silly cars and doing deep, mixed-gas rebreathe diving, some-
times all in the same day, it was only a question of time before
I was dealt the wrong hand,” he says. One marriage and two
daughters later, Smith stopped flying, hung up his flippers and
bought a “sensible car with the right number of seats in the back”.C
ampbell’s unshakeable belief in his own infallibility was
sustained by superstition and the occult. He shunned the
colour green and attended séances to raise his late father.
He never darkened the cockpit without Mr. Whoppit, his Teddy
bear mascot. With Whoppit at the wheel, what could go wrong?
Smith is refreshingly impervious to the vortex of Campbell
hysteria. One wonders what inspired his “Guide to Idiot Types”
posted on the Bluebird Project website. Type IIs are, “danger-
ous due to a typical inability to modify their stance regardless
of how utterly defeated, outgunned or proven wrong they may
be... they will usually drop from sight... never to be seen or heard
f rom a ga i n .”
“Interesting fella, Campbell,” says Smith. “But you have to
step back from the ‘Ooh! Aah! Donald Campbell!’”
As for Mr. Whoppit, “Everything it touches crashes,” says
Smith. “We regard Mr. Whoppit as anything but lucky.”
The Bluebird myth derives from Maurice Maeterlinck’s play
L’Oiseau Bleu that captivated Sir Malcolm in 1911. The Bluebird
of happiness symbolises life’s eternal challenge. It is, as Donald
wrote, “Always within reach, yet, if pursued to catch and possess,
beyond our grasp.” Mr. Whoppit looms as Bluebird’s dark enforc-
er, ensuring that the ultimate prize remains elusive.
All this raises questions about what kind of role model Camp-
bell really is? He sits alongside the Charge of the Light Brigade,
General Charles Gordon, Robert Falcon Scott, George Mallory,
and possibly Eddie the Eagle as heroic British “failures”. Some say
that loser-worship is rooted in the Victorian idea that character
trumps achievement, a hypocritical subterfuge to help us cope
with the brutal realities of Empire. Campbell had no such qualms.
He didn’t believe in failure, only misunderstood triumph. Deter-
mined to “be the first man to pass 300mph on water”, driven by
his father’s disdain and by the “shame” of writing off the Blue-
bird SN7 car on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, he deliberately
crossed a large red line.
“My father felt that Malcolm had let the family down by dying
of a stroke in bed,” says Gina. “Malcolm’s rivals, Henry Segrave,
John Cobb and J. G. Parry-Thomas, all died in their vehicles.”
This was the Campbell code: submit judgement to passion,
reason to determination, insurance to tutelary spirits, body to
cockpit, and if you don’t die trying to succeed, then your goals
aren’t high enough, and you have defaced your escutcheon.
There was a plan to run the rebuilt, and some would say im-
proved, Bluebird on Coniston Water in summer 2019. The run
was cancelled when it became clear that the Museum hadn’t
prepared the spectator infrastructure, traffic management,“My father felt that Malcolm let thefamily down by dying of a stroke in bed.Malcolm’s rivals all died in their VEHICLES”complicated relationships with their fathers. “I knew him first as
Mr. Campbell, then Donald and, finally Skipper,” says Antony
Robinson, who assisted Campbell during his final months, and
whose mother’s hotel in Coniston put up the Campbell family
over four decades. “A hugely attractive character. I’ve seen rooms
go quiet when he walked in. He was amusing and funny, but you
had to be careful not to associate that with his serious side. In the
boat he was very different.”
The two characters diverge most strikingly in their respec-
tive attitudes to risk. Evoking Campbell’s daredevil spirit, Gina
recalls at least two “near misses” when her father was piloting
her in light aircraft. In 1960, Campbell survived a 360mph crash
on Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah with a fractured skull and burst
eardrums. “What others thought impossible, my father thought
totally possible,” shrugs Gina.
Smith has an altogether healthier relationship with risk, as you
would expect of a security expert. “Flying helicopters, drivingVANITY FAIR EN ROUTE 53
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