A tribute to one-time Bristol boss Tony Crook

However, the sorry news appears to put an end to any hope that another buyer might enter the ring, buy the company and use it for making cars. Times are hard for new-start car companies – only Ariel and BAC have managed it in recent decades – and today’s demand for luxurious British GTs is well and truly met by Bentley, Aston Martin and more.

Tony Crook and Bristol were notoriously hard to deal with: in the glory days as the company’s guardian, he had a small retinue of repeat  buyers and preferred to deal only with them. But by the 1980s, the cars had become outmoded and lost their appeal – despite the mid-2000s appearance of the promising but under-developed Dodge Viper-based Fighter – and Bristol became a restorer and servicer of cars it had built decades before.

Crook and I became good friends in his later days, often meeting for lunch at the little office he set up near the Kensington showroom from which he had been barred. His reminiscences were remarkable. But one event stands out above all others: when I managed to organise for Autocar a drive of a new Blenheim.

The idea was to use a restored World War Two Bristol Blenheim aircraft, which lived at the Imperial War Museum’s Duxford airfield, in our photographs. I would be allowed to drive only on taxiways, not on the road. I flew there in my own aeroplane, a Robin, and Crook did the same in his, a Rallye. 

One of Crook’s faithful group of long-standing employees drove the car from Bristol’s Filton factory, where it had lately been fettled. We photographed the car with the old bomber and I drove it a few miles around the Duxford perimeter. It wasn’t very good, but I didn’t have the bottle to say so until the story appeared. It took some months for our relationship to recover, but it did.

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