‘I want you to look after this one, Murray,’ said Jack, and I didn’t need a second invitation. This was perfect for me and hopefully the credibility I now had as a motor-sport television and radio personality wouldn’t do our bid any harm with a car manufacturer. We put together a team of the agency’s best research, creative, television and media people and went at it absolutely flat out. After making the best possible presentation we sat back to await the result. And when the call came from Vauxhall Sales Director Geoff Moore at Luton it was good news – we were in! Euphoria all round and for me a pair of engraved gold and ruby cufflinks as a token reward. The joy of knowing that I was going to head up the account was tempered somewhat by the sadness that I would have to come off the Mars/Petfoods business which I had enjoyed so much, but I was looking forward to the new challenge ahead.
It wasn’t easy to do well for Vauxhall, for their cars were seen as dull and Americanized rust buckets. The Viscount was the top model, an upmarket version of the six-cylinder Cresta and, to me, the ultimate soft-suspension, personality-free Squidgemobile. It had everything: plenty of smooth power, automatic gearbox, power brakes and power steering, electric windows, leather upholstery, multi-band radio, the lot. You may get all these things in virtually any car now, but you didn’t then, and the Viscount oozed along with effortless smoothness – but absolutely zilch in the way of automotive charisma. Elizabeth loved it for its luxury, comfort and lack of drama but it didn’t suit my gung-ho self-image at all. I felt 40 years older every time I got in it and in an effort to make it sportier, which it was never meant to be, I had it fitted with a set of the ultimate Pirelli Cinturato radial tyres – the sort that Ferrari used. They didn’t make the slightest difference and since it was designed for crossplies they might even have made it worse. However, I convinced myself that it now steered as though it was on rails.
‘Vauxhall – the big breed!’ had been the blanket theme of our successful presentation and soon after it had been concluded Arthur Martin, the Advertising Manager, said, ‘Let’s go to my office, Murray, and talk about what we are going to say in the advertising.’
Completely poleaxed, I said, ‘Arthur, we’ve been busting our braces for three months to work that out and that’s what we presented.’
‘Oh no, we can’t possibly say that,’ said Arthur, and so after the usual arguments off we went again. It’s when you have to agree with the client that the going can get tough in the agency business. We ended up with ‘The Vauxhall breed’s got style.’ As part of the advertising campaign we were asked to make name recommendations for a new saloon and came up with ‘Ventura’.
‘Like it!’ said Vauxhall, only to come back weeks later saying, ‘Can’t use it. There’s already a Pontiac Catalina Ventura model in the States and the Model Names Committee has given it the elbow.’
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘You can’t buy a Pontiac in the UK so what’s the problem?’
‘Don’t confuse us with the facts,’ said Vauxhall. ‘Try again.’
So back to the drawing board and a stroke of inspiration. We rounded off the U of Ventura and called it ‘Ventora’. The faceless men in Detroit accepted it and that’s what it was called: ‘Vauxhall Ventora – the lazy fireball!’ It did quite well too: I had one and with its high-torque, easy-going engine it fully lived up to the advertising.
With the agency workers concentrated on the UK I set about getting the Vauxhall business in Europe, such as it was. This was a big mistake, because it wasn’t worth having and with hindsight was never going to be. The Continent was Opel territory and Vauxhall sales there were very small beer. We had an excellent Masius agency in Amsterdam and after I had met and got to know the Vauxhall boss in Holland, John Czarski, we made a successful presentation for what turned out to be an account well worth having. This was more than could be said for France: we presented for the business in Paris and got it, only to find that the previous year’s sales of Vauxhall in France had totalled 47 cars – all of them at greatly reduced prices to GM employees!
It was not a very good start and it didn’t get any better. When I appeared with missionary zeal in Stockholm to present for the Swedish business (which we got), Hugh Austin, the American boss, said, ‘Come with me, Murray, and I’ll show you the sort of problem we have with Vauxhall.’ He took me to the Service Department where there was a factory-fresh Victor with drum brakes on one side and disc brakes on the other. If I hadn’t seen it I would never have believed it.
While all this was going on in work, the rest of my life became increasingly hectic. My parents had moved down to Beaulieu in Hampshire for my father to help Lord Montagu develop his newly founded Montagu Motor Museum and were living in the East Wing at Palace House, in the beautiful New Forest. What started with just a few historic cars in Palace House became the present collection of wonderful vehicles in their own custom-built premises and one of the finest automotive museums in the world. My father was particularly responsible for the motor-cycle section, which I still visit regularly to relive old memories, but the whole collection is well worth the trip, particularly the new exhibition, which I had the honour of opening recently.
Elizabeth and I bought our first house in 1960, the base for my uniquely divided life. Monday to Friday belonged to the agency – and a lot of weekends too when we were working on new business presentations. But almost every weekend was either the BBC’s or ITV’s because for years I worked for both of them on motor-cycle scrambles.
It was non-stop. On Friday evening I would leave the office in St James’s Square, meet Elizabeth and our boxer dog, Sheba, and head off in the car to wherever that weekend’s scramble was taking place. Usually they were somewhere in the Midlands or the North and in those days there was no M1 motorway, so it was a long slog up the A5 and onwards to arrive at a hotel late at night and then be on parade at the track first thing on Saturday. If it was ITV’s World of Sport, with Dickie Davis hosting the programme from London, all the races were repeated for the regional network the next day at the same track with the same riders on the same bikes, then it was home again, starting at about 5pm if we were lucky. Trying to get a good meal late on a Sunday afternoon was a major challenge but eventually we were saved by the advent of the Chinese restaurant, one of which was always open and always good. Then it was another long drive and into the office on Monday morning.
I was a glutton for work and in the winter of 1963 wrote most of my book The Art of Motor-Cycle Racing, which I co-authored with the great Mike Hailwood, by the light of a flexible reading lamp in the passenger seat of our Austin A40 with Elizabeth at the wheel. Our record was 13 consecutive weeks doing alternate broadcasts for ITV and the BBC in the appalling snowbound winter of 1963, which was when my appendix suddenly packed up. I was climbing down from the commentary box after a scramble meeting near Stratford on Avon when I collapsed in extreme pain. I’d been seeing a specialist so Elizabeth rushed me home and got him over to look at me. Half an hour later I was in an ambulance on my way to King Edward VII Hospital for Officers in London’s Marylebone Road and the next morning I woke up in a mini-ward with a General and an army chaplain.
The agency continued to expand, with already great accounts joined by the Co-op, Nationwide, Ever Ready, the Government’s Central Office of Information (for whom we did the memorable ‘Don’t ask a man to drink and drive’ and ‘Clunk, click – every trip’ campaigns), W H Smith, Danish Butter and Bacon, Crown Paints, Daily Express, Brooke Bond, Ski Yoghurt, Golden Wonder Crisps, Hoover, McDonald’s and many others. But in 1968 a second major automotive company contacted the agency – my old employer Dunlop.
We got the business with a fairly conventional approach but once we had made ourselves acceptable to the Dunlop management we proposed a humorous, truly innovative and memorable campaign based on a whimsical and endearing made-up animal – the Groundhog. (Only much later when I was in Canada for the Grand Prix at Montreal did