A year ago today I lost a friend. At around nine o’clock in the evening of the twenty-fourth of May 2023, a month and a day after his ninety-third birthday, Ian Scott-Watson died in hospital, having failed to recover from what had appeared at the time to be a minor fall in a supermarket car park.
If you know even a little about the history of Grand Prix racing, you’ve probably heard of him, though you might have thought his name was Ian Scott Watson. (For most of his life, it was. The family added the hyphen relatively recently.) He achieved many things, but he is best known for having pushed Jim Clark into a career which led to him becoming F1 World Champion in 1963 and 1965. It’s impossible to determine who the greatest driver in history has been, but when people make that futile attempt, Clark’s name is bound to be mentioned. And that’s because of Ian.
He first encountered Clark when they were driving from their respective homes just north of the border between Scotland and England to a meeting of the Ednam and District Young Farmers’ Club. That Sunbeam is in the hands of a lunatic, Ian thought, not yet realising that Clark had a level of car control he had not previously believed possible.
They became friends, and met often at local motorsport events. It would be fair to say that neither of them had inherited an interest in this activity. “The best driver I ever sat beside,” I was once assured by David Hodges (another member of the Berwickshire motorsport community, and the first person outside the hospital to learn of Ian’s death), “was Jim Clark.” That seemed fair enough. “The worst,” he added, “was Jim Clark’s father!”
Later in the conversation David admitted he had never sat beside Ian’s father, who was probably worse still. The senior Scott Watson, who preferred riding horses, believed that to exceed twenty miles per hour was to trifle with one’s health, and that the safest way to drive was to straddle the centre of the road, a technique which could become suboptimal in the fortunately unlikely event that someone coming the other way was also employing it.
The senior Clarks tolerated their only son’s involvement in sprints, hillclimbs, rallies and autotests because competitors take part in those one at a time. They drew the line at circuit racing, where all the cars are on the track at once. Ian, feeling that Clark should try this too, asked him to act as his mechanic at the June 1956 meeting at Crimond, two hundred miles away in Aberdeenshire, where he had entered two races, but did not mention until they got there that one of the entries was for Clark. He was sure that Clark’s parents would never hear about it, but failed to realise that more distant relatives would be among the spectators. By the time the lads returned to Berwickshire, Mr and Mrs Clark already knew what had happened, but they received the news surprisingly calmly, and decided they could no longer forbid Jim from racing now that he had already done so.
Famously, Clark drove Ian’s car round Crimond three seconds a lap quicker than Ian himself could. Obvious conclusions have been drawn, but I believe this has been misinterpreted. I sat beside Ian twice, and on both occasions admired his skill. I’m not usually a good passenger, but I was perfectly relaxed, even though Ian was making what is euphemistically described as ‘good forward progress’. In my view, the three-second difference tells you everything about Clark’s driving, and nothing about Ian’s.
After Crimond, Ian continued to offer his cars for Clark to race, and later bought ones for this purpose (using them himself as daily transport), and was instrumental in the reformation of the Border Reivers team almost solely for Clark’s benefit, and became Clark’s unofficial and unpaid manager when Clark joined the Lotus Grand Prix team, only to be removed from the scene abruptly and embarrassingly in 1961, though not at Clark’s instigation.
He was a key figure – at first the key figure – in the early stages of Clark’s career, but he was not alone. There were many other supporters, notably Jock McBain, who sold Fords in Berwick-upon-Tweed and manufactured windmills in Chirnside, and was in charge of preparing and maintaining the Border Reivers cars.
In the absence of such support, reaching the highest level in motor racing is impossible. Without Ian and McBain there is, in Formula 1 terms, no Jim Clark, in the same way that without Barry Filer or Anthony Hamilton or Jos Verstappen there are no Jackie Stewart or Lewis Hamilton or Max Verstappen. Clark was never going to have the approval of his family, but he had no shortage of friends and well-wishers to help him on his way.
Why? It is invariably said that he was extraordinarily talented. I have no reason to doubt this, and in fact Clark is, along with Tazio Nuvolari, one of the two racing drivers I most wish I had been able to watch. But I think there is another factor. I think that if Clark had been as good a driver as Ian actually was, and if Ian had been as good as Clark actually was, Ian would have not had the support Clark did. I think that in those circumstances Clark might still have had that support.
