My friend, Jim Clark

Clark was suspicious about the world outside Scotland. Long-time girlfriend Sally Stokes told me: ‘Jimmy could cut you off, he really could. There were two totally different portions of his life, the driving, and the rest of it. The total concentration went into the driving. He didn’t show much sign of nerves. But when he stepped out of the car that was a sign for his indecisiveness to take over. When he got into a car again, he was the total master and he never thought of decisions.’

I enjoyed a rapport with Graham Hill, Jack Brabham, Bruce McLaren, and the rest of the Grand Prix circus. They knew my face and remembered my name; a few even read The Guardian, but if Jim Clark did he never mentioned it, which meant he never found anything to complain about. Mutual friend Jabby Crombac, a French journalist, told me Jim read the British press in Crombac’s Sport Auto office and if he disagreed with something got very cross indeed.

Determined never to be deceived by rascally lawyers or accountants Clark turned to two local Scots he trusted to administer his affairs, as he had Scott Watson. He just wanted them to pay bills and send him enough money to be going on with, but it was a mistake. They were never up to dealing with the Inland Revenue and were not well received at Lotus. ‘Tiresome fellows,’ according to team manager Andrew Ferguson. ‘Scottish bullocks,’ Chapman called them, irritated by letters he thought were designed to please Clark. That the bullocks’ control turned out to be ineffectual was only cruelly revealed after Clark’s death.

So, I knew to be careful. I avoided asking Clark anything he’d not tell any journalist. It was no use pulling friends’ status. Sometimes the Fleet Street barrier could be breached, and we talked easily, although there were always taboos: money, danger, racing secrets. He famously never discussed braking distances with Jackie Stewart yet enjoyed sharing racy tales about people. Jackie helped reassure Clark I was unlikely to report gossip while David Benson who’d been my deputy editor at The Motor and in whom Jim Clark had a curious confidence, was similarly helpful.

It got easier. During practice at the 1967 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring there was a jolly journalist lunch party in the restaurant opposite the pits that may have gone on a bit. My 22-year-old bride, not long out of the Mary Erskine School for well-brought-up Edinburgh gels knew Clark well. He was anxious to persuade a brunette, working in PR I think, back to his room in the Sporthotel, so she made introductions, joking, perhaps unwisely, about procuring talent for a World Champion.

Walter Hayes was adroit, the industry’s best-ever spin doctor. It was 30 years before I could bring myself to do a book about Clark and once Hayes had read it, he wrote to me saying: ‘I finished it very late last night (couldn’t put it down until the last page arrived) and decided that nobody will ever better define Jimmy or, for that matter any great racing driver. Best of all the Clark family will like what you have done.’

This time, alas, he was wrong. The Clark family never took to it. To them Jim was forever 1955. By the time he died a celebrity, I knew him perhaps better than they did. They remained in a world their diffident, shy brother had left behind. He was not only a World Champion, he was also cash rich. When he came home, the family thought he was the same person, but he wasn’t. His closest sister Betty Peddie knew Sally and his girlfriends, and told me about the effect accidents had on him, like the 1961 Italian Grand Prix at Monza where Clark was caught up in the crash that killed von Trips and 14 spectators.

The generous Borders family was sure he would return when he gave up racing – their prosperous Presbyterian generation was bound by trust and they never failed him, but a dichotomy persisted. When he wasn’t racing Clark attended local lamb sales, drove tractors: as the only son expected to have no ambition beyond farming, he felt guilty doing anything else.

In 1965 he flew with Colin Chapman to the French Grand Prix. Landing at Clermont Ferrand’s little airport coincided with a civic welcome for the world’s first astronaut. Yuri Gagarin was fresh from the air show at Le Bourget, his Russian translators weren’t very good, but he recognised Clark fresh from winning the Indianapolis 500. He embraced, apologised for his minders, and talked.

Champagne had flowed. Some then piled into a Peugeot Chapman had hired. He didn’t know where he was going, so Sally navigated. Driving with his customary vigour Chapman drove into the hills and crashed into a ditch. He only cut his thumb, but Sally went through the windscreen; Jim was stunned and covered in glass.

Mike Spence was in the back and unhurt. Sally, blood pouring from her head and face revived Clark, but Chapman, determined the press must not know, bundled her back into the Peugeot while Spence pushed it out of the ditch. They wrapped her head in scarves, had it stitched up at a midnight surgery and as his price for silence the doctor watched Jim Clark win from the Lotus pit.

