Whitney Straight was American born, but had become a naturalised British citizen before the war. His widowed mother married again and, with her second husband, founded the Dartington Hall artistic and agricultural community near Totnes in south Devon.
Straight had the money to run his own motor racing team. His colleagues included Dick Seaman, who would crash fatally at the 1939 Belgian Grand Prix as a Mercedes-Benz works driver.
Alongside a business career in aviation, Straight was a member of No 601 Squadron in the Auxiliary Air Force. On attachment, he served in Norway in 1940, seeking frozen lakes from which the RAF could operate. He was injured and deafened in a bombing attack but regained his operational category in time to rejoin 601 at Exeter in late September 1940 and qualify for the Battle of Britain Clasp.
In July 1941 Straight was commanding No 242 Squadron. He forced-landed in France after being hit by flak. He was eventually interned by the Vichy authorities but escaped and returned to Britain after an absence of almost exactly a year.
During his post-war career, Straight, who left the RAF as an Air Commodore, was managing director of the BOAC airline. With his wife, formerly Lady Daphne Finch-Hatton, he had two daughters. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography records that he also had a son “from a thirty-year relationship with” Diana Barnato Walker.
She was a pioneering pilot who served in the Air Transport Auxiliary. Her father, Woolf Barnato, drove Bentleys to victory in the Le Mans 24 hours motor race in 1928 (partnered by Bernard Rubin), 1929 (“Tim” Birkin) and 1930 (Glen Kidston).
The glamorous annual event at Le Mans also figured in the sporting career of ‘Reggie’ Tongue, who learned to fly with the Oxford University Air Squadron and whose service in the Battle of Britain was as a Hurricane pilot with Nos 3 and 504 Squadrons. For a time during the war he was engaged to the widow of Dick Seaman, but the marriage did not take place.
Tongue competed at Le Mans in 1934. With Maurice Faulkner he brought an Aston Martin to the chequered flag in 10th place. In 1951 he was a member of the crew of a Jaguar Mk 5 in the Monte Carlo Rally. In those days merely reaching the eponymous district of Monaco, from various starting points across Europe, in deep winter, was an achievement. Reggie Tongue and his co-driver, P E Warr, set off from Glasgow, made Monte Carlo and were classified 31st.
As Le Mans features prominently in this blog, it is perhaps not inappropriate to mention Squadron Leader Johnny Hindmarsh, whose contribution to winning the Battle of Britain came as a Hawker test pilot. He was killed testing a Hurricane in 1938.
Hindmarsh had taken victory in the 1935 24 hour race, partnering Luis Fontés in a Lagonda. Susan, one of his daughters, went on to marry the post-war grand prix driver Roy Salvadori, Essex-born but of Italian extraction. The 1959 Le Mans race was won by an Aston Martin crewed by Salvadori and the American, Carroll Shelby.
Luis Fontés, who was British but with Brazilian parentage, provides another link to wartime flying but also a warning of what can happen when ‘motor racing’ becomes unofficial. Shortly after his Le Mans triumph, he was imprisoned in Britain after he collided with, and fatally injured, a motor cyclist while the worse for drink and taking part in a ‘race’ on public roads. He later joined the Air Transport Auxiliary and was killed in October 1940 in the crash of a Vickers Wellington.
Whitney Straight died in 1979 and Reggie Tongue in 1992.
Geoff Simpson, FRHistS
