From the archives of Bob Montgomery
BEAULIEU: The arrival of good weather invariably turns the minds of many drivers towards motoring trips to be made in the summer months. For those who take their cars to Britain, the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, near Southampton, is a destination which should figure high on their list of 'must visit' places. Yet this remarkable world-class museum came about almost by accident.
It was the present Lord Montagu's father, John Douglas-Scott Montagu, who first introduced the motor car to Beaulieu. In the summer of 1898 he purchased a two-cylinder Daimler and followed it the next year with a four-cylinder car of the same make, the very first four-cylinder Daimler manufactured.
An advocate of the motor car in Parliament, he attempted to become the first to drive a car into the courtyard of the Houses of Parliament. At first refused entry, he gained admission on appeal to the Speaker of the House. In the same year, The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, became the first member of the British royal family to ride on a car when John Montagu drove him around the estate at Beaulieu.
John Montagu died in 1929, and in 1951 his son Edward Montagu inherited the sprawling Beaulieu estate. In an attempt to make the estate financially viable, the new Lord Montagu opened it to the public. Within the entrance hall of Palace House he displayed six old cars as part of an attempt to tell the story of his father's love of motoring.
It soon became apparent that the cars were a major attraction for the 80,000 visitors who came to the house in that first year, but it was a chance meeting with an American collector, James Melton, during a lecture tour of the US by Lord Montagu, which sowed the seeds of what would become one of the world's greatest motor museums.
At first more cars were purchased and added to various parts of Palace House, but in 1959 Lord Brabazon of Tara and Stirling Moss opened a new purpose-built structure to house nearly 100 cars and motorcycles in what was now called the Montagu Motor Museum. By the mid-1960s the museum was jam-packed with significant vehicles and was attracting over a half million visitors annually.
By now it was clear that a new and even bigger building was urgently required and this in turn was opened to the public in June 1972 by the Duke of Kent. At the same time the museum became a charitable trust, changing its name to The National Motor Museum - 'national' referring to the extent and scope of the collection rather than signifying any state backing.
Today, the museum incorporates a restoration workshop and a world famous archive and motoring library, as well as the many and varied vehicle exhibits. Perhaps its most significant exhibits are its four land speed record breaking cars.
These are the 1920 350hp Sunbeam which, driven by Malcolm Campbell, took the world land speed record to 150.86 mph at Pendine; the 1,000hp Sunbeam of 1927 in which Henry Segrave became the first to break the 200 mph mark; the Golden Arrow in which Segrave further pushed the record to 231.44 mph in 1929 and finally Donald Campbell's Bluebird which sped to a record of 403.1 mph at Lake Eyre in Australia in 1964 - all fitting centrepieces for this remarkable collection.