GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

The inimitable motoring writer LJK Setright

To his admirers he was eloquent, cultured, erudite and insightful; to his detractors he was verbose, pretentious, elitist and arrogant. With an appetite for the mischievous quip and the provocative opinion, he earned ample representation in each camp. But love him or hate him, the one thing you could never do was ignore him. LJK Setright was an original and, perhaps more thoroughly than any other automotive writer of his quite lengthy time, he was completely, totally his own man – and it went far deeper than just a taste for distinctive menswear and Latin phrase-dropping.

Then again, Leonard John Kensell Setright probably wasn’t fated to be demure. Arriving in 1931 to Australian parents who had moved to London – the diametric opposite of the prevailing norm – he inherited their self-evident independence of thought, along with a love of music, a passion for learning and a keen intelligence. His father was a successful and, according to Leonard, very artful engineer, who invented and produced the iconic ticketing machine of London bus conductors. In addition to providing an excellent education and an early exposure to fascinating cars, he also inspired in his son a downright reverence for the engineering profession.

That Leonard subsequently chose to take up law instead might have been, as some have speculated, a reaction to his father’s death when he was only eleven. Whatever the reason, Setright found that, while he admired the law’s clockwork elegance in principle, he couldn’t abide the real-world messiness of its practice. In 1961 he gave that up for a staff writer position with general tech magazine Machine Age; he soon became editor, selling articles to motoring publications on the side, moving in 1965 to write automotive copy for an advertising firm, and in ’66 he took the plunge as a full-time motoring journalist.

He would remain such until his death from cancer in 2005, aged 74, generating material for journals domestic and foreign, including, most notably, a three-decade stint with the British magazine Car. His output ranged from new cars and old to motorbikes and biographies, as well as some 20-odd books as author, co-author or editor. Following a religious retreat at a Hasidic community in Texas (likely spurred by the 1980 suicide of his first wife: the Judaism of his childhood had been largely secular), Leonard became something of a Talmudic scholar, writing on that subject as well, and it was fascinating to watch his famous personal ‘look’ progressively morph from suave Edwardian gent to rather more ZZ Top’s hipster rabbi.

His natural calling, however, and the role his loyal fans remember most fondly, was as a columnist, where the less structured format allowed his intellect and curiosity to roam freely. It was Setright in the 1960s pages of Car and Driver who first introduced me, then a mere teenager, to the cult of Bristols, car design as an art form, the voodoo of clutchless shifting and the concept that driving was a serious craft, to

‘HE WAS EQUALLY LIKELY TO HOLD FORTH ON HONDA ENGINEERING, MOZART’S SYMPHONIES OR A HEAVY GOODS VEHICLE’

be studied, performed with utmost speed (LJKS really, really liked speed), but with absolute precision and scrupulous respect for the equipment. Oh, and don’t forget the driving gloves.

Leonard was equally likely to hold forth on the virtues of Honda’s engineering, Mozart’s symphonies, a groundbreaking artificial heart valve, or a heavy goods vehicle. Of course, the full Setright treatment inevitably included that regular dose of untranslated Latin, which was indeed eventually as cloying as his habit of self-reference in the third person. His tirades on speed limits, environmentalism, or whatever he deemed an encroachment on his individual freedoms, could be as acidic as a contrarian uncle at Christmas lunch, his rhapsodies as misplaced as his gleeful celebrations of the wretched black cigarettes that ultimately killed him.

But here’s the final takeaway: regardless of topic or viewpoint, Leonard Setright never, ever trivialised the process. He never talked down to the readers or pandered to popular trends for the sake of pleasing a choice demographic. He was intelligent, knowledgeable and literate, and if an allusion to the Punic Wars fitted the situation, he had enough faith in his audience to believe they’d work it out just fine, if need be, and that expanding one’s horizons is among life’s greatest pleasures. In a world of increasing anti-intellectualism, where the very notion of learned expertise is denigrated by cynical opportunists and emotion often rules over reason, Setright is sorely missed.