King Arthur on the telly

King Arthur, it seems, can still grab people’s attention. The mythical Once and Future King of the Britons has cropped up twice on the telly recently – first with someone coming up with a theory (or rather, another theory) about where Camelot may have been located, and then in the title of a documentary that, as it turned out, wasn’t really about him.

The latest Camelot theory came from the TV presenter Nick Knowles who, while plugging a special edition of his show DIY SOS on The One Show last month, decided to go a bit off-message and state that he, or rather he and a professor from Bristol University, has (have?) a new theory about the location of Arthur’s court. Cirencester, apparently, is where the Arthur and his knights met around a round table that was in fact the old Roman amphitheatre there. In Roman times, the Gloucestershire market town was Corinium, a fort built at the point where the Fosse Way crosses the River Churn which became one of the biggest cities in Roman Britain. 

Archaeological evidence has shown that in the period after the Romans left the amphitheatre was fortified but it takes quite a leap of the imagination to go from there to claiming that this little corner of the Cotswolds was once Camelot – a place that’s also been claimed to have been identified as having been in Cornwall, Hampshire, Somerset or even Yorkshire, and that’s before you take into account the various possible Welsh locations that have been suggested over the years.

I’m not convinced by this new claim. If you’re going to go around stating that the round table part of the King Arthur legend is based on the notion that a Dark Ages warrior leader might have met with his followers in an amphitheatre (which makes sense), then the one at the old Roman legionary fortress at Caerleon over in south-eastern Wales is a much better bet.

Next up was a BBC2 documentary called King Arthur’s Britain: The Truth Unearthed which was broadcast a couple of weeks ago. Fronted by Alice Roberts – a presenter with much more credibility than Mr Knowles, she being an academic (the Professor of Public Engagement in Science at Birmingham University, no less) with shows like Time Team and Coast on her CV – this focussed on a place that has long been associated with Arthur; in fact, according to the legends it’s where his life began. Tintagel, on Cornwall’s north coast.

What followed wasn’t really about Arthur – somewhat unsurprisingly, the story (as told by the medieval chronicler/historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose rather fanciful writings provide us with the basis of the King Arthur legends as we know them today) of his having been conceived on a stormy night at Tintagel during which his dad made use of Merlin’s magic to trick his mum into thinking that he was actually her husband was quickly dismissed as legend rather than fact (but then, one of the key things to remember is that much of the Arthur story is more legend than fact; in fact, when touching on anything relating to King Arthur it is worth remembering that line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”). There were also some rather cheap-looking animated graphics but I think those can safely be disregarded as unimportant.

There were two main strands – an archaeological dig at Tintagel itself (long known to have been a high-status settlement in the Dark Ages, the focus being on the rocky peninsular known as Tintagel Island, upon which the medieval castle was later built; historically, this was always regarded as being distinct from the village on the mainland which was called Trevena until the mid-nineteenth century) and a wider look at archaeological studies across the country in order to find evidence for the Anglo-Saxon invasion during the post-Roman period which provided the backdrop for the legends of Arthur which originate in the Celtic/British resistance to this new influx. Although he wasn’t mentioned in the earliest records of the time (not that there are many of those), it is Arthur who over time emerged in the stories about an heroic leader who led the fight against the invaders. 

Professor Roberts concluded that the available archaeological evidence doesn’t really support the idea of a large-scale invasion, contrary to what the chroniclers (not just Geoffrey of Monmouth but also the monk Gildas, who was writing in the sixth century) tell us; a very detailed study in Yorkshire has revealed evidence for settlement rather than conquest, while a scan of an Anglo-Saxon cross found in a grave in Cambridgeshire and DNA analysis of human remains points more to co-existence and assimilation than conflict. That said, there does seem to have been a clear cultural divide between eastern Britain (which was being settled by the Anglo-Saxons and so was linked primarily with Northern Europe) and the west. The dig at Tintagel unearthed a lot of high-end pottery which hinted at trading links with the Mediterranean world having been maintained after the Romans had left (the most obvious commodity that the Cornish of the Dark Ages had to trade with was quickly and correctly identified as tin). Then there was an inscribed piece of stone which seemed to indicate that the people who lived there were probably Christians. By placing King Arthur’s conception at Tintagel, maybe Geoffrey of Monmouth was alluding to the importance of that place in the Dark Ages?

All very interesting, fascinating in part. Yet I couldn’t help but think I’ve heard a lot of this before. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out where – a TV academic of an older vintage called Michael Wood, who covered King Arthur in In Search of the Dark Ages and in a couple of chapters of a later book called In Search of England. In the former, a TV series which aired between 1978 and 1980 and can now be found on YouTube, he too sought the facts behind the Arthurian legends by looking at how archaeologists were trying to piece together what happened in Britain after the Romans left (during the course of which he visited the amphitheatre at Cirencester) and found evidence hinting at continuity rather than conquest in Dark Ages Britain before going off to look at hill-forts in rural Southern England and concluding by casting doubt on whether King Arthur really existed. In the latter, he referred to a stone with an inscription on it being unearthed at a 1998 archaeological dig at Tintagel, which at the time generated quite a bit of excitement due to the name on it, Artognou, being not a million miles from ‘Arthur’ although it’s a bit of a stretch of the imagination to link the stone with the Once and Future King! 

