“The sight, sound and smell of motor racing have been denied from us for nearly six years.” So went the opening sentence of August 1945’s Motor Sport Magazine, as it reported an oft-forgotten but highly significant event in British motorsport history. It was called the Cockfosters Rally, and it took place just two months after VE day, making it the very first motorsport event to be held in Britain following the war. When a star-studded line-up of drivers and cars assembled on the tarmac roads of the unbuilt Hertfordshire residential area, British forces were still serving around the globe. One of the drivers, famous racer Tony Rolt, had only just returned from a Nazi prisoner of war camp.
But while the country had yet to come to terms with the extent of social and economic damage suffered in humanity’s most destructive war, all that mattered on a warm and sunny 14th July was motorsport. None of the UK’s race circuits had re-opened yet (Crystal Palace remained inactive for another eight years), but the non-competitive Cockfosters Rally confirmed that the passion for racing was back. It welcomed not only an eclectic mix of machines, each having been dusted off after six-years of dormancy and fuelled up with rationed petrol, but also 1,500 spectators, who’d travelled from far and wide to line the unfinished roads. The layout had been laid in 1939 and should have been joined by hundreds of houses as part of a new residential area, had it not been for the six-year denial of normality.
For the Saturday rally, fans entering Cockfosters’ Bevan Estate – a rural Tudor setting that had remained largely unchanged until the nearby Cockfosters tube station opened in 1933 – were surrounded by open land of grass and trees. A stark contrast to the pavements and brickwork that make up the area now, part of the London Borough of Barnet, 2.5 miles inside the M25. It’s comprised of small residential streets that feed off a larger Mount Pleasant road, which links to an adjacent roundabout. Back in the summer of 1945, this appropriately named 'The Roundabout' provided the main feature for a tight circuit drawn out by Cockfosters Rally organiser, Alec Francis Rivers-Fletcher. Other bends were called Rembrandt Corner and Chessington Bend, after the hotel and zoo, which were popular wartime car club meeting locations that Rivers-Fletcher had frequented.
Like many of the event’s attendees, Rivers-Fletcher’s story is deserving of its own feature. He started work as a mechanic for the Bentley Boys and went on to work at BRM, to name two of his many achievements, and appropriately, drove a 4.5-litre Bentley in Cockfosters. Assisting him was the fifth Earl Howe, who opened the event wearing a suit and tipped cap while driving a Type 57S Bugatti – which 64 years later would sell for $4.4 million, having been discovered in a French barn in original condition. Although arguably the most eye-catching competitor was a then brand-new Aston Martin Atom concept, with the one-off car's aerodynamically-sculpted panels making it look like something out of this world – especially compared to the in-period entrants.
That list included a then famous ‘Bloody Mary’, a double-engined open-wheeler first built to tackle Shelsley Walsh by schoolboy brothers John and Richard Bolster in 1929, with a budget of just £25. The short wheelbase car, which had started life with a JAP 760cc V-twin bike motor before being given a second engine to create the final 110hp setup had earned its brothers plenty of silverware through hill climbs of the thirties. Its post-war motorsport return was met with smiles thanks to the exuberance of its driver, but there was also sadness at the realisation that only one of the Bolsters, John, was to be driving in Cockfosters. Richard had lost his life serving as an RAF pilot in the war.
Not surprisingly, there were many more stories like that, so while a large line-up of deafening, high-powered racing cars provided a welcome diversion (some were described as demonstrating their distaste of rationed petrol by spewing out plenty of smoke!), the fatigue and suffering endured was only just below the surface. Central London, still recovering from the Blitz, was only a dozen miles south, after all; even the cheery local paper report to follow the Cockfosters Rally ran alongside the story of a presumed dead Barnet airman of just 21 years of age.
Nevertheless the crowd of the Cockfosters Rally is said to have brought real enthusiasm with it, even if in this case it was not officially sanctioned as a competition but rather a bit of jolly good demonstration fun. Rivers-Fletchers later described the day in the November 1973 issue of Classic Car magazine as having had a “terrific” atmosphere, with onlookers applauding efforts from the most enthusiastic drivers, including a certain Alec Issigonis, who – 14 years before his ingenious Mini would reach market – “neatly” piloted his aluminium monocoque and supercharged Lightweight Special around the course.
By contrast, Motor Sport reported that another driver, Winston Churchill’s wartime Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Brabazon of Tara, no less, pushed his 1,100cc streamlined Fiat quite hard, while providing spectators with a “reminder of how safe and controllable the modern car is”. Naughtiest of them all was Leslie Ballamy, a pioneer of suspension and swing axle designs used in Bugattis and Bentleys, who in Cockfosters “skidded round” his Ford Ten. An impressive feat, we’d argue, given that the UK-built saloon had only 30hp from its 1.2-litre four-pot. One that apparently caught the attention of course marshal for the day, broadcaster Eric Findon.
The day’s running was considered to be a major success, and perfectly timed, too, with rainclouds rolling in barely an hour after the crowds dispersed. Cockfosters may be best-known these days as a suburban area with a curious name at the end of the Piccadilly Line, but 75 years ago, its role in the re-awakening of British motorsport was cheerily significant; enthusiasm was high after the rally that soon after July, a sprint at Filton was organised, before larger-scale sprints at Elstree, Prescott and Shelsley followed on the 1945 calendar. Then, in 1946, inactive RAF aerodrome Gransden Lodge provided the UK with its first post-war closed-circuit event. Britain’s recovery from war was to be a long and arduous one, but at least motor racing was back. Thanks in no small part to the cars and drivers that gathered one summer’s day on an undeveloped housing estate in Middlesex.
[Bugatti pic credit: Bonhams]
1 / 8