The Chairman’s Occasional Blog
The news that Donald Campbell’s Bluebird K7 has been restored, with the hope that it may run again on Coniston Water, has a link to Chichester, albeit tenuous.
Donald’s father, Sir Malcolm Cambell, first broke the land-speed record for a car on Pendine Sands, near Tenby in South Wales in September 1924 reaching a speed of 145 miles per hour in his Sunbeam car. Four years later on Daytona Beach in Florida he reached 206.9 miles per hour in a Napier-Campbell Blue Bird designed by Charles Amherst Villiers.
In the 1911 census for Chichester, Charles Amherst Villiers, aged ten was living at Oaklands Park together with two sisters, their mother, Elaine, (3rd daughter of 1st Lord Wimbourne, a Welsh Industrialist) his father Ernest, an ordained member of the Church of England, who had been a Liberal member of Parliament for Brighton from April 1905 to December 1910, a Governess and nine servants. The family had taken a short-term lease on Oaklands, (see Richard Childs, Chichester History No. 37, 2021, p.10).
Charles Amhurst Villiers died in 1991, aged 91. He moved to Canada and then the USA after the 2nd World War becoming President of the American Rocket Society in 1948 returning to England in 1965 working with the British Racing driver Graham Hill. He was also an accomplished artist including a portrait of Ian Fleming in 1962. In early Fleming novels James Bond had driven a Blower Bentley, designed by Charles Amhurst Villiers. His Obituary in ‘The Times’ of 31 January 1992 refers to Charles’ ‘infectious enthusiasm, much charm and boundless energy to everything he did during a long and adventurous life’. A life that spent some time in Oaklands Park, Chichester.
Charles Amherst (the latter taken from his paternal grandmother’s maiden name, Florence Tyssen-Amhurst) was to go to Oundle School in Northamptonshire and thence Cambridge where he read physics, having spent some time as an apprentice at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough. From Cambridge he went to work with Armstrong-Whitworth in Coventry and became an expert at boosting the performance of car engines. It was this knowledge and skill that caught the attention of Malcolm Campbell and led Charles Amherst to design the 24 litre Napier Lion engine that enabled Campbell to achieve the world land-speed record in 1928.