Babs versus the Blue Bird

Not far from the beach at Pendine in Carmarthenshire is a small museum called the Pendine Museum of Speed, a modest and infrequently open establishment which pays tribute to Pendine’s history as a venue for land speed records attempts. The main feature, albeit one that is often absent from the museum’s otherwise very modest collection, is one of the cars that featured in a couple of those attempts, a white-painted monster of a vehicle that dates back to the 1920s when the boundaries of speed were being pushed by specially-built racing-cars that were fitted with aeroplane engines. The car is called Babs, and back in 1926 she became the fastest car in the world, and she did that on Pendine Sands.

By the 1920s, the land speed record had got to the point where it was no longer feasible to use roads or race-tracks due to the straight-line distances that were required, for as well as the one-kilometre length along which the cars were timed the cars also needed space to accelerate and brake before and after said flying kilometre (it was a kilometre rather than a mile because the record’s first regulators were French). Long and straight stretches of sand beach were being sought out, and the one at Pendine is six miles if you don’t count the bit at the eastern end that curves round towards Laugharne; with the tide out and in fair weather, it was and for that matter still is an ideal venue to drive a car in a straight line as fast as it can go. Twice within the hour, for from the beginning the land speed record had to be an average of two runs, one in either direction in order to negate any benefits that gradient or the wind might give.

The first land speed record attempt at Pendine Sands was made by Malcolm Campbell in September 1924. Campbell, who’d got into motor racing prior to the First World War, set the record in a modified Sunbeam racing-car that he’d called Blue Bird due to his habit of racing in cars painted blue (as opposed to British racing green). Powered by an 18.3-litre aircraft engine, it had been raced at Brooklands and indeed used to set a land speed record at that circuit before Campbell acquired, repainted and renamed it. Before arriving at Pendine, Campbell and Blue Bird had already made two attempts at the land speed record elsewhere, although they were deemed invalid due to the use of unapproved timing equipment. At Pendine, though, his team were using the proper equipment and Blue Bird set a new land speed record of 146mph. The following summer, they were back and the record was raised to 150mph.

Campbell had been keen to break his own record because he’d heard that someone else was preparing for a land speed record attempt in a more powerful car. John Parry-Thomas was a Welsh engineer who, in addition to having made a name for himself racing at Brooklands in the early 1920s, had been involved with the development of the car that came to be known as Blue Bird. This had motivated him to try for the land speed record for himself, which led to the purchase of a large racing-car called Chitty IV from the estate of Louis Zborowski, an aristocratic racing driver who’d been killed at the 1924 Italian Grand Prix (he had designed and built four powerful racing-cars called ‘Chitty’ or ‘Chitty Bang Bang’, which years later would provide Ian Fleming with the name of his fictional vintage car). Built for racing at Brooklands, Chitty IV was powered by a 27-litre Liberty aircraft engine and was in fact the largest capacity car to race at that famous old circuit. Parry-Thomas, who actually lived in a house located within the Brooklands circuit, not only substantially modified the car for his land speed record attempt; he also gave it a new name – Babs.

In April 1926, Parry-Thomas and Babs went to Pendine. They didn’t just break Campbell’s record – they smashed it, raising the bar to 170mph. Conditions hadn’t been ideal, though, and Parry-Thomas reckoned that with some modifications Babs could do much better.

Campbell’s reaction to this was that he clearly needed a bigger car. A new, more powerful Blue Bird was built, powered by a 22.3-litre Napier aircraft engine (hence this one’s full name, the Napier-Campbell Blue Bird). Although the engine had a smaller capacity than that of Babs, it was the more powerful and as a result this Blue Bird was reckoned to be capable of breaking the 200mph barrier. In February 1927 Pendine Sands would once again be the location for a record attempt. In the event, though, Campbell was only able to raise Parry-Thomas’s record to 174mph; the new Blue Bird had achieved a top speed of 195mph but it was the two-way average speed over the one-kilometre course that counted.

Parry-Thomas, meanwhile, had not been idle, having spent the winter of 1926-27 rebuilding Babs’s bodywork. His work complete, Babs was ready for another record attempt and a month after Campbell’s new record had been set, Parry-Thomas was back at Pendine. On 3^rd March 1927, he set out to win back the land speed record but he would end up going down in motorsport history for a very different reason.

Quite what happened once Parry-Thomas had got Babs up to a speed of around 170mph has been a matter of debate; some reckon that the drive-chain snapped, although it’s more likely that there was a failure regarding one of the back wheels. What we can say for certain is that the car went out of control at high speed and rolled over, killing her driver who became the first person to die while attempting to break the land speed record.

That was the last time Pendine was used for a land speed record attempt; later that month, Henry Seagrave topped the 200mph barrier at Daytona Beach in Florida, and it was to this location that Campbell would take the Napier-Campbell Blue Bird for his next (successful) land speed record attempt the following year.

As for Parry-Thomas, his body was buried in a churchyard not far from Brooklands; Babs, however, was buried underneath the dunes at Pendine Sands, and she would remain there for over four decades.