The secret of any artist’s success is the involvement of the viewer 
– Eoin looks at the motoring art of Frederick Gordon-Crosby and talks 
with the artist’s son, Michael, who has lived in New Zealand since 1952

Motor racing artist Frederick Gordon-Crosby’s major achievement was his ability to imbue his viewer with the feeling of actually being there, a sense of standing on the edge of the picture and breathing in the atmosphere, hearing the roar of the engines and brushing the dust from your clothes as his favourite monster cars of the Golden Age thunder past. Gordon-Crosby started illustrating for The Autocar in the era before photography, and it was his job to capture the action that illustrated in the era before photography took hold and it was the race reports.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Frederick Gordon-Crosby, the most talented of the early artists in motoring history and certainly the most prolific, is that so little is known about the man himself.

Originals of his work are now hugely valuable and sought-after. Even the colour prints issued full-page by The Autocar in the ’30s, and used as pin-ups by every schoolboy with motoring blood in his veins, are collector’s items. One of the reasons for the rarity of original Gordon-Crosby art is that much of it was destroyed on the principle of today’s newspapers wrapping tomorrow’s fish and chips. By the time the talent of Gordon-Crosby began to be appreciated – and we are talking here as late as the ’60s – large detailed cutaway Crosby drawings were still being used to wrap bundles of magazines in The Autocar offices. Gordon-Crosby was quite simply a house artist at Iliffe, an employee, and as such scarcely to be regarded as famous or encouraged to have a reputation. He remained something of an enigma, but when historians with an interest in motor racing art began to seek his background, the trail was going cold.

Rescuing the artwork

Photographer Charles Pocklington remembers working on a project at Iliffe in 1968. “There were Gordon-Crosbys on the floor, broken frames and glass, valuable artwork just lying about. They just didn’t want to know about them. I’m sure a lot of it must have been ditched.” There was another tale of an enthusiast visiting the Iliffe offices at lunchtime, telling the typist he was keen on Gordon-Crosby art, and being told he could take his pick from a pile of artwork strewn about in the office!

Peter Garnier, sports editor and then editor of The Autocar, was the man responsible for rescuing what remained of Crosby’s art, storing it properly, cataloguing, and writing the definitive work, The Art of Gordon Crosby (Hamlyn, 1978). He established himself as an authority on the artist’s work, and in 1976 stood up in court to give expert evidence in a case involving four paintings – “allegedly by the late F Gordon-Crosby.”

Garnier had been interested in the Gordon-Crosby style since his schoolboy days in 1928, and attended St Martin’s School of Art in Charing Cross after WWII with the avowed ambition to succeed Gordon-Crosby as house artist at The Autocar, but he was to fill the pages with words rather than pictures. Garnier’s problem with his book was that details of the artist’s early life were thin and sometimes foggy. He was unaware, until after his book was published, that Gordon-Crosby had a second son, Michael, who had been a prisoner of war in Germany, married a New Zealand girl in Britain and emigrated to New Zealand to farm in 1952.

It was the death of Frederick Gordon-Crosby’s elder son, Peter, in WWII that almost certainly contributed to the suicide of his ailing father in August 1943. Gordon-Crosby’s obituary in The Autocar mentioned that his son had been “posted as missing from an RAF fighter exploit.” Michael was able to provide Garnier with further background on family life, but the book had already been published and there was to be no revised edition.

After 25 years on his farm at Feilding, Michael retired and moved to Wellington, now with time to devote to the family name and fame and he gives talks to car clubs, illustrated with colour slides of his father’s art. He also markets limited edition signed and numbered prints, and runs a small picture-framing business as a busy retirement project.

Early history

The man who would create the standards by which all motoring artists would be judged was born in Sunderland in 1885, the son of a ship-builder, and christened Thomas Frederick Gordon Crosby. There was no hyphen then.

This article is from Classic Car issue 195. Click here to check it out. Click more to read on.

