‘Mayhead’s fascination has been so all-consuming that it has even led to him acquiring Gardner’s old MG’
GOLDIE
Motoring and motorsport biographies can often end up being rather worthy affairs, and when you learn that the author of this tribute to speed-record hero Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Thomas ‘Goldie’ Gardner spends his day job investigating classic car valuations and collating market analysis, it doesn’t sound promising. But if you’ve met John Mayhead, or indeed read any of his contributions in the classic and mainstream press, you’ll know that the editor of the UK Hagerty Price Guide is far from a dusty scholar. He’s a true classic enthusiast, who has clearly poured his heart into his first book by tackling a man for whom his fascination has been so all-consuming that it has even led to him acquiring Gardner’s old MG TC (a charming story covered in the book’s epilogue).
The result is a biography that’s exhaustively researched and engagingly written, with a narrative that has the pace of a WW2 escape story rather than a dry history book. In that respect, it fully delivers on the mission statement of the newly minted National Motor Museum Publishing, for which Goldie is also a debut title. The NMMP has been formed with the aim of sharing ‘the personal, social and cultural tales of motoring with a non-specialist audience’, largely through lively storytelling, and that is clear from the off – following a thoughtful and considered foreword from the Duke of Richmond, whose grandfather was one of Gardner’s great friends.
Mayhead’s former career as a Coldstream Guard must surely have influenced his interest in Gardner, and the book begins at full tilt as it dives not into Goldie’s early years and schooldays, but into the horror of the battlefields of the Somme. There the future racing driver and record-breaker acquired much of his grit – and a debilitating injury that would affect him for the rest of his life.
Having set the tone for the story to follow, Mayhead does then track back to recount the lanky racer’s early life and burgeoning passion for speed, before returning to the plane crash that would lead to him being invalided out of the army and, eventually, embarking on a career in motorsport. It was as a racer that Gardner first encountered Cecil Kimber and MG, but as a record-breaker with the sporting Abingdon marque that he is best remembered. This period of his life, setting remarkable targets in tiny-engined streamliners, inevitably makes up the bulk of the book, yet his often t
