Quotes and stories from the team
I remember watching those slow, carefully delivered news broadcasts as the Falklands war developed and we lost ship after ship it seemed. I remember just as vividly reading a couple of brilliant books entitled "Try not to laugh Sergeant Major" and "Dont cry for me Sergeant Major" They were written shortly after the conflict and told the funny side of the war, hundreds of soldiers in one place with one aim made sure that there would be a funny side to it all. I knew someone who flew a chinook up to the scene of the Lockerbie crash hours after it happened and the only stories he told were of the hilarious incidents that broke up the horror of the job in hand. It's simply another facet of human nature. We will always seek out the lighter side of any traumatic situtaion in order to protect our fragile selves.
Although the Bluebird Project has been and remains a very serious endeavour, there has been no shortage of hilarious moments, stupid blunders and quick one liners that have left us helpless with laughter. Some of you might want to share in this side of things. This project, at the end of the day, has been a thoroughly enjoyable gathering of like minded souls.
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The standard reply to anyone who is stupid enough to enquire why something sank is, "because it filled up with water".
Of course, you soon get wise to this and enquire instead as to the actual cause of this filling up with water business, but it remains the stock response. We arrived in Coniston one freezing January morning not long after the sun had dragged itself out of bed. There was snow on the fells and a thin crust of ice around the shore, morale was never good in those conditions and it didn't help at all to discover that we'd managed to leave our sonar tripod back in Glenridding. At that time of year the Kirkstone pass was decidedly treacherous and having struggled ourselves over it one way there was no possibility of going back for the tripod which is a huge ungainly structure not unlike one of those Martian fighting machines from War of the Worlds. It sits on the lake bed and holds a scanning sonar head about 2m above the mud. It was time to improvise. In a scene that could have been lifted straight out of Scrapheap Challenge, we cut the top off a roadcone that we stole from somewhere, fastened our horribly expensive scanning head to it with hose clips and tyraps and eyed the whole assembly with deep suspicion.
We'd had technical problems before but the standard procedure is for everyone to carry on as normal while the techies (Alain and Graeme) try to sort it. because of this, Beanie and Carl were nowhere to be seen for a while as they fettled the rebreathers. Rebreathers don't like cold weather because they're full of O rings and we all know what happens to O rings in the cold, it cost NASA a rather expensive spacecraft!
It was really beginning to get cold when Beanie re-appeared, we were blowing on our hands and pulling our hats down around our ears while we pondered the battered roadcone with it's attached sonar system. Beanie arrived, Mr non-technical accountant type who, by his own admission, would struggle to put a plug on a trainset. He threw it one horrified glance, looked around the rest of us to see how we felt about it and asked "how will it sink?" Typical Mr Smart Arse over here just looked at him and delivered a variation on the standard answer, "because it's heavier than water" said I. Of course, that's not what he'd meant at all so he shot me a withering look and walked back off up the jetty in disgust to play further with his O rings.
Eventually we got all the rebreathers sorted and made it out onto the lake. It was still bitterly cold so we wrapped up in scarves, hats and gloves.
There is always a period of relative inactivity while the boat is positioned perfectly.Each dive had to count in those conditions so it was worth the extra time on the surface to ensure that the underwater work went according to plan. The trick is to allow the wind to hold the boat against two widely spaced anchors, the wind effectively becoming the third anchor in a three point mooring. Each one has to be precisely positioned to keep the angles right and to ensure that we don't drop the anchors through a sensitive bit of lake bed. It can be a frustrating business. Frustrating it certainly was this time, no matter where I positioned the boat, we seemed to drift off in a different direction to that which we expected, it would be impossible to take advantage of the wind if I couldn't predict how it would affect the boat. By now there was a small blizzard going on but inside my snug little wheelhouse it made little difference. The windscreen wipers would quickly throw the snow into the lake before it had a chance to gather on the glass.
Things were becoming increasingly frustrating, the boat just wouldn't behave, finally I turned round and looked out over the rear deck. "Which way is that bloody wind blowing?" I shouted at no one in particular. Beanie peered up from his huddled position on the deck, smiled a little and said "same way that the snow's going" What could I do but grin stupidly while everyone got a laugh at my expense. Still, it was poetic justice, nice one Beanie, till the next time.
