enabled the gearbox to press a hole in its shell. It was clear that only a boat equipped with a jet engine would achieve record speeds, and Samlesbury Engineering Ltd delivered the corresponding device in November 1954: Bluebird K7 . Stanley Sayres with his Slo Mo Shun held the record that Campbell snatched from him on July 23, 1955 with 325.6 km / h. By 1964 he improved the value several times and finally arrived at 444.71 km / h, which he achieved on Lake Dumbleyung in Australia .

More records

At the same time, Campbell was developing an automobile that was supposed to be good enough for a land speed record : the Bluebird CN7 , with a production cost of around 12 million marks, undoubtedly the most expensive car of the time. The project had been pursued very thoroughly and with scientific methods for five years, backed by an interest group of around 70 local companies, which made the matter a "project of British prestige". Campbell was inspired by a glowing patriotism , which occasionally expressed itself in arrogance - especially towards its American competitors - but also openly and charming, his extreme superstition was no secret. On Friday, September 16, 1960, he accelerated a little too much on the Bonneville Salt Flats , the Bluebird CN7 overturned , Donald Campbell got away with another broken skull and a broken ear drum . Immediately afterwards Campbell announced that he would try again with his vehicle , indicative of his tenacious doggedness, which would drive him, increasingly riddled with sheer desperation, over the next four years.

Sir Alfred Owen , owner of Motor Panels Ltd , the producer of the Bluebird CN7 , pushed the repair of the badly damaged car forward, British Petroleum suggested Lake Eyre, Australia, for the next record attempt, and Dunlop sent Andrew Mustard there to check the surface quality the salt flat. Mustard was then also responsible for the preparation of the record track. However, as unexpected rains came in 1963, which softened the salt, Campbell had to leave again. The following year there was the same picture. With the scenario of failure in mind, the nerves of some of those involved were on edge: In Parliament in Canberra , MPs were heated up by the kind of circus hype that was also supported by the government through the provision of road construction equipment. Sir Alfred Owen asked whether Campbell was even able to get everything out of the vehicle; even the press no longer seemed to consider him suitable - the fastest accident a person had ever had seemed to be in his bones. Eventually Andrew Mustard, the project's official reserve driver, began to publicly offer himself as the one who would get the job right away. The doubts about Campbell's suitability went so far that the "Confederation of Australian Motorsport" required him to undergo a medical examination to clarify his suitability.

On Friday, July 17, 1964, he drove the Bluebird across the runway and achieved an average of 648.7 km / h from two runs, which was the record for wheel-driven land vehicles. A telegram that reached him from Buckingham Palace ultimately stood for the importance of his undertaking: "DELIGHTED TO HEAR OF YOUR SUCCESS - PHILIP " (Glad to hear of your success). In December of the same year, he set a new record with a racing boat at 444.65 km / h, the seventh improvement on his own record without interruption. The achievement of breaking the speed record on water and on land within a calendar year was and is unique.

Waning interest and his death

Public interest in Donald Campbell's plans then subsided. Hardly anyone was interested in wanting to break the sound barrier with a rocket-propelled car . Campbell intended to change this by increasing the water speed record to 300 mph (482.7 km / h) with his proven racing boat . A mirror-like surface of the water is a prerequisite for this, and so on January 4, 1967 on the English lake Coniston Water, a water brake installed on the Bluebird K7 and his impatience were his undoing. The water brake created waves that rippled the water surface for a long time. As an exception, Campbell did not stop for fuel after the first run as usual and immediately started in the opposite direction. The tiny waves were enough to make the boat roll over at 527 km / h, with Campbell's death. The wreck and the remains were only found and recovered by a diver on May 28, 2001. The racing boat has been restored and completed trips on the water again in 2018.

Honor

In 1957 he became Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Posthumously Donald Campbell received the award "The Queen's Commendation for Gallantry".

Artistic processing

In the film Across the Lake (UK 1988) Donald Campbell is portrayed by Anthony Hopkins .

In the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day , villain Gustav Graves refers to Donald Campbell as saying that “fulfilling his dream” is “a good way to walk”.

The British rock band Marillion released the song Out Of This World on their 1995 album Afraid of Sunlight . This deals with Donald Campbell's accident. At live concerts, video sequences of the last record attempt are recorded for this song.

The song inspired a Marillion fan and amateur diver to dive for the sunken speedboat and Donald Campbell's corpse. This undertaking was crowned with success in 2001.

See also

• Rocket car

literature

• Paul Clifton: The fastest men at the wheel. The history of the world speed records in the automobile , ( The fastest men on earth, New York 1964, German), trans. by Günther Görtz, Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 1968, pp. 211-217, 223-235 u. 247-265
• Geoff Dawes: Bluebird Blasts the Bush , in: Australian Classic Car Monthly , June 1997 ( Racing Campbells - Donald & Malcolm Campbell - Bluebird Blasts The Bush ( Memento from September 7, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ))
• Donald M. Campbell , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 13/1967 from March 20, 1967, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
• Nobility obliged . In: Der Spiegel . No. 40 , 1960, pp. 88-92 ( online - 28 September 1960 ).
• Record attempt . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 1961, pp. 64 ( online - 12 December 1961 ).
• Until white heat . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 1963, pp. 64 ( Online - Mar. 27, 1963 ).
• Playing with death , in: Die Zeit No. 8/1967 of February 24, 1967

Web links

Commons : Donald Campbell  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Donald Malcolm Campbell CBE 1921–1967 , ( Memento from February 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
• Donald Campbell. Speed ​​King , BBC documentary on Youtube (accessed May 30, 2014)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kenneth Rudeen: Speed ​​King? Or Just Son Of Speed ​​King? , Sports Illustrated, July 29, 1963, on si.com. (Accessed November 9, 2014)
2. ↑ Salt of the Earth . In: Der Spiegel . No. 3 , 1967, p. 57 ( online - January 9, 1967 ).
3. ↑ Spiegel Online: More than 50 years after the crash - the special racing boat “Bluebird” is back on August 7th. 2018 (Accessed August 7, 2018)
4. ↑ To sing at Donald Campbell's funeral was one of my biggest gigs ever ( Memento of the original from July 13, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , newsandstar.co.uk, accessed May 22, 2012. 
5. ↑ The Bluebird Project ( Memento of the original from January 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , simplemanblog.wordpress.com, accessed May 22, 2012. 
6. ↑ Bluebird's Return to Coniston Water , bbc.co.uk, accessed May 22, 2012.