Crosby served his time in the shipyard, worked in the drawing office at Daimler, and joined The Autocar as an artist in 1907 or 1908. During WWI he worked with the Air Ministry producing precise drawings of any technical novelties of crashed German aircraft that could be of interest to the Allies. His painting of the first German Zeppelin to be destroyed by a British aircraft was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1916, the first aeronautical subject to be shown there.

He pioneered the art of the exploded drawing and the technical cutaway. His first test at The Autocar was to produce a perspective drawing of a BTH magneto. Gordon-Crosby returned with artwork which Garnier describes in his book as, “What was eventually to be termed an exploded drawing – that is, with the instrument fully dismantled and all its components correctly placed relative to each other and drawn accurately in perspective.” His fascination with things mechanical extended to the magneto from a Zeppelin engine, which he adapted to use as a cigarette lighter at his desk.

In the post WWI years, motoring and motor racing gathered pace and Gordon-Crosby was at the hub, meeting and making friends with the men who would build the Bentley, Morris, MG and Jaguar empires, and covering the classic motor races. It must have been at this time that the hyphen appeared in his name. Garnier is convinced that there never was one, and that the hyphen became a later family affectation, but Michael says there is a hyphen in his name on his birth certificate, and there is certainly a discernible hyphen in the Crosby signatures on his art. My feeling is that the hyphen arrived between Gordon and Crosby around 1919, when John Bryan, who was Gordon-Crosby’s opposite number on The Motor, changed his name to Bryan de Grineau. Bryan had taken his wife’s family name and there was presumably a cachet if you were an artist with a top-drawer title – especially among magazine artists – a name that you could sign with a flourish.

Michael Gordon-Crosby is still a little puzzled about the origin of the Gordon name, but assumes it was a family name. A small point, perhaps, but an important one in unravelling the early life of the artist.

The Gordon-Crosby style

Garnier points out in is book that although Gordon-Crosby had no formal artistic training he developed his personal style rapidly. “Where Crosby is concerned, one realises the subtle dividing line between illustrator and artist – just as there is one between journalist and author. In both cases, the former are required only to record incidents or to describe something in words or pictures, within the limitations of space, and the time allowed by the printing schedule. But the latter are creative; they put something of themselves in their work, they are free to resort to any means available to them to achieve their ends. Somewhere between, in the world of art, is Crosby – the illustrator with such outstanding creative and artistic ability that he is able to raise his pictorial records into works of art – to put a whole lot more into his illustrations than the job requires.”

Gordon-Crosby’s graphic style brought the speed of the day to its magazine readers, but there were differences between his weekly output and his more considered paintings. Time was the enemy of the weekly magazine artist, although Gordon-Crosby had the advantage of two days over his rivals on The Motor, which came out on Wednesdays.

When de Grineau became ill and had to leave The Motor in the late 1930s, his place was taken by Ulsterman Patrick Nevin, who told me what life was like in the world of motoring art at that time. “De Grineau was twice my age when I met him at the Ards TT races, and I think he thought any talking he did to me was to my benefit – which it was.” Like a teacher to a pupil rather than as man to man, but it was Gordon-Crosby who arranged for Nevin’s first press pass and arranged for the young local artist’s work to be included with his own in a display in one of the biggest stores in Belfast before the TT. “He was always stylishly dressed, usually in plus-fours and a hat. He always said hello to me, but he didn’t press it because we were all on schedules and holding a job down.

“We would always arrive at the tracks early and sketch the obviously popular cars, cars with the best chance in the race, Birkin’s Bentley for argument’s sake. Then we would go round the course and pick corners that looked likely for incidents and sketch the background. If anything happened during the race you could often get to the corner in time, but if you couldn’t you could always see the marks on the road and the spectators and marshals would fill you in with the details.

“Crosby did a lot of drawings that were never published. A little sketch of a part of a car or a car at speed, beautiful, spontaneous and quick. He probably gave them to the drivers or the mechanics. Unlike me, he was a very good mechanic and that helped a lot. He was a great man for the touring cars in racing, like the TT or Le Mans. He loved drawing a car like the big Mercedes in black and white, but he didn’t like doing the white Mercedes in colour. The cars he didn’t like were the Grand Prix Mercedes of the late ’30s, said they were like sausages on wheels. He liked the classic shapes without the streamlining.

