Marbled Whites Are Back Today

Almost the same date as last year.

 

New-born Dragonfly

 A brand-new Southern Hawker from our pond today.

Roumelia Avenue, Boscombe

An interesting street.

 

Boscombe Town Centre

The town centre had the air of many south coast towns, of neglect and unemployment.  The local fast food delivery drivers foregathered in front of the dachshund.  The standard of street art was high but wasn't commercial as far as we could see.  The arcade was clean and bright, housing art galleries but again not very commercial.  

 

Boscombe Beach

 Boscombe is just east of Bournemouth and a lot of thought has gone into its beach and pier.  There are numerous exercise areas and there are rentable beach compartments above the watersport and coffee shops and large public toilets of The Overstrand.

The Barracks, Christchurch

We ate at the Bailey Bridge restaurant next to the Inn.  I wondered about the origin of the name until I discovered what was clearly an old guardroom just down the road on Dragoon Way.  I found out that that there had been a barracks there since 1794 and that in the 1930s Mr Bailey had worked on developing his eponymous bridge right there.  It was adaptable for any width of crossing or weight of vehicle and some of the bridges are still in use today around the world.  I also liked the dog behaviour business. 

 

NMM, Beaulieu (Land Speed Record Cars)

This room was dark and lit by artificial light giving odd colour rendition.  The red car is the Sunbeam LSR Mystery of 1926, often called The Slug.  Designed by Jack Irving of Sunbeam, this had two V12 sunbeam boat engines giving a combined output of 870 bhp.  One engine sat in front of the driver, the other behind (and behind the rear axle!)  This made the car quite unstable, but Henry Segrave drove it to a new record of 203.97 mph on Daytona Beach in Florida (Jan. 1927).   Malcolm Campbell in his Bluebird then raised the record by a few mph, and American Ray Keech took it to 207 mph in his White Triplex, powered by three V-12 Liberty aero engines.  Irving left Sunbeam, and Segrave persuaded him to design another car to take the record to 250 mph.  Using just one engine, a W-12 Napier Lion used for the Schneider Trophy seaplanes and tuned for 925 bhp, the Irving-Napier Special, or Golden Arrow, this car was amazingly docile - Segrave drove it to and from its garage onto the beach at Daytona - and on its first run it easily raised the record to 231 mph.  The next day, driver Lee Bible crashed the White Triplex, killing himself and a photographer.  The beach was closed and Segrave was unable to attempt other runs.  Golden Arrow covered a distance of 36 miles in its active life.  Donald Campbell's Bluebird in the NMM was powered by a gas turbine engine connected to all four wheels.  Weighing about the same as the Golden Arrow, it had nearly five times the horsepower and was aiming for 500 mph.  After a high-speed crash at Bonneville Salt Flats in 1960 and rain problems with the salt lake Lake Eyre in Australia, Campbell finally raised the speed record to 403.1 mph in 1964.  This record, unbeaten until 2001, was the highest for a wheel-driven car.

 

National Motor Museum, Beaulieu (Lights)

 Some of the light sets at the museum.  The rust on the Ford Anglia was typical of cars of that age, but was the only bit of rust I saw anywhere (except in the Top Gear exhibition).  The two motorbikes are the Coventry Eagle and the Ariel Leader, or 'Noddy Bike'.  The Noddy was so called because the policeman riding it was instructed not to remove his hands from the grips but to nod rather than saluting.

National Motor Museum, Beaulieu (Mechanicals)

The only tripod I took was six inches high, so there were a lot of ultra-low view angles in places where the light was poor.  The Allard was one of the first dragsters, its cart springs almost identical to the vintage car in the photo above.  The Lotus 49 is for my generation the iconic racing car, the first to use the engine and transmission as part of the 'chassis'.  The engine was bolted to the rear of a monocoque tub, and the rear wheels and suspension were attached to the engine.  It was very light, and the Ford Cosworth 3 litre V8 turned out 400 bhp; Jim Clark took it to a convincing win on its first outing at Zandvoort in July 1967, and if Graham Hill's engine had not failed, it would have been a one-two for Lotus.  It immediately rendered cars like the heavy BRM H-16 [the green car next to the Lotus] obsolete, and the 49 went on to dominate racing for the next four years. Next pic is of the BRM's triple brake pistons.  Finally the front axle and suspension of a Routemaster bus.