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"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." It’s a
maxim that applies as much to cars as to deciding who shot
Liberty Valance, and maybe nowhere more so than to the
legend of the Blue Train Bentley. Ask Bentley cognoscenti
to identify the Speed Six Bentley with which Woolf "Babe"
Barnato beat the express Blue Train from Cannes to Calais
and the chances are that they’ll go for the elegantly streamlined
Gurney Nutting coupe pictured here. It must be
so – there’s even a celebrated Terence Cuneo painting of
the car racing the famous French express to commemorate
the achievement. Sadly, Bentley France’s own website
undermines the legend by giving the date of Woolf
Barnato’s celebrated race as March 1930... and Barnato
didn’t take delivery of the eye-catching Gurney Nutting
"Sportsman Coupe" until 21 May!
Its place in Bentley history is based on firmer ground,
for its daring styling – the work of the great A.F. McNeil –
was the first recognizable step in the development of a
fastback line that is still the hallmark of the modern Bentley
Continental GT which, like its distant ancestor, is the
world’s fastest four seat coupe...
didn’t take delivery of the eye-catching Gurney Nutting
"Sportsman Coupe" until 21 May!
Its place in Bentley history is based on firmer ground,
for its daring styling – the work of the great A.F. McNeil –
was the first recognizable step in the development of a
fastback line that is still the hallmark of the modern Bentley
Continental GT which, like its distant ancestor, is the
world’s fastest four seat coupe...
But back to the legend... Captain Barnato, who was
the chairman and principal backer of Bentley Motors and
consequently had the pick of the company’s products,
certainly did race the Blue Train in another Speed Six, for
he owned three of them in 1929-39 (and had previously
had seven Standard Sixes). So as a measure of the Speed
Six’s performance, the Blue Train exploit – immortalized
in W.O. Bentley’s (ghosted) autobiography W.O. – deserves
analysis.
It seems that Barnato was partying, as was his wont, at
the Hotel Carlton in Cannes in March 1930 and the conversation
turned to the craze for racing the train across France
from south to north, a distance of some 800 miles. It had
kicked off early in 1930 when journalist Dudley Noble
raced Le Train Bleu from St Raphael on the Cote d’Azur
(one stop on from Cannes) to Calais in a 2-liter Rover
"Light Six", beating the train by 20 minutes. Then at the
beginning of March one E.J.P. Eugster challenged the Blue
Train in a new Alvis Silver Eagle and reached Calais three
hours ahead of the train.
Ever ready for a wager, Barnato bet a hundred pounds
that his Speed Six could not only beat the Blue Train from
the Mediterranean to the English Channel, but that it would
beat the express to London, too. That suggests he had a reasonable
knowledge of the workings of the French railway
system, in particular the fact that its express trains were
restricted to the equivalent of 75 mph (and fitted with a
"spy-in-the-cab" recorder to ensure that the driver didn’t
exceed the limit). Moreover, the PLM system’s "Blue
Train" proper only ran as far as the Gare de Lyon in Paris,
where one or two of its blue first-class sleeping cars were
detached and worked round through the city’s eastern sub-urbs behind a leisurely tank engine to be joined to the
Nord system’s "Golden Arrow" for the seven-hour journey
by train and cross-Channel steamer to London.
So, discounting the cross-Channel ferry – where the
car, which had to be craned aboard, was at a slight disadvantage,
since the railway passengers merely had to walk
on board and get onto another train at Dover – the "Blue
Train" averaged approximately 38 mph from Cannes to
London. Eugster’s 2-liter Alvis had averaged some 42
mph between St Raphael and Calais; the 6.5-liter Bentley
could surely do rather better... |
