Always in the Shadow

Heroes are created by public demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials.

--Gerald White Johnson

American Heroes and Hero Worship

Donald Campbell was a hero only by his own demand and not by his own assessment, for the materials were scanty indeed.

As a child in England, Campbell had rheumatic fever, and it affected his heart. During World War II, he was invalided out of the Royal Air Force after he had been accepted for pilot training. All his young life he lived in the shadow of a robust, rich and famous father: Sir Malcolm Campbell, gentleman sportsman, holder of nine world land-speed records and three water-speed records, knighted by King George V. Even after Sir Malcolm died, in his bed at 64, the shadow remained. Donald sought out mediums, trying to contact his father--sometimes, he claimed, with success: "There he was, laughing uproariously as he called me 'a complete clot.' "

The Innings. One day in 1949, Campbell was sitting moodily in his father's study when a friend rushed in to tell him that U.S. Industrialist Henry Kaiser was building an aluminum boat designed to break Sir Malcolm's 1939 water-speed record of 141.74 m.p.h. "Why should they have everything?" Donald exploded. "By God, they won't have that record!" So Campbell, who by his own admission had "never traveled at more than 70 m.p.h. on the water and not much more on land," set out at 28 to fight his overmatch with speed.

He had his innings, but they rarely seemed to justify the cost. By 1959, Campbell had broken the water-speed record six times--and had gone through two broken marriages. In 1960, he became the first man to survive an auto crash at over 200 m.p.h., when his turbine-powered Bluebird spun out of control at the Bonneville Salt Flats and soared 681 ft. through the air. That cost him a basal skull fracture and a $4,500,000 car--$112,000 of which was his own money. In 1964, he scored another first, setting records on both land (403 m.p.h.) and water (276 m.p.h.), but again there was a clinker: his land-speed mark applied only to direct-drive automobiles, because the U.S.'s Craig Breedlove had already clocked 407 m.p.h. in a free-wheeling jet-powered vehicle.

Solitaire in Spades. Melancholy, superstitious, plagued by self-doubt, Campbell kept talking himself into retirement and right back out again. "Donald," says a psychiatrist who knew him, "was always trying to prove himself to himself and to his father and to the world." Last week, on Coniston Water, a small, deep lake in northwest England, Donald Campbell, 45, tried for yet another water-speed record in a jet-powered Bluebird hydroplane designed to skim the surface on two 6-in. sponsons fastened to the pontoons. His goal: 300 m.p.h., a speed realm that no one had ever touched. Playing solitaire on the night before his record attempt, Campbell turned up the ace and queen of spades in succession. "Mary Queen of Scots had the same combination before she was beheaded," he remarked. "I know that one of my family is going to get the chop. I pray to God it isn't me." And there he was at 8 o'clock next morning, clambering into Bluebird's cockpit, clutching his lucky Teddy bear, Mr. Whoppit. Then he revved up Bluebird's 4,520-lb.-thrust Orpheus jet engine and shrieked off across the lake.

On his first run, Campbell clocked 297 m.p.h. He swung Bluebird around and started back into the measured kilometer, picking up speed until he was doing an estimated 340 m.p.h. Suddenly, Campbell's voice crackled over the radio. "She's tramping [shaking]! She's tramping! She's going!" Bluebird's right pontoon lifted, then her nose; finally, the whole boat went airborne, looped over backward, slammed back into the water, and sank. Divers finally located Bluebird, split in two on the lake bottom 142 ft. below. At week's end they were still searching for Campbell's body.

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