Jeremy Clarkson: This tired old bird deserves another chance
When the Vulcan flew over my house nobody could understand why I was running about in the garden, pointing and grabbing my private parts
The Sunday Times
Published: 3 October 2010
Last week we were told, for the umpteenth time, that unless eleventy million pounds is raised by next Tuesday, the last airworthy Vulcan bomber will be mothballed in a shed, where it will be eaten by rats and used by birds as a lavatory.
You’re probably fed up with these stories. We’re always being told by those who rescued this plane from oblivion that they’ve spent the £100 you gave them last year and that now they will dangle from your heartstrings until you give them some more.
There are many worthy organisations that want your money.
Sick kiddies. Landmine amputees. Our Brave Boys. So why give it to a lot of people with adenoidal problems and cheap shoes just so they can indulge their passion for a plane that was used only once in anger in its entire 24-year service life? You may remember. It flew all the way to the Falkland Islands to bomb the runway at Port Stanley. And mostly missed.
I understand your cynicism but if we take this argument to its logical conclusion, then there is no point in paying millions of pounds every year to keep the Tower of London upright. It, too, served no useful purpose when it was new and is now nothing more than a glorified safe, guarded by 37 pensioners in silly dresses. Let’s pull it down and sell the land to Wimpey.
Stonehenge is also a waste of time and money since nobody knows what it was for then, and now it’s just a magnet for lunatics. And why should I give Bill Oddie any of my hard-earned cash just so he can sit in a box, counting ospreys? Screw ’em. What have they ever done for me?
Happily, in this country, we are extremely good at preserving things that we think matter. Many of our magnificent old houses are kept in tip-top order and those who sit on the summit of this newspaper’s Rich List donate millions each year to keep a few dabs of Constable’s oil in air-conditioned comfort.
Find something old and I’ll find you a group of enthusiasts who are working round the clock to preserve it for future generations Recently, Rowan Atkinson announced that he wished to build a splendid modern house, designed by an esteemed architect, in the Oxfordshire village where he lives. But the neighbours went nuts, suggesting that it would look like a petrol station and would consequently ruin the olde worlde charm of their surroundings. Yup. They were prepared to stone a national treasure to death to keep things as they had been for 200 years.
I experienced similar problems with my house, albeit on a smaller scale. Planners allowed me to make many modifications using modern materials such as glass and steel. But they were absolutely insistent that the door between the hall and the kitchen must remain. “It is a very important door,” said one expert.
It’s not just doors, either. Beavers, stamps, hedgerows, bats, books, woodland, monuments, boats, pottery, sporting equipment, poetry, record players. Find something old and I’ll find you a group of enthusiasts who are working round the clock to preserve it for future generations. I even know of one man who collects and restores vacuum cleaners.
However, we seem to have a very different attitude to machinery. After the war, for instance, most of the aircraft that had helped to keep Johnny Hun at bay were taken to fields in Wiltshire and Blackpool and chopped into tiny pieces. We didn’t need them any more in the jet age so Wellingtons, Lancasters, Blenheims and Sunderlands were simply scrapped. That’s why, today, there are only around 50 working Spitfires in the whole world.
It was much the same story with Brunel’s steamship, the SS Great Britain, which now resides at the docks in Bristol. This was a massively important piece of engineering, the first ocean-going steel ship to have a propeller, and it was big too. A hundred feet longer than anything that had gone before.
I’m delighted to say the lottery fund stumped up much of the cost of renovating Brunel’s masterpiece. But it drew the line at the 1,000-horsepower engines. Even though these were really what set the ship apart and made it interesting, it would not cough up and, as a result, the motors that visitors see today are electrically powered fakes.
Then you have the Science Museum. Only a tiny fraction of its exhibits are on show in London. The rest — some 200,000 — are housed in a collection of dingy hangars near Swindon. And, of course, a recent application to the lottery to turn this site into a full-on museum where visitors could see the cars and the missiles and the planes that made Britain an economic powerhouse was rejected in favour of a cycleway or some such nonsense. “Preserve a car?” To the Miliband boy and his mates, that would be like paying to preserve the bubonic plague.
Generally speaking, the job of maintaining Britain’s mechanised past is the responsibility of wealthy individuals. Nearly all the working Spitfires, for example, are in the hands of rock stars and blue-bloods. It’s the same story with most of our country’s automotive history, and that’s before we get to the traction engines that are maintained by a group of people who think Fred Dibnah was a god.
The idea of getting a grant or sponsorship to preserve a Type 42 destroyer or a Tornado is simply laughable. And that’s why it is important we do whatever is possible to help the men in plastic shoes keep that Vulcan airworthy. Sure, it’s not as glamorous as a Spitfire, which is why, when it flew low and slow over my house the other day, my children couldn’t have been less interested. My dog thought it was noisy and wet itself. Nobody could really understand, therefore, why I was running about in the garden, pointing and grabbing my private parts.
It’s true, of course, that this big, loud, delta-winged, retaliatory fist never did anything noteworthy. But since it was built, purely, to drop nuclear bombs on Russia, we should all thank God for that. And be grateful, when we hand over a hundred quid to keep it up there, that we still can.
Top man!
Gully
probably raise more awareness more than any other media article would! and it was on our local news about 558 over the w/e too
). I strangely find him funny & I'm glad he still speaks his mind. 
