Historic picture found in box of family snaps
11 May 2009
With just a matter of days to go before the return of stock car racing to Scunthorpe, a photograph of one of the town’s very first racing teams has been discovered in a box of family snapshots where it has lain unseen for almost half a century.
The sport came to Britain from France in 1954 and the first meetings attracted huge crowds as the craze spread around the country.
Amongst those to get bitten by the stock car racing bug were the management and mechanics at Scunthorpe garage E.M. Wright, based in Robert Street, which within a couple of months had built two stock cars and signed up a team of drivers that included an RAF pilot, a local jeweller – and a customer who said he fancied a drive!
Improbably, they turned out to be a crack team.
One of the fans was team boss Eddie Wright’s schoolboy son, Tony, who travelled to a number of meetings around the country. Now the Chairman of the company, Tony found the photograph of the team taken in 1954 in a box of old family photographs that nobody had looked at for years.
Tony said: “It was pretty crazy stuff in those early days. The cars they used were a couple of late 1930s Packards, real American gangster cars, that were very popular in this country after the war.”
“The Packards were ideal in that they had powerful motors . . . six or seven litre engines . . . and they were built like tanks even before the mechanics at Robert Street got to work to prepare them.”
“The lead driver was Dick Protheroe, an RAF pilot who became the commander of a nuclear bomber base before leaving to start a Jaguar dealership and racing team. He was with our team for a couple of seasons before going on to greater things. He was a very good racing driver, although sadly he was killed in practice at Oulton Park in 1966 driving a Ferrari.”
“Other drivers included Alex Tomassi, the well-known Scunthorpe jeweller and Glyn Reynolds, a Scunthorpe customer who got a seat after seeing the cars in the garage and saying he fancied having a go.”
“It sounds amazingly casual and it was. We’ve got a newspaper cutting from that first season, August 1954, regarding a meeting that we took part in at The Wombwell Greyhound Stadium near Barnsley. The report mentions that the meeting staged the first ever woman’s stock car race – in which a Mrs Rainton of Scunthorpe came second.”
“Mrs Rainton, who was the wife of Jim Rainton who had a garage in town, said later that she had tossed with her daughter to decide who should drive in the race!”
Tony added: “I hadn’t thought about the team for years until it was announced that racing is coming back to Scunthorpe this year, with the first meeting taking place next Saturday at the speedway track – which we now sponsor.”
“It raced all over the country, including Scunthorpe. So far this is the only photograph that we’ve found. We think it was taken at the Wombwell track.”
Guy Parker, who is promoting stock car racing’s return to Scunthorpe, said: “It’s a real find. Photographs from that first season are quite rare, so it is a little bit of the sport’s history.”
“The souped up thirties Packards are rather amusing when you take a look at modern stock cars, but if none of that had happened then we would not be where we are today.”
Further information or comment please contact Tony Wright at Eddie Wright on 01724-270755