Not only drivers pay the price
IT was close to twilight on Friday when I found the grave I had been searching for in St Sepulchre’s Cemetery in Oxford. It was surrounded by a bed of stinging nettles and clumps of serene bluebells, uneasy companions thrown together by the decay of the churchyard. In the quiet of the early evening, some gravestones lay flat on their backs, defeated by the passing of time as surely as the men and women who rested beneath them.
But Frankie Tayler’s grave was well-kept and even though the bunch of white and pink roses that sat by the headstone had started to wilt, it was obvious they had been placed there recently. The illustration on the stone was still easy to make out, too: a carving of an old racing car, probably an MG, driving into the setting sun.
It is a heavy time of year for those of us who love motorsport and it does not seem too long ago that I visited the grave of Ayrton Senna under a flowering ipe tree at the Morumbi cemetery in Sao Paulo. F1 cars are racing again at Imola this weekend and in a fortnight, it will be the 27th anniversary of his death at the San Marino Grand Prix of 1994.
Frankie Tayler died 60 years before Senna and even though he was a mechanic, not a driver, his passing and the effect it had on those he left behind carry the almost unbearable poignancy of many of the losses that motorsport can visit on those who dedicate themselves to it.
Tayler was killed on the Isle of Man towards the end of May 1934 when he was 28 years old. He was the mechanic for a famous racing driver whose nom de course was Kaye Don and the day before his death, he had been working on Don’s MG Magnette in preparation for that year’s Mannin Moar race after the racer had complained of a brake problem.
Don, a holder of the land speed record, was playing cards with friends amid much merriment and high spirits when Tayler arrived to tell him he believed the problem had been fixed. Don said he would take the car for a spin. Tayler went with him. It was late in the evening and the roads had been reopened to the public. Don drove in the darkness with no lights.
Don crashed at high speed at the top of White Bridge Hill while he was trying to take a corner and collided with another car. The MG Magnette flipped and Don and Tayler were trapped beneath it. Don escaped with a few cuts but Tayler died in hospital the next day. Don was charged with manslaughter and was sentenced to four months in jail. Contemporaneous reports suggest rather more sympathy for the driver than for the man who had died.
The postscript is especially poignant. Tayler had been married for only 10 months and had promised his wife, Phyllis, that the event on the Isle of Man would be his last time in a racing car. Even though she lived on for 66 years after his death, she never remarried and before she died in 2000, she asked that her ashes be scattered on his grave amid t he nettle beds and t he bluebells.