Clark died in a crash in April 1968, long before I knew he had lived. Clearly, I never met him. I got to know Ian well, especially over the last five years. We first met when I interviewed him while researching an article for Autosport magazine, and went on to meet several times more for the purpose of writing other articles, including one based on a celebratory visit to Crimond. Then I moved to Berwickshire – or the part of today’s Scottish Borders council area which used to be called that – nine miles from the house he had built in 1962 and lived in for six decades. (This was coincidental. It took me over a year to find somewhere, and two of the places I looked at were three hundred and twenty miles apart. I wasn’t trying to live in Berwickshire. It just happened.) I became one of many people, including his wonderful neighbour Carol, who helped him out in his declining years. On perhaps a hundred Saturdays, I picked him up and took him shopping in Duns, after which we would find somewhere to have lunch (Ian was definitely a man who liked a good lunch) and then head back to his place for coffee, hoping his cat hadn’t caused too much devastation while we were away.
Jim Clark in 1965. Photo copyright Dutch National Archive.
What follows, therefore, is based on a combination of hearsay and personal experience. Everything I’ve read about Clark, or heard from people who knew him, suggests that, though quiet and modest and polite, he was in a certain way very charismatic. Ian, a splendid fellow, to be sure, was not charismatic, and I don’t think he would ever have claimed to be. Clark was revered during his lifetime and still is today, well into a new century. Ian was greatly admired for his part in the Clark story, and for his excellent work as a house designer, but not, I would say, revered. A book could be written about Clark’s relationships with women, though I hope nobody will do this. The only woman Ian said he had wanted to marry, and as far as I know the only one who wanted to marry him, married someone else instead. One girlfriend admitted, after they split up, that she had gone out with him only in order to be closer to Clark.
It is absolutely the way things should have been that Clark became a World Champion and Ian did not (though he occasionally pointed out that other famous drivers were sometimes three seconds a lap slower than his friend, as he had been at Crimond), but it wasn’t just about talent. It’s never just about that. Clark, who seems to have had no ambitions in the sport at all in his younger days, reached the top of it at least partly because people around him wanted that to happen. We, especially the Ians in our midst, the kindest and most generous and most selfless of us, like to help the charismatic people, both the deserving ones, the Clarks, and the less deserving, while the Ians are left to fend for themselves.
Old age did not sit well with Ian. He said it was only when he turned seventy that he began to feel, if not exactly old, at least different from the way he had in his twenties. The gradual decline which followed led him to say, on another occasion, “If I had popped off when I was eighty-five, that would have been all right.” And towards the end, but before the fall, he told me he did not want to live to be a hundred, a wish he was unexpectedly granted. His quality of life would by then have been unbearably low. His eyesight was deteriorating badly (I suspect he was only a few weeks away from being registered blind), and when his hearing aids weren’t functioning properly, which seemed to happen quite a lot, he was completely deaf. As a result, although he remained incredibly sharp, and was able, while lying on what would become his deathbed within a fortnight, to recall perfectly some complex details about the construction of a house he had designed in the early 1970s (which I passed on to the owner on his behalf), he could initially seem very confused if someone approached him in the street, or in a room with more than two people in it. In fact, he was confused, but not because his mind was no longer working as it should, which they might understandably have assumed. It was simply that he couldn’t properly see or hear whoever was talking to him.
He wished, without making a big deal of it, that he had been more celebrated for his house designs, though as far as I can tell he was considered eminent in that field, but he was also very proud of the Clark connection. In his final year, he expressed surprise at having met someone who didn’t know about this, as if he thought everyone did. When he fell, and a crowd of kind, concerned people rushed over to see if they could help the old man, word about who he was quickly spread, and a woman next to me said excitedly to someone else, “This is the guy who made Jim Clark!” He probably didn’t hear that, since he was shouting in pain because of the damage to his hip, which had to replaced, but he might have been pleased if he had. Two months later, I wrote his obituary, and was paid for it. This was right and proper, but I couldn’t help feeling slightly guilty, though it also struck me that, in his generous way, he would also have been pleased that he had helped me to earn some money, if not about the reason for it.
Perhaps he would have been pleased by this tribute too. I fear he wouldn’t, but I will never know.
Postscript: A few days after Ian died, I went to the charming little town of Kelso, which he had known well, with another friend. It was a nice day, and we felt the need for exercise after a splendid lunch, so we walked along the bank of the River Tweed, within sight of its confluence with the Teviot. We passed close to some ducklings, not newly hatched but still young enough for their parents to take care that they stayed out of trouble. Ian has been taken from us, I thought, but there are more ducklings in the world now than there used to be. Life, as has so rightly been said, goes on.
Ian’s memoir, Black Sheep in the Fast Lane, is available to buy from the Jim Clark Trust.
Top image of Ian in 2018 copyright Ford Motor Company.
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