Book of the month
The Last Eye Witness
DOUG NYE, Porter Press International, £195, ISBN 978 1 913089 91 7
‘John Moore-Brabazon… became the first resident Englishman to make an officially observed flight, at Shellbeach, Isle of Sheppey, in May 1909. That November saw him take livestock aloft, contained in a waste-paper basket, just to prove that “pigs can fly”.’
Besides being the world’s pre-eminent motorsport historian, Doug Nye also has a knack for writing informative and frequently witty captions. The John Moore-Brabazon mentioned here – after whom the ill-fated Bristol Brabazon airliner would be named – is pictured in this book, sliding a Minerva around the 1907 Circuit des Ardennes. Elsewhere, Nye describes a riding mechanic in the 1904 Gordon Bennett Cup, swaddled in a voluminous smock and bonnet, as ‘looking rather like one’s deeply unimpressed granny’. He does, too.
But, of course, it’s the images that dominate this large-format hardback. They
