bordering on the antique when she crashed. On
the walls, Donald Campbell, a suave block of ice,
smiles from photographs.
“Two tonnes of aluminium,” says Smith. “In the 1950s, there
were a pair of fatal speedboat accidents: John Cobb’s Crusader
disintegrated at 200mph on Loch Ness in 1952; in 1954, Mario
Vega’s Laura III suffered a similar fate on Lake Iseo in Italy. People
thought there was something like the sound barrier but on water.
Campbell built Bluebird like a brick shithouse. He used to brag
about rocketry and advanced engineering. It’s a dog’s breakfast.
It is a blunt instrument. Push it hard and it’ll go fast. But a thing
of beauty—come on!”
At a glance, Smith, 52, is an unlikely custodian of part of Britain’s
engineering heritage. A bloke in a fleece, he’s a does-what-it-says-
on-the-tin Geordie. You’d hardly notice his compact, security ex-
pert’s body whether it was walking down the street or sitting next
to you in his local, the Staith House gastropub. Within minutes of
meeting Smith, however, you realise what a strangely compound-
ed character he is. He made his pile inventing and patenting a se-
curity device for vehicles. A “closed-circuit, mixed-gas rebreather”
amateur diver and shipwreck hunter, he has flown helicopters and
driven “flash cars”. For five years he worked as a vehicle security
expert in Russia. A walking Wikipedia on air crashes, he attended
daily briefings on the Lockerbie disaster investigation. His alert,
speculative intelligence works in strange ways. A dyscalculic, he
struggles with numbers. “I think in colours and shapes, not val-
ues,” he says. “Certain numbers are horrible; nine is the ugliest.”After Bluebird crashed on January 4,
1967, Royal Navy divers located her hull and
attached a transponder to it to signal her where-
abouts. They failed, however, to find Campbell’s body. True to
Donald’s wishes that skipper and machine stay together, Tonia
Bern-Campbell, his widow, asked that the transponder be re-
moved. Man and machine lay undisturbed for 33 years, abetted
by local villagers who skilfully misinformed treasure hunters
enquiring of Bluebird’s lo c a t i o n.
The story of Bluebird’s ascent from a mangled heap on the bot-
tom of Coniston Water to a lock-up in North Shields is a domino
game of unforeseen consequences. It began with Smith, dumped
and dejected, returning home from a diving trip in 1996 and put-
ting on Afraid of Sunlight, an album by Marillion. On the track
“Out of This World”, a recorded voice says, “A complete accident,
I’m afraid.” It caught Smith’s ear. Police radio? “I looked it up. It
was the commentary of Bluebird’s final run.” A light bulb went
on in Smith’s head. He rang his diving mates.
At first, the idea of finding Bluebird scarcely got beyond a
toe-dipping exercise followed by an immersion in the local
beer. Then it got serious. “The more we couldn’t find Bluebird,
the more it annoyed us,” says Smith. “So we did a proper search
using technology developed for North Sea oil rigs.” Realising
something was up, the locals suggested Smith seek Gina Camp-
bell’s permission.
“Yes,” said Gina. “So long as you find my father so that I can
put him somewhere warm.”One-Man Garage Band
Left: Bill Smith in his garage workshop with Bluebird. Above: the crude technology
of Bluebird’s cockpit is mirrored by Smith’s no-frills toolkit (below). Opposite page:
Smith with Bluebird as she was pulled from Coniston Water in 2001SEPTEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR EN ROUTE
09-19Bluebird.indd 51 17/07/2019 12:37