[BITList] Fwd: Glamour with bonnets

[John Feltham]

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> Bentley,  Walter Owen  (1888-1971), designer and racer of motor cars, was born on 16 September 1888 at 78 Avenue Road, Hampstead, London, the youngest in the family of six sons and three daughters of Alfred Bentley, retired businessman of London, and his wife, Emily Waterhouse. After leaving Clifton College at sixteen and a premium apprenticeship (1905-10) with the Great Northern Railway at Doncaster, he raced motorcycles and cars, and worked as a driver and mechanic for the National Motor Cab Company.
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> In 1912 Bentley acquired, with his brother Horace Milner Bentley, the London agency of three French cars, Buchet, La Licorne, and Doriot, Flandrin et Parant. At their premises off Upper Baker Street he then made a major contribution to the development of the internal combustion engine, originating the use of aluminium for pistons. Commissioned in 1914 and attached to the Royal Naval Air Service, he designed two rotary aero-engines, BR1 and BR2, which were successfully fitted to the Sopwith Camel and Snipe respectively. In 1919 he was appointed MBE.
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> In that year, with F. T. Burgess and Harry Varley, Bentley designed, built, and marketed a 3 litre engine and car, aimed at the top of the market, with a high performance for fast, sporting touring. He subsequently designed 4, 6, and 8 litre engines. Speed and endurance record breaking and long-distance racing were the surest forms of testing and advertising. 'We were in racing, not for glory and heroics but strictly for business.' Paradoxically, his 'Bentley boys', among them Woolf Barnato, son of the South African diamond millionaire, provided the British motor industry with its most glamorous episode. The works-entered team won the twenty-four hours' race at Le Mans in the years 1927-30.
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> Bentley's company was chronically underfunded and development costs always outran returns. Financial disaster was temporarily averted when Barnato put his money in and replaced Bentley as chairman in 1926, but the Wall Street crash in 1929 (the first year in which the company showed a profit) exposed the vulnerability of the luxury car market. In 1931 the company was bought, to Bentley's chagrin, by its rival, Rolls-Royce, Bentley's service contract being among the assets acquired. He had no part as a designer in the new subsidiary, Bentley Motors (1931). He felt 'a hostage-a dangerous ex-enemy confined (with all the comforts) to my Elba'. His contract expired, he moved to Lagonda in 1935, dangerously returning to the precarious world of the fast car. There he improved the Le Mans 4 litre and introduced a new V 12 twelve-cylinder.
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> During the Second World War Bentley worked with Lagonda on aircraft and tank components. After the war Lagonda announced a 2 litre car to be sold as Lagonda-Bentley. Rolls-Royce was swift to establish in the courts that its purchase of the trademark Bentley over-rode its contract with him, which had banned his own use of his name for ten years only. The car was then marketed as 'Lagonda, designed under the supervision of W. O. Bentley', but the volume of orders could not be met owing to the post-war shortage of steel. The firm was sold to David Brown and Bentley's engine was used in the Aston-Martin DB2 developed in its successors.
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> Taciturn, precise, a perfectionist engineer, but with little skill in a boardroom, Bentley was, by his own account, unresponsive and over-sensitive to criticism, dependent always on the riches of others whom he could not control. Though not easily approachable, he inspired enthusiasm, lasting devotion, and, increasingly, historic reverence.
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> Bentley married three times. On 1 January 1914 he married Leonie, daughter of (St George) Ralph Gore, ninth baronet. She died in the influenza epidemic of 1919. His unsuccessful second marriage, to which he never referred, was to Audrey Morten Chester Hutchinson. After a divorce he married on 31 January 1934 Margaret Roberts (b. 1892?), daughter of Thomas Roberts Murray, mechanical engineer, and divorced wife of Charles Alan Hutton. There were no children from these marriages. Bentley died at the Nuffield Nursing Home, Woking, on 13 August 1971.
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> H. G. Pitt 
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> Anita McConnell 
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> Sources  The Times (14 Aug 1971), 14f + The Times (17 Aug 1971), 12h + The Times (21 Aug 1971), 12h + The Independent (10 July 1990) + W. O. Bentley, W. O., an autobiography (1958) + W. O. Bentley, The cars in my life (1961) + W. O. Bentley, My life and cars (1967) + J. M. L. Frostick, Bentley, Cricklewood to Crewe (1980) + A. F. C. Hillstead, Those Bentley days (1953) + V. L. P. Davis, W. O. Bentley, MBE: summary of his life and work (1988) + WWW + b. cert. + m. certs. + d. cert.
> Likenesses  Dave, photograph, 2 Oct 1968, Hult. Arch. · photograph, 1969, Sci. Mus., Science and Society Picture Library [see illus.]
> Wealth at death  £3121: administration with will, 22 Oct 1971, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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