Flying Car – Flying Driver

Sometimes stunts which go wrong can produce even better pictures than those that work perfectly.

 

Sometimes stunts which go wrong can produce even better pictures than those that work perfectly. I learnt this simple lesson early in my association with master stunt arranger and showman Joe Weston-Webb who ran the Destruction Squad team.

Car Over River

One day in the late 60s, Joe telephoned to ask if I would be interested in photographing one of his cars jumping over a river.

To be honest I wasn’t that taken with the idea. It seemed unlikely to interest any of the picture editors on the major magazines and newspapers for whom I worked. However, Joe had come up with some sparkling pictures for me in the past, so I decided to get in my car and drive the hundred or so miles between London and his base in the Midlands.

When I arrived, he explained that he had prepared an old family saloon for the jump and secured location on a small river surrounded by farmland. His idea was to place two jumping ramps, out of sight, on a steep bank. These would launch the car into space and, provided the driver got the speed right, enable it to fly over the water and land safely in a field on the other side.

Dull Day – Dull Pictures

We arrived at the location early one morning. The weather was grim. it had been raining heavily the previous night, and although this had stopped by the time I set up my cameras, the skies were grey and the light levels poor.

Surveying the scene, I was as unimpressed by what was on offer as I had been when Joe first came up with the idea. Then I spotted something which I felt would make my photographs rather more interesting.

A few hundred yards down river, a fisherman was placidly casting his line from a small boat. If we could persuade him to move the boat, and himself, into the middle of the river and the car were to jump over it, that would make for a slightly more exciting image. Joe had a brief conversation with the fishermen and came back to me to say he had agreed to move for £5. That sum having been paid, Joe’s team carefully manoeuvred the fisherman’s boat so that it was safely tied in the exact middle of the waterway.

Soggy Field – Slow  Car

I was using two motorised Nikons, one set on a tripod and fired by remote control the other being operated by myself. As with all my black and white photographs, I was using Kodak Tri-X film, rated at 400 ASA, and shooting at four frames per second with a shutter speed of 1/500^th second and an aperture of f4.5.

The driver was called up on his walkie-talkie – this is well in the days before mobile phones – and given the go-ahead. A few moments later we heard his engine labouring as he tried to gather speed across the field which was far wetter than Joe had anticipated.

“Is he going to make the attempt?” I asked.

“I hope not,” he replied. “He can’t be going more than 30 mph I needs to be doing at least 50mph to clear the river.”

The Car Nose Dives

Fortunately, I kept the camera to my eye as, less than a second later, the airborne car lurched into view.

It managed, just about, to clear the boat before crashing down into the river with an almighty splash.

The fishermen seeing the vehicle, as he thought, about to drop onto his boat, flung himself into the water. In the event, the car landed about 6 inches short of smashing his craft into smithereens.

The driver, Bill Johnson, clambered out through the window and stood on the car’s roof, as it floated gently downstream, waving triumphantly.

The Driver Goes Flying 

A few moments later I noticed the fishermen, who looked extremely angry as well as extremely wet, clambering onto the bonnet and then up to the roof of the car. I just time to raise another Nikon, this one fitted with a 135mm telephoto lens, to capture the moment when the fishermen punched Bill in the face and sent him flying backwards into the river.

The sequence of pictures of the stunt which went slightly wrong were published in more than a hundred newspapers and magazines around the world. Just shows that in photography, if not always in life, what you don’t expect to happen can be far more interesting than what you planned to occur.

Footnote

As a footnote, let me tell you about an interesting conversation I had a few months ago with the driver Bill Johnson. He telephoned me out of the blue to find out how things were going. I asked whether he still performed stunts. “Good heavens no,” he laughed. “It was far too risky. I became an investment banker and made a fortune!”

Photos below show the full sequence of events from the moment of take off to the moment the driver goes flying for a second time.

 

 

In my next blog I’ll be telling you about the time I was almost killed by a biplane.

For a full set of my photographs from the 60s see my new book The Way It Was: A Photographic Journey through ‘Sixties Britain.