Geoff Duckworth best mate

Geoff Duckworth

I completed the run, 25 years ago, with Geoff as co-driver, trip organizer, navigator as well as French translator. Friends from the pub, Graham Crompton, John Murphy and Jack Daniels loyally followed in the support vehicle: this has rightfully become a minor legend in itself. Unfortunately, the passing years have taken their usual toll; there now remains only two of us still alive that is, Graham and myself. John died, cruelly, of motor neuron disease, Jack, being 125 years of age faded away due to old age, and Geoff, died from a heart attack, very prematurely, on Wednesday the 17^th. January 2006.  Geoff, who over the years had become a genuine Francophile, had proposed the original idea for the Beaujolais run during the previous summer after first seeing the vehicle following a long hot day of drinking Greenall’s best bitter. In fact it was Geoff who initially introduced Jo and I to France with a six-day visit in the September of 1978 leisurely travelling the coast of Brittany and Normandy in a cramped over laden Honda Civic. 

He later recounted this tale, in his customary ebullient manner, of mad English people racing cars, from midnight on the nearest Sunday to November the 14^th, starting in central France to then race to Marble Arch in London with the sole aim of bringing back the first bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. The fastest car to make it back from Beaune, approximately 750 km to London won the race. Geoff described how many of these foolish drunken prats habitually finished up embedded in a roadside ditch enduring broken limbs, to be then transported to the nearest hospital or mortuary. The ‘gendarmerie’ conveniently ignored the reckless crazy speeds that these insane bastards were achieving, pushing their Porches, Ferraris, Masaratis, Lamborghini’s and Lotus Cortina’s faster than their own reflexes could cope with. I don’t know the actual death toll or the record time that had been achieved, by any vehicle, car or bike, but it was blown away when some RAF twat completed the journey, in a Harrier Jump Jet, in three minutes. 

I subsequently became curiously hooked on the idea of making the run myself, with Geoff as co- driver, in the then recently built, Burlington.

I had built 001 Burlington as a very willing amateur, although I did rely on professionals to weld the chassis, re-build the engine and gearbox, to re-wire the entire car there was much that I did myself. Because of this, I felt it prudent to co-opt a back up team along with a support vehicle as a form of insurance if the car broke down whilst half way through France. At the same time I was the licensee at the White Crow so it seemed a smart idea to recruit some of the regulars as the back up team.