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The Shuttleworth Collection’s Jim Punter tells us more about the pioneering collector Richard Shuttleworth and his legacy to us today – including a special offer for Old Glory readers.
Most collectors and enthusiasts of vintage equipment will be aware of the Shuttleworth Trust – that small grass 1930s aerodrome at Old Warden in the Bedfordshire countryside housing a priceless collection of aeroplanes, road transport vehicles and other machinery from the Edwardian era to the 1930s.
What is perhaps less well known is that its very existence was borne out of wealth generated during the Victorian heyday of steam transport and engineering, by one of the leading businesses of the time – Clayton & Shuttleworth.
The Lincoln firm of Clayton & Shuttleworth was jointly owned by Nat Clayton and Joseph Shuttleworth, who had entered into partnership in the 1840s; Shuttleworth having married Clayton’s daughter at about that time. By 1883, when Joseph Shuttleworth died, the company had created an industrial empire employing 2000 men in Britain, and another 1200 at a site in Vienna. They made anything and everything – portable and fixed stationary engines, traction engines, elevators, flour mills, saw-benches – in fact just about any agricultural or general machinery, to feed the voracious appetite of the maturing industrial revolution for such machines.
This was classic Victorian family industrial wealth on the grandest scale, perhaps billions of pounds in today’s money – into which Richard Ormonde Shuttleworth was born on 16 July 1909, just nine days before Bleriot made the first airborne (by heavier than air machine) crossing of the English Channel.
In 1922 the young Richard Shuttlworth went to Eton, but he was no academic, being far too entranced with anything and everything mechanical. It is reported that he turned up for lessons in oily overalls after working on his old motorcycle. Ultimately, due both to his lack of scholastic aptitude and recalcitrant behaviour (he was renown as something of a prankster), after just two years of schooling at Eton he was told to leave – not quite expulsion, officially called ‘superannuation’ – in reality a distinction without a difference!
A decade later it is the mid-1930s, aviation and motor racing is at the very peak of popularity – headlines proclaim every next motoring and aviation exploit. Land speed records; longer, faster and higher flights with ever improving engines. Motor racing had moved beyond the huge and clumsy aero-engined Edwardian monsters to finely engineered Buggatis and sophisticated twin camshaft-engined Alfa Romeos, both leading manufacturers of cars competing in the Grand Prix races of the era.
Wealthy gentlemen went flying and motor racing, and ‘Squire’ Richard Shuttleworth, young and fabulously wealthy even by the opulent standards of the times, eagerly followed the trend. He learned to fly in 1932 and was an intrepid pilot – purchasing a brand new single-engined Comper Swift light aircraft just to fly all the way to India from his private airfield on the family estate at Old Warden – to enter an air race!
A renowned motor racing driver, he bought the very latest of those racing Bugattis and Alfa Romeos to enter international Grand Prix, suffering a serious injury in a motor racing accident. Yet for all his wealth, ‘hands on’ he repaired and maintained the aircraft and cars himself.
Unusual for the time, Richard Shuttleworth was also an avid collector of old machinery (originally cars and later aeroplanes) all at a time when it was not at all ‘fashionable’. The 1930s was an era of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’; anything old was ‘out’, and everything new was ‘in’ – Shuttleworth had a foot in both camps, collecting the old – aeroplanes, cars, old engines and agricultural machinery – and buying the very best of the new – road and racing cars, farm machinery and aircraft – he was also a director of the Railton Car Co.
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