“He scooped me on one occasion which rather set me back a bit, but it was the war of the magazines, nothing personal, really. There was a crash at Brooklands and he seldom did crashes, but my magazine went to bed first so I had to get the work in. I was sketching the wreck and it looked grim, although in fact it wasn’t. He said he didn’t think it was very good policy to draw the crash if someone had been killed, so I asked my sports editor, Rodney Walkerley, what he thought. He said to do something else and I did, but when The Autocar came out on Friday, blow me down, there was a Crosby drawing of the crash!”

Elegance

Nevin’s mention of Gordon-Crosby being a stylish dresser comes through in the few photographs published of the artist at work, and Garnier recounts a tale in his book about Gordon-Crosby’s sartorial elegance and his ability to work an expense account. “Sent from the Coventry office in the 1920s to portray something important at Brooklands, he set off by train, beautifully dressed in the country clothes he favoured and wearing (as always) expensive, highly polished shoes. When he reached Weybridge, Moroccan leather sketching case, shooting stick and all, it was pouring with rain. He rapidly became soaked to the skin, but being conscientious, he completed the job – and then allowed temperament to take over. He obtained a lift back to Weybridge where, at the best tailor’s shop he could find, he bought himself a completely new outfit, down to his skin, plus mackintosh and umbrella for good measure. He then took a hotel room in which he changed – and, finally dry and happy, he caught the next train home and put everything on his expense sheet.”

Family memories

Peter Crosby was born in 1914 and Michael in 1920. The boys grew up at the family home in Virginia Water, near the Wentworth Golf Club, and Michael remembers his father working a lot at home when he wasn’t travelling. “He couldn’t stand the city and only went up to the office in Stamford Street once a week.”

Photographs survive of a miniature motor car Gordon-Crosby built for Peter, powered by a small cycle-motor engine. The wheels and tyres came from war-surplus landing skid wheels off RE7 WWI fighters, the springs from a Sopwith tail-skid. The rear axle and ball bearings came out of a crashed 119kw (160hp) Mercedes engine from a German fighter. On the dummy radiator shell was a winged badge that Gordon-Crosby would use in modified form for the first Bentley sales catalogues.

Peter trained as an artist, and established himself in aviation and motorcycling fields. MG used the work of the junior Crosby in a comic-strip series of catalogues based on a cartoon character called George, which it used for its sports cars.

Gordon-Crosby was friendly with Cecil Kimber at MG, and when the Tiger and Tigress series was mooted, Crosby produced a bronze tiger as a mascot. The MG series was short-lived, only a few cars being built, and the mascot was never used, but when William Lyons wanted a proper Jaguar mascot for his cars in the late ’30s (“not something that looks like a cat shot off a fence” as he described a Jaguar mascot produced by one of the accessory companies of the day), Crosby converted his Tiger cat into a Jaguar cat.

Gordon-Crosby’s artistic talents were splendidly three-dimensional. He sculpted a bronze racing car to be presented to Sammy Davis when he was in hospital after the Invicta crash at Brooklands, a sports car of indeterminate breed which might have been a mix of MG or Riley. He did the artwork for the Brooklands Automobile Racing Club car badge, which showed two cars racing underneath the bridge over the banking, and he produced the artwork for the Brooklands Flying Club badge, a matching pair keenly sought-after by collectors today. He also produced the bronze award plaques for the British Racing Drivers’ Club showing a similar Brooklands scene, but with the cars in relief on the banking. A famous large Crosby bronze plaque in relief of Tim Birkin in his Maserati, produced in memory of Birkin, was stolen from its wall-mounting on the Clubhouse at Brooklands during the war, and has never been seen since. Michael Gordon-Crosby recalls that brother Peter did the lettering for the Birkin plaque because he was better at it than his father.

