Post by administrator on Mar 27, 2009 21:19:06 GMT 1
HARRY Skirrow wins acclaim as the man who did most to modernise British midget car racing in the mid-1930s. His influence came in 1936 when he took up the challenge of Belle Vue (Manchester) promoter Eric Spence for somebody to design a race car especially for use on the speedway tracks.
Before that, most cars were adapted from light road-going models, with the Austin Seven a special favourite. Various drivers tried to build race cars that could race with success on the speedways.As far back as 1931, the West Ham rider Alan Kilfoyle tried without much success to build a speedway car.
When midget car racing started at Crystal Palace and Greenford early in 1934, Spike Rhiando was one of the first drivers to realise that from the specatcle point of views, modified roadsters provided little excitement for the spectators. As a result, Rhiando designed and raced his own track special.
Crystal Palace-based driver Jean Reville progressed further than Rhiando in this direction, racing and building the ‘Gnat’. This was undoubtedly the forerunner of a proper British midget car. It looked good, bore a strong similarity to the cars hat were then being raced and used with success in the USA. And that it was competitive was proved when Reville, Bud Stanley and Ralph Secretan successfully raced ‘Gnats’ when they competed in the 1935-36 Australian season.
However, the ‘Gnat’ vanished from te British racing scene in 1936, mainly because its originator Reville decided to stay in Australia. At this time, Eric Spence was already experimenting with a copy-cat version of Amrican star Ronny Householder’s Elto midget car.
This car had been raced with distinction in the States, and Spence brought it to Manchester in late 1935 where Len Hulme built similar looking cars, but fitted them with twin-JAP engines rather than Elto outboard motor boat engines.
In 1935, Spence also offered a special prize for any other design of midget car. Enter former speedway rider and engineer Harry Skirrow and his assistant Walter Mckereth. Skirrow decided that a midget car should be four-wheel drive rather than the two-wheel drive favoured by the Elto. When Skirrow demonstrated the car at Belle Vue it shattered the track records that had been set by the Roadster-type midget cars and it started to catch the attention of a new generation of northern drivers.
Mackereth, who was a blacksmith in Kendal, Westmoreland, had assisted Skirrow in the development of the car that was to carry his name. He was one of the first exponents of racing car, and Belle Vue speedway riders Eric Worswick and Charlie ‘Ginger’ Pashley also took an interest in the sport but, unlike Mackereth, they raced Eltos.
The Skirrow started to attract the interest of would-be drivers in the Midlands and South, and towards the end of 1936 Skirrow had built 12 cars. These were featured prominently in that year’s inaugural World Championship at Hackney, and Skirrows also started to appear at Dagenham, High Beech and Barnet.
Many motor engineers claim that Skirrow’s car was an adaptation of Jean Reville’s ‘Gnat’ and photographic comparisons tend to indicate this. Then, again, both the ‘Gnat’ and Skirrow bore similarities to the cars being successfully raced in the USA and Australia, and in context it is fairer to say the Skirrow accepted a uniformity of appearance to cars being used elsewhere in the world.
A fiiting testimony to just how good Harry Skirrow’s car were is that while the last one was built in the early part of 1939, a handful of them were still good enough to survive and race in a meeting at Coventry in 1958.
(c) John Hyam 2009