The man who filmed Bluebird
I REMEMBER as a schoolboy coming home in 1967 to watch the evening news and seeing Donald Campbell being killed as he tried to beat his own world water speed record, on Coniston in the Lake District. He’d had a good initial run, touching 300mph, but made the fatal mistake of making a return attempt before the waves and ripples of his first track subsided. Bluebird K7, Campbell’s beautiful craft, hit its own turbulence, flipped, somersaulted, and smashed at high speed into the lake. Campbell was decapitated.
This week Bluebird was returned to the water after being salvaged in 2001 and since meticulously restored. This was a reason to re-run the shocking TV news footage of the 1967 catastrophe.
Only one TV news unit captured the horror of half a century ago. I knew the cameraman concerned; he was the first news cameraman I ever worked with, at Border Television in Carlisle.
His name was Eric Scott Parker; so his initials were ESP. And boy, did Eric have ESP – Extra Sensory Perception.
On that day in 1967 he was leaving the lake along with all the other assorted hacks and photographers, certain that Campbell had made his first and last run of the day, when something made him turn around and, alone, he went back to the lake’s shore.
“I just suddenly knew, somehow, that he was going to do it again,” Eric told me years later. He wound up his Arriflex clockwork film camera, set it up on his little tripod on the shingle shore, and waited. Sure enough, a few minutes later Bluebird made its unexpected return approach, and Eric captured the terrible moments of its destruction and Campbell’s violent death. The only TV cameraman to do so.
Eric definitely had the gift of second sight. Once, when we were filming local dignitaries on a Carlisle golf course for some political story or other, he set up his camera on the tee, pressed “record”, and stepped into shot. “Here we go – hole in one,” he said with flat certainty.
He teed the ball up and swiped it. It dropped straight into the first hole.
Another time as we were setting up for a routine news interview, he handed me a piece of paper with a few words scribbled on it. I’ve never forgotten them, because Eric told me exactly what the man was going to say to me. “Sorry,” he said. “For some reason I need to tell you this.”
I glanced at the note as I asked the MP my opening question. His reply was word for word, syllable for syllable, what Eric had predicted.
“Hmm… well… I’d need notice of that question… I’ll take the fifth, if you don’t mind.”
It was all a bit creepy, to be honest. Like the time I asked Eric, mid-season, who he thought would win the FA Cup. He told me, the teams, and the score. I laughed him off.
If I’d placed the bet, I’d be writing this from my own island in the Bahamas.