A personal view of Daniel & Bunty Richmond (Downton)

[mk1]

I have recently been helping the well know author, presenter & former Sunday times columnist Jonathan Meades find some pictures of Daniel Richmond, this was in connection with his latest book "An Encyclopaedia of myself".

Mr Meades father was a good fishing friend of Daniels, visiting the works on a number of occasions the teenage Jonathan got to know Daniel & Bunty very well indeed.

He has been kind enough to allow me to reproduce a short extract of the Chapter entitled "Daniel & Bunty Richmond" here. This is particularly special as the book is not released for another month or so.

It is, I am sure you will agree a superb glimpse into the life of these great English eccentrics.

Daniel (never 'Dan) was charming, intemperate, alcoholic, witty, promiscuously bisexual, snobbish, generous, chain-smoking, outrageously rude, usually laughing. For over a decade and a half my father and he would enjoy a friendship marinated in fishing, cars, champagne and black velvet. 'I'm just a gwease munkih,' Daniel would sibilantly murmur, not for a moment expecting anyone to believe him. He was, in fact, a brilliant and inventive engineer. An engineer on the verge of (automotive) fame and considerable fortune. His company Downton Engineering tuned the BMC Mini Coopers which, driven by Timo Makinen and Paddy Hopkirk, became the most successful rally cars of the age and won the Monte Carlo three times. They were tested to screeching point on the long straight roads across the Forest: stray ponies tested the brakes. I couldn't, still can't, tell a manifold from a rocker arm. How cars worked bored me. Daniel didn't bore me, nor did his diffident astonish­ment at his achievement. He was an obsessive tinkerer and maker who succeeded in raising the performance of Alec Issigonis's creation to an unprecedented pitch. Issigonis and Alex Moulton, who designed the folding bicycle and the Mini's suspension, were friends of Daniel's. So too were Jem Marsh who designed and built the Marcos and such once-scandalous figures as his fellow gentleman-engineer Jeremy Fry, Edward Montagu of Beaulieu and the profligate landowner and occa­sional writer Michael Pitt-Rivers (who despite his marriage to Sonia Brownell was homo rather than bisexual). Daniel's milieu was that of upper bohemian oddballs,- black sheep, remittance men, holters, bankrupts - the sort of people who lived in the villages of Rockhourne and Whitsbury, had indiscreet affairs, gambled recklessly, suffered nembutal and/or seconal addiction and hanged themselves.
Bunty, his terrifying and saturnine wife, was not actually his wife. She had apparently bolted from her husband, a man named Whitaker, after a couple of years' wartime marriage and had not divorced. She was older than Daniel. Together they bought a garage that was little more than a decent-sized shed, a carriage house. It was an extension of Daniel's hobby of motor sport - saloon car races, hill climbs (Shelsley Walsh, Snertisham), time trials etc. They hoped to scratch a living repairing and refitting the grand cars of the aristocracy which had been in wraps for the duration. It wasn't the most ambi­tious of enterprises. They were novices in engineering and business. Bunty's modest private income was hardly a guarantee of security.
Daniel had a gift for friendship, Bunty had a gift for antag­onism. He could get away with anything. She couldn't. It can be a fine line; in this instance it wasn't. Her accent was posher than the Queen's. She was bossy, occasionally menacing, impressively touchy and never let anyone forget that she was Somerset Maugham's niece. Which, in fact, she wasn't - her father's sister was married to Maugham's brother. Near-miss. Besides, what kudos did she expect to gain from announcing herself as Maugham's niece in a village such as Downton, a bucolic place whose industries were tanning (Richardson), seeds (the well-named Hickman) and brickfields (the stations and halts of the fantastically slow Salisbury and Dorset Junction Railway were ruddily built of them). Her precise cousinage was improbably challenged, for why should such a connection be fabricated? She was hypersensitively suspicious of the most meagre courtesy shown her. 'Why don't you say what you're fucking thinking?' was her habitual response to any utterance which she reckoned (rightly, wrongly) euphe­mistic or, signally, which failed to insult her as she believed she deserved to be insulted. She abhorred niceness, she despised wanting to be liked: 'Je m'en fous du qu'en dira-t-on.' She gave no other indication of familiarity with idiomatic French. With crashing understatement my mother once remarked: 'Bunty can be really quite difficult.' The rawness, hurtfulness, vindictiveness, palaeolithic crudeness of her demeanour were much more than difficult. This was clinical. Her appearance was a problem. She had clearly once been good-looking - handsome rather than beautiful; but, in the cant of the era, 'she had let herself go'. And how. Her hair was a greasy chaos with a pronounced widow's peak. There was liverish baggage beneath her eyes. She had a puffy indoors complexion, her arms were fubsy with quasi-dropsical flaps that were not yet called buffalo wings. Years later I would see her near-replicated in Ian Nairn. Her frumpy shapeless dresses might have been expressions of self-contempt. Yet she drove a Ferrari (Enzo Ferrari himself owned a Downton-tuned Mini) whilst Daniel drove anything that was around, mostly Minis but also an astonishingly ungainly Morris or maybe Austin Maxi which could accommodate salmon rods. It was lumbering proof that Issigonis had peaked with the Mini. And it presaged the decline of British car manufacture. Since they were unsaleable maybe Daniel had been given his.

His habitats were a) the Works, h) the Bull, c) the House.The Works was a group of utilitarian, single-storey, light industrial 1950s buildings to the north of the village. These insipid structures looked as though they had been intended for some purpose other than tuning cars and had been seized upon by Daniel and Bunty as they began to prosper (which he, certainly, had never yearned for let alone expected).

The Bull, still there . . . . . . . .

"An encyclopaedia of myself" by Jonathan Meades will be published in May by Fourth Estate, ISBN 9781857028492

If you would like to read more of this superbly written, funny, insightful book, which I can most highly recommend, I suggest you visit Jonathan's web site for further information.

http://jonathanmeades.co.uk/

[rich@minispares.com]

I always find with Jonathon meads, that its possible to read about every fifth word and still get a general idea of what he is on about.

im sure he just uses loads of words that normal people have never heard of just to make us thickos feel even worse!


still, its very rare to hear of someone who actually met dan (lol) Richmond and is able to talk honestly about his and buntys characters

[Will Grant]

I read Museum without walls recently, there is a passage about downton in there - that piece is brilliant mark, lots of information in the public domain about downton products, and so little about the characters other than than the obvious 'eccentric' epithet, plus always nice to get it from a primary source, thank you for putting it up, and looking forward to the book

[mk1]

Glad you enjoyed it Will,

That is just a tiny sample of the Daniel & Bunty section, I demolished the whole book last weekend & thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Pete]

It's very well written and as ever with many talented and colourful characters there certainly lurked a dark side with both of them, I wouldn't necessarily have wanted have been stuck in a lift with either of 'em !

[JC T ONE]

Thanks for posting interesting to read

[Spider]

I found that awesome. I have to say, in general, I like the guys writing style. Will be a very good read for sure.

Thanks kindly for sharing

[Ant Hines]

Really great read. Thanks Mark.