Racing art

Gordon-Crosby covered races with SCH (Sammy) Davis, who he had met originally in the Daimler drawing offices before both men found their way to The Autocar. Ironically Davis answered an advertisement for an artist on the magazine, but was to make his name as a motor racing journalist and racing driver, winning Le Mans for Bentley in 1927. WF Bradley was another of the famous racing writers on the staff and Gordon-Crosby travelled extensively with him, finding an enthusiastic patron in Count Florio when they covered the early Targa Florio races in Sicily.

They were such favourites that they had special permission to drive round the mountain circuit during the race to find suitable positions for sketching! The Count commissioned several racing oil paintings, and these were used as poster art for the race as late as the 1960s. The Targa Florio poster showed a Bugatti leading an Alfa Romeo through a mountain pass. Bradley’s book on the Targa featured Crosby art of an Alfa leading a Bugatti in a similar setting.

His pens and brushes seemed to be seldom still. He covered the London motor shows at Olympia and White City with Sammy Davis, and for several years produced a humorous review of the show with Monty Tombs. The European shows he covered with Bradley, who signed on as continental correspondent for The Autocar in 1919. “It was an education to watch him work at these shows,” wrote The Scribe in his Disconnected Jottings column after G-C’s death. “He would stand imperturbably in a crowded gangway, a sketchbook precariously balanced against his body, producing perfect lines such as few men could draw in the seclusion of a studio.”

Gordon-Crosby illustrated a series of features on the major car-makers with Maurice Sampson. “In my opinion many of his little thumbnail pen and ink sketches and heading drawings for these articles were never surpassed or equalled in the field of periodical illustration,” wrote Sampson. “They were marked by his usual accuracy and by a degree of humour that was outstanding. Many of his apparently rough pencil or charcoal sketches were extraordinary, in that the make of car was clearly indicated to the expert by some tiny detail such as a shackle.
“We had many jolly trips together, but perhaps the best of all were in France. Freddie’s French was literally limited to the equivalent for ‘omelette’, and that made him exceedingly cautious and much inclined to keep close to my elbow in an emergency!”

Gordon-Crosby established his motor racing style with such strength and exaggeration to draw speed from his subjects that when others produced works of perhaps greater technical photographic clarity, they looked somehow wrong and lacking in dynamism, missing the essential excitement of Gordon-Crosby’s work.

Imagination

Michael Turner, the class of today’s motoring artists, is known for his technical accuracy, his almost photographic precision, but he says he was a Gordon-Crosby fan from the age of 14. “There is a dramatic sense of imagination in his art. The interesting thing I always felt about his work was that his style was ideally suited to the period he portrayed – the dust and stones, the aggressive drivers – and he did exaggerate the angles of the wheels. I’m not denigrating him when I say this, but I think in later years his style didn’t really keep up with the type of racing he was covering. He was a great artist in his period, and I don’t think he really kept up with progress. You can imagine that when the situation changed, it wasn’t appropriate to bend wheels and have dust and stones about…” Turner’s comments echo Pat Nevin’s remarks that he felt Crosby never really liked the ‘sausages on wheels’ that GP cars had become by the late ’30s.

His mechanical training gave him an edge on other artists with his exploded drawings and cutaways, because he knew how things were supposed to fit and work. His upbringing in the shipyard also gave him a feel for the sea that comes out in his seascapes and nautical art, just as his knowledge of aircraft gained through his work with the Air Ministry in WWI helped the accuracy and perspective in his aviation drawings and paintings. Gordon-Crosby said he liked his work with sea subjects because of the fascinating action of the waves.

In his book, Garnier assesses his subject thus: “Though he produced many outstanding colour paintings in gouache and in oils, the oil paintings being largely confined to his wartime aircraft subjects, I have always found the greatest pleasure in his less studied, less finished charcoal and crayon work. These illustrations, generally produced over the weekend for that Friday’s issue of The Autocar from on-the-spot sketches, have tremendous strength and vigour that the others tend to lack. He was equally at home filling an Imperial-sized sheet of Whatman board with pen-and-ink, pen-and-wash, or charcoal – with or without wash – and succeeded with each medium in producing a combination of life, vigour and mechanical accuracy.”

Words Eoin Young Photos Archives

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