One of the things that we did during the recovery of Bluebird was to buy ourselves a new ROV. This stands for Remotely Operated Vehicle which in plain language means a little swimming robot ususally equipped with cameras, lights, thrusters etc that can be controlled from the surface. Mr Connacher has devoted a significant part of his life to building such machines but they are fickle little things and we decided to buy one that someone else could look after if it needed developing or it went wrong.
What we ended up with was a tiny piece of kit that would go places that we couldn't usually get to. It took us a bit of a while to get used to it but Graeme finally decided that he'd mastered the little beast when we had the wreck at about 20m.
It wasn't long into the lift and we still had concerns about some of the strops and shackles. One of the strops had been damaged by a piece of sharp wreckage on our very first attempt to move the wreck and we were taking no chances so as the wreck moved upwards in 5m stages we tried to inspect every part of the rigging.
I was calling instructions across to Predator which was tied alongside the barge, Predator was used to deploy the sonar and ROV but there was a monitor on the barge to allow the rest of us to see what was going on under the water.
My requests to inspect this shackle, that rope and the other strop seemed to be taking an age to get right but we just put it down to Graeme learning a new piece of kit, he was doing OK and eventually the inspection was complete. Satisfied, I went back to other concerns.
Ten minutes later Graeme appeared on deck looking very sheepish, he suggested in a round about way that if there were any "frog personnel" (his name for divers) nearby, it might be a good idea to have one of them rescue the new ROV which he reluctantly admitted was firmly stuck somewhere up the rear end of Bluebird.
We had to throw Carl in the water to rescue the ROV, Graeme had managed to get it into the jetpipe. That was what had caused the delay every time I wanted to inspect something. Graeme had been just about to enter the jetpipe on several occasions but we'd caught him just in time and asked him to look at something else. This went on until the inspection was finished whereupon he'd rushed straight round the back and up the jetpipe without delay.
Despite the fact that he was able to produce some amazing images of the turbine, stopped forever since 04 January 1967, he still ended up being re-named "Roger Ramjet" and finding himself accused of being the first person to
"get stuck up Donald Campbell's jetpipe"
We had to laugh.
It was getting dark and cold on the lake shore next to the Bluebird Cafe. It was the day of the lift and everyone was totally knackered. I'd been thoroughly worked over by the press, TV and radio folks. Every one of them wanted to ask the same questions and get the same answers with all the attached emotion, excitement and enthusiasm. By the time it got dark I was freezing cold, exhausted and running low on enthusiasm. The rest of the team had buggered off back to our cottage to slob out in front of the fire, I had one last TV interview to do for BBC 24. It was a live interview so there was a quick brief with the presenter to make sure that I didn't forget my lines. No cause for concern there, I was on autopilot by that time and the answers were so polished they could have been written for one of those politicians I keep seeing on the box these days.
There was practice run for the presenter, it went something like, "Here we are in Coniston at the end of this amazing day, blah blah blah, Donald, blah blah, tragic accident, waffle, waffle, he was only......hang on!!..... How old was Donald when he died????"
None of us knew the answer! shock horror and direst calamity! Time was ticking away before the broadcast, there were cameras, satellite dishes, vans full of techies, the film crew and me but there was no one about who could answer that simple question. We had a problem.
was guessing somewhere between 45 and 47 but I wasn't sure, no one else had a clue and BBC 24 would have looked as daft as Sky News who thought that Tonia was Gina, if they couldn't get Donald's age right with a whole day to rehearse, not to mention the resources that they could have called upon for information throughout the day.
"Hang on a minute, I've got an idea" I grabbed my mobile and called Alain, we were running out of time. Alain answered the phone. "Where are the Speed Freaks?" I asked frantically, (our independent observers from the Speed Record Club with their Campbell CD ROM memory for facts and figures were called Speed Freaks from day one) "They're asleep" Alain explained. I didn't have time for snoring Speed Freaks, "Ask the anoraks how old Donald was when he died" I shouted.
It was with little hope of a positive result that Alain leaned through the connecting door to where our slumbering deck slobs adorned the floor. "Anoraks" he asked, "How old was Donald when he died?"