The press did find out. Patrick Mennem of the Daily Mirror knew, but never filed a story. It was a fair trade. Motor racing reporters didn’t tell tales; if we had, exclusives from Clark, Lotus and the rest of the pit wall would stop. That was the Grand Prix circus then; maybe unlikely now.

I could no more report gossip then than I could 30 years later, but Andrew Ferguson, Lotus racing manager recalled an occasion in Team Lotus, The Indianapolis Years. Published two years after he died in 1994, it told how Chapman and Clark shared a room. ‘One morning Chapman came down to breakfast in what Ferguson described as a ‘quivering lower lip’ mood. “You know I don’t sleep well,” he said. “Jimmy went out on his own last night, and I was woken up by him coming back into the room with some bird. I had to pretend to be asleep, and they went into the bathroom. I couldn’t believe it. They had a noisy shower together, then they both got into Jimmy’s bed. By this time, I was not very happy. Then she said, ‘What about him – won’t we wake him up?’ And do you know what Jimmy said? “Don’t worry about him – the silly bugger never wakes up.” God knows what time I got to sleep.”’

With Ferguson’s story in the public domain, I had no need to break any of my taboos and quoted it in Jim Clark Tribute to a Champion. Clark family members admonished me. I had signed and carefully dedicated personal copies and a Glasgow auctioneer later asked me to authenticate one which they had disposed of. They never really liked the book; it is sold in the Jim Clark Museum and we donate a small royalty on every copy of the newest edition to the Jim Clark Trust.

Clark was happy with girls pursuing him. He spent his tax exile in Paris with Crombac, who described how they stalked him round his motorhome. ‘He only had to smile or make a little move and one would come and he would take her out for dinner and then she would be his.’

Favourites tended to be blonde, slim, pretty and since so many resembled Sally, we knew them as Sally Mark VI or Mark VII. He should have married Sally, and although she married Dutch driver and race organiser Ed Swart and lived happily ever after, she never forgot Clark. Picture-pretty, stoic Sally. Two years ago, at the reopening of the Jim Clark Museum in Duns I stood with her and Ed when Jackie Stewart made a clumsy reference: ‘I see Sally is here,’ he called out. ‘Well, she wasn’t Jim’s only girlfriend.’

Embarrassed, I held arms in the museum doorway with both of them. Helen Stewart once recalled: ‘There were a lot of bad times for her that she probably doesn’t remember. When he wouldn’t marry her, she got angry and depressed. They’d been together a long time. She took care of him, she did everything for him. Why he couldn’t make that decision, I don’t know. Maybe he felt she was too much of a Londoner, a southerner, a sophisticate. When they were living in London or went up to the farm she would cook for him, do anything a wife would do. But she wasn’t a wife and she resented that.’

Jim Clark’s Borders were his anchor, he loved the place, but I doubt whether he would have been content going back. The later Clark I knew was more deliberate, as though he was trying to make race car driving less important. He was tense, nervous, uneasy, as his famous nail-biting revealed but even Stewart said, ‘Nobody ever knew what was going on inside him. He was an incredibly private person, he hardly ever confided in anybody.’ Jabby and Jackie both found a lot of things you could never discuss with him. He kept things to himself so much that he seemed isolated. Stewart: ‘You could see the anxiety in his shoulders. He had a stiffness in his shoulders. He was never what you could call a loose guy and it got worse as he got older.’

Wrangles with the authorities did not stop when he died. The Scottish Estate Duty Office tried to suggest he was not truly resident in a small Bermuda apartment and duty was due on his money in Britain. It had to be argued that something similar was used by a former ambassador to Washington and a chairman of ICI. They counted where Clark spent his days, examined the racing calendar, when he had been in Europe for Grands Prix, Australia and New Zealand for the Tasman Series, how often to Bermuda. The Estate Duty Office even thought he might have expected burial in the place claimed as home. On the advice of accountants his headstone still references both Duns and Bermuda…

Six years later, the ‘bullocks’ delivered further shocks. Almost all Clark’s money was lost in imprudent investments. The pair had been Scott Watson’s advisors too and while they probably had no intention to cheat, stood trial for misdemeanours.

Jim Clark’s mistake was less naivety than simply trusting people because they were Scottish. Crombac: ‘Jim never believed a Scotsman would fleece him.’

Eric Dymock’s superb biography of Jim Clark is available from www.dovepublishing.co.uk