![]() ![]() ![]() The bicycle shop had become a small garage, and Sid was expected to muck in. He got a scholarship to Bootle Grammar School but, when he told his father he wanted to be a doctor, it didn’t go down well. All the others laughed at me, of course.” The other kids had the usual ambitions – fireman, engine driver – but I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon. One day, when I was about eight years old, our teacher asked the class what we wanted to do when we left school. “The local copper used to take two Alsatians with him on the beat. Sid and his brothers went to the local school in Bootle – “ a rough area then,” Sid remembers. The family of six, including Sid, the youngest, lived over the shop. He became a professional racer, eventually riding for the Raleigh works team, and during the 1920s he scraped together enough money to set up a bicycle shop in Liverpool. But young Wally Watkins was determined not to spend his life at the coal face, and his means of escape was the bicycle. His family were miners, and his father first went down the pit aged eight, as a candle boy. Her authorised biography of Bernie Ecclestone, when it is published, should be extremely revealing. ![]() ![]() Susan is a respected historian, with acclaimed books on Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots among her works. A subterranean tunnel, carved through rock when the house was built, runs from the wine cellar under the terraced garden to a balcony overlooking the river. It has tall, gracious rooms, separate studies for Sid and Susan where each can write in peace, an Aga-warmed country kitchen, and a fishing tackle room for Sid. The house is superb: an early 18th century manse which Susan has flawlessly restored from a wreck, with the same attention to period detail that a Ferrari expert might bring to rebuilding a 375MM. So he and his wife Susan invite me to spend the day and stay the night. A mere lunch won’t give us enough time to plumb a serious bottle of Glenmorangie (or for some scurrilous off-the-record stories, racing and medical, after the voice recorder is turned off). Since his retirement from the regular F1 grind five years ago he has more time for them: fishing, good whisky, the novels of John Buchan, his children and grandchildren, his house in the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York, and his Scottish home on the side of a steep hill overlooking the River Tweed. Sid is a lover of other good things in life, too. To everybody in Formula 1 he was affectionately known as ‘Prof’. No Grand Prix, race or practice session, could start without him. Thanks to him, lives were saved and injuries lessened. But he also happens to love motor sport, and during 26 seasons as F1’s doctor he completely revolutionised the principles and procedures of driver safety. He launched the Brain & Spine Foundation, and led vital research into Parkinson’s tremor, movement disorders, intractable pain and cerebral palsy. He performed unnumbered operations, and developed ground-breaking new procedures. For some 30 years he was a pillar of the Royal London Hospital. Professor Eric Sidney Watkins, OBE, BSc, MD, FRCS, has had a brilliant career as one of the world’s foremost neurosurgeons, practising in the UK and USA. He was just a motor racing enthusiast who used his days off from a very demanding vocation, saving lives and healing wounds, to deal with lives and wounds in F1. However, love is not too strong a word to describe the F1 paddock’s feelings towards a man who, for no fewer than 424 Grands Prix, was an indispensable part of that cast.Įven more remarkably, it didn’t represent his proper job. In the relentless theatre of Formula 1, the members of the complex cast – drivers, team chiefs, designers, organisers, circuit owners, officials – may be liked, admired, respected, even feared. ![]()
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