For a second or two, nothing happened but such serious requests obviously travel through the subconscious mind of sleeping Speed Freaks with the velocity and inertia of an express train.
In perfect unison, they both stopped snoring, shuffled a bit and said "forty five", then they fell back into a dead sleep.
We got the facts correct for the news.
Thanks Anoraks.
About a week after Bluebird came out of the water we moved her into her semi-permanent home on Tyneside. She'd been stored for a week to keep the press away from her. As soon as we got her off the trailer and onto the floor we started cleaning her up and welcoming the visits of many people who had been associated with Bluebird and Donald. She's stored in a large workshop at the end of a factory in which several excellent examples of the British working man toil away all day to put bread on the tables of their hungry families. ( I have to say that sort of thing or they'll not be there in the morning!) After discovering that their Boss had arrived home with Donald Campbell's Bluebird one afternoon, they gave it a bit of a looking over and went back to whtever they do all day. Over the coming weeks the lads watched as various guests were led through the factory and the doors opened to reveal Bluebird. This worked fine as long as we had engineers, air crash investigators and such like coming to visit but Gina wanted to come along and as she'd been involved in the making of the documentary, our friends from the BBC documentary crew wanted to be there as well.
This was clearly going to be a different situation and there were several problems to address. Firstly the sound man always wanted silence which is a bit of a rare commodity in a factory. Asking the guys not to do any work seemed to do the trick. Our second problem was that we rent part of the upstairs of the building to a theatre group and they tend to be a bit loud in the workshop where Bluebird is kept. Telling them that there was a genuine BBC documentary going on below their feet sorted that problem, albeit temporarily. My biggest concern was that the lads in the factory were made aware that Gina Campbell, daughter of Donald Campbell, was about to walk through their midst and see for the first time in over 34 years the boat in which her Dad was so tragically killed. Of course, the British working man is well known for his charm, deportment, restrained sense of humour and perfect English so there shouldn't have been anything to worry about. Purely as a precaution, I had a discreet word with everyone and explained who was about to visit, the extent to which she could become upset and the reasons why. Our BBC team set up lights and stuff in the workshop, it took about an hour but they finally declared themselves ready to press the go button on the camera. With my heart in my mouth I walked down the workshop with Gina. As soon as we set foot in there, the guys took one look at this dignified lady walking through their scruffy factory and immediately shrank into a corner shuffling their feet and muttering nervously amongst themselves. As Gina and I got closer the lads looked everywhere but in our direction, a couple of them puffed nervously on cigarettes. As we drew level, Gina paused very briefly, smiled at them and said, "I'll be back in a minute to have a smoke with you lads, OK?" Then she carried on down towards the double doors leaving half a dozen amazed blokes staring after her. I bet she's just like her Dad.
One of the most amazing, and humbling aspects of the Bluebird Project is that I've had the opportunityto meet so many of the people directly associated with Donald and his boat
I've had the privilege and pleasure of meeting such people as Ken and Lew Norris, Corporal Evans, Bill Vanryn, Tony James, Tonia, Gina, Robbie Robinson and a host of local Coniston people who remembered Donald or who had some involvement in his efforts.
I've asked every one of them to tell me about Donald and I've heard the same thing every time I've asked. It is beyond question that Donald was an extremely kind and generous man, he could have turned his hand to anything though he was never really trained in any one area. He had a fearsome determination and patriotic fervour. His personality could pervade a room and infect everyone in there, he could project his mood to any congregation, he "oozed charisma" as Gina said. These gems of information were easy to come by and are well recorded but every time I pushed a bit harder for some inside info, I found the barriers up and the doors shut.
I finally concluded that Donald was so exciting that even 34 years after his death, his closest associates were closing ranks around him and looking after his good name.
I only got one tiny look beyond the barriers, I will not say who's quote this is but I will say that it was someone very close to Donald. I asked what he was really like and I was told the same old stuff, but what was he "REALLY like" I asked?
"Well", I was told, "if Don is in Heaven, there are a few Angels had better watch out!"
I hope that one of my friends will pay me a tribute like that one day.
Bill.