UK industrialist Bentley’s cars dominated at Le Mans circuit

WITH support from elite Bentley Boys, Walter Bentley, born 130 years ago, pushed his big saloons across the line.

W.O. (Walter Owen) Bentley at the wheel of the very first Bentley 3-Litre in 1920. Picture: Bentley Motors

THE light was fading as rain slicked the Circuit de la Sarthe track on the first day of the fourth 24-hour Le Mans challenge on June 18, 1927.

Among the 22-car line-up were three cars from “W.O.” Bentley’s Cricklewood factory near London. On the second lap their No. 1 car — named Old Mother Gun — broke the record for the 17.3km circuit, hitting 115km/h.

Among the elite Bentley Boys team backing engineer and former motorcycle racer Walter Owen Bentley, born 130 years ago tomorrow, at Le Mans were Woolf “Babe” Barnato, heir to South Africa’s Kimberley diamond magnate Barney Barnato; bacteriologist Dudley “Benjy” Benjafield; former World War I pilot and baronet Henry “Tim” Birkin; Shell Mex engineer Leslie Callingham; champion jockey George Duller, and magazine sports editor Sammy Davis.

At just after 9.30pm, French driver Pierre Tabourin in a Theophile Schneider car misjudged the virages of Maison Blanche, known by Britain’s Bentley Boys as the White House curves, to stop in a broadside across the road. At the wheel in Old Mother Gun, Callingham avoided a pileup by running off-road into a ditch where the car rolled, tossing him back on to the road.

W.O. Bentley at the wheel of his car circa 1910-1920. Courtesy: Bentley

Callingham — who in 1925 made headlines when Adelaide-born ear, nose and throat surgeon Francis Muecke created a new face for him after his nose and cheeks were pulped in a car accident in Surrey — was staggering to warn other drivers when Duller, in No. 2, slammed into No.1.

In the three-litre No. 3 Bentley, Davis had topped 128km/h when he noticed gravel and dirt strewn across the approach to White House. He slowed for the corner but, still too fast to stop, sent his car into a slide to hit the crashed cars sideways.

Despite considerable damage, Davis limped back to the pits, where he and co-driver Benjafield had a wheel repaired and returned to the track.

As glum British spectators wrote off their chances, Davis and Benjafield pushed their battered No. 3 car, which they also crashed just after the 1926 race, around the track. Passing competitors, they caught up to take first place across the line in one of the most celebrated drives in British motor racing history.

Expanded from four-litre to eight-litre engines, Bentleys dominated Le Mans up to 1930, when the financially ailing company retired from racing — selling two Speed Six models, from only 182 produced, to the Western Australia police force. The WA Criminal Investigation Department spent £3000 on each vehicle, capable of 144.8km/h with seven men on board.

“Speed Six Bentleys, the last word in road speed aristocracy,” newspapers enthused. “Bentleys, that more than any other British make of car, have retrieved British prestige at Brooklands and Le Mans. WA police authorities made full inquiries in England before they chose the Bentleys,” which replaced Ford “Tin Lizzies”. With radio equipment and modified sedan bodies, the Bentleys had a top road speed of 177km/h and were in use until 1947.

Bentley, born on September 16, 1888, in Hampstead, London, was the youngest of nine children of retired silk and wool merchant Alfred Bentley and his Adelaide-born wife Emily.

In 1840, Emily’s father Thomas Waterhouse arrived in Adelaide from Yorkshire to open a grocery shop with his brother John. In 1847 they built Adelaide’s oldest shop, Waterhouse Chambers, at 42-46 King William St, Kent Town. Waterhouse was also an early shareholder in the lucrative Burra Burra Mine, which supplied 89 per cent of South Australia’s copper for 15 years from 1848. As settlers fled to the Victorian gold rush from 1851 to 1856, he invested in land in Adelaide’s city centre, and retired to London in 1868 when Emily was 14.

In 1874 she married Alfred Bentley, then aged 33.

motoring magnate W.O. (Walter Owen) Bentley circa 1920s.

Walter was privately educated at Clifton College, Bristol, from 1902 until 1905. At 16 he became an apprentice engineer with the Great Northern Railway at Doncaster, Yorkshire.

He raced Quadrant, Rex and Indian motorcycles in 1909 and 1910, and briefly studied theoretical engineering at King’s College, London.

In 1912 he opened a company with his brother Horace, an accountant. Bentley and Bentley sold French Doriot, Flandrin & Parant cars, and Bentley-designed aluminium alloy pistons for DFP engines.

During World War I, Bentley worked for the Royal Naval Air Service Technical Board to improve the French Clerget rotary engine, using aluminium pistons.

He had built a factory at Cricklewood, when Barnato joined as financier and race driver in the 1920s.

With Bentleys always costly — £1125 for a saloon in 1924 when a T-model Ford cost £200 — Bentley suffered after the 1929 Wall Street crash. Barnato and Bentley were forced to sell in 1931 to holding company British Central Equitable Trust, only to find it was a front for rival Rolls-Royce, concerned the eight-litre Bentley was encroaching on Phantom II sales.

When Rolls-Royce closed its racing department in 1935, Bentley joined Lagonda, which combined with Aston Martin after World War II.

Bentley died in August 1971.