In the middle of the 1800s a family of jewellers built a business in London making timepieces and trading in gold. The generations that followed would continue to keep good time, whether it was in the jewellery line or in the very different one of pursuing speed records for Britain. They were the Campbells and we can meet some of them in the 1851 census for Paddington, where the household consisted of Andrew Campbell, his wife Jane and children Arthur, aged 6, William, 5, and daughters Jane (2) and Elizabeth (3 months). They were all looked after by two servants and a nurse for the children.

A few years later, and at the time of the 1861 census, the family’s occupation is recorded as being ‘watch manufacturing’ jewellers. At this time they were living on Tottenham Court Road in the St Pancras area of London.

Following William, one of the Campbell sons in the census collection, it is evident that he carried on the family business tradition as he is recorded at the beginning of the 1900s as a ‘jeweller timekeeper’. His speciality echoes that of his parents as the census authorities have added the word ‘watch’ over his declared occupation in the 1901 count. William Campbell and his wife are now to be found living in Chislehurst in Kent with their daughter, Winnifred, but there are no other children under their roof on that census night. However, by doing a wider search of the census across the country, the couple’s son, Malcolm, can be found. Born in Chislehurst in 1885, he was away at school in the East Midland county of Rutland. The 16-year-old was one of a number of boys boarding at the independent Uppingham School, located on the town’s High Street.

Malcolm Campbell, as many readers will have recognised, was destined to become famous not for making timepieces or selling gold to customers in London, but for breaking both the land and water speed records in his precision-engineered cars and boats. Having developed his passion for motorsports, the years between 1906 and 1908 saw him enter and win all three London to Land’s End Trials motorcycle races. By 1910 he was now involved with motorcars and began racing them at Brooklands.

Campbell called his cars Blue Bird, painting them a distinctive blue and taking the inspiration for this name from a stage play that Campbell had been to see at the Haymarket Theatre: The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck. Malcolm Campbell is often referred to as a motoring journalist but by consulting the various records, available to us online at TheGenealogist, we can see that he seemed to favour using his status as a Member of Lloyd’s when completing the occupation question in many of the official forms that have become records available to family historians.

A ‘name’ who became famous
One such example is in the 1911 census when he was a boarder in a house in Bromley, Kent. The 28-year-old is recorded working on his own account as an underwriter and insurance broker, adding underneath: ‘Member of Lloyds’. This marks him out as one of those rare people who had pledged their entire financial estate against the acceptance of risk underwritten by them at Lloyd’s of London. Individuals such as Campbell, also known as ‘names’, were usually organised into groups called syndicates and would share in either the profit, or the loss, that their syndicate made, taking unlimited responsibility for underwriting any losses.

Malcolm Campbell is also to be found in a number of Passenger List records on TheGenealogist in which he similarly furnishes the compiler of the records with his occupation as a Member of Lloyd’s. This he did even at a time when he was travelling with the purpose of taking part in a world speed record in America, as we can see from a look at the passenger list from August 1935. On 3 September 1935, Sir Malcolm Campbell’s latest version of Blue Bird reached 301.337 miles per hour (484.955 km/h) breaking the 300 mph barrier for the first time by a bare mile per hour. The front-engined car was designed by Reid Railton and sported a 2,300 hp 36.7 litre supercharged Rolls-Royce V12 engine; it had turned out to be too powerful for the attempt earlier in the year at Daytona Beach as its wheels lost vital grip in the sand and so another attempt was scheduled for September at a new venue. Thus it was at the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah that the Campbell-Railton Blue Bird achieved its world record in September 1935, the driver having sailed over the Atlantic on the SS Majestic departing a month earlier from Southampton.

Consulting the passenger list for this Cunard White Star Line ship in the records on TheGenealogist, we can see that it includes his teenage son Donald. He, of course, was a man who would follow his illustrious father to break both the land and water speed records himself. A glance at the image of the document allows us to note that a few names below Sir Malcolm’s entry on the same ship was Reid Railton, Blue Bird’s designer. This gentleman’s ticket number was consecutive to the young Donald Campbell, showing us that they were probably booked together, though separate from Malcolm Campbell’s own ticket on the page by a number of other passengers. Also of interest is that the shipping manifest does not use Sir Malcolm’s title as a knight. This was an honour that he had been given after setting the land speed record back in 1931, when he achieved a speed of 245.736 mph, and was then knighted by King George V. We may also note that the address for both father and son in this record is Povey Cross Cottage, Horley, Hookwood, Surrey where they resided at this time.

Birthplace of Donald Campbell
Sir Malcolm, we can tell from a school that has a blue plaque displayed on its wall, had previously been a resident in Kingston upon Thames. If a motorist were to take the A3 road into this town from Wandsworth in the east, the route skirting the beautiful Richmond Park at the point where it branches off at Kingston Vale and follows the A308 from that junction into Kingston itself, then the driver would pass, on Kingston Hill, the house that was once the property of our speed king and the birthplace of his equally famous son.

It had been in 1919 that Malcolm Campbell, Member of Lloyd’s, motoring journalist, racer and former RFC pilot, moved to Canbury on Kingston Hill. The property was a substantial two-storey detached house, dating from the late 19th century, and which in modern times has become a private school. By consulting the Lloyd George Domesday Survey records on TheGenealogist we can see that on 16 May 1914, plot 2485 was then occupied by a Dr William Henry Roots as a tenant, the Campbells having yet to move in.

The surveyor has also provided a sketch of the footprint at the time on one of the pages of the field book. Notably, the property is shown being bordered by roads that had yet to be named as he refers to both of them as New Road. On the accompanying Lloyd George Domesday Survey map, however, Warboys Approach and Warboys Road had then been pencilled in after the roads had been named.

Major Campbell chose this house as a future home for himself and his intended wife when he moved into this property in 1919. He and his first wife, Dorothy Whittall, were married a year later and it was here in this house that their son, Donald, was born in March 1921. Donald Campbell would, of course, continue the family tradition of taking cars and boats named Blue Bird to the limit, pursuing and achieving speed records for Britain.

Today their former house sports a blue plaque in their memory that was erected by English Heritage, whose website recounts that Sir Malcom had the tendency to get into casual road races with other drivers when returning to this home from his office in London. It notes that ‘such was his competitive spirit that he would sometimes drive past his front door and not give up the chase until he had reached Esher or beyond’.

From Kingston upon Thames the family then moved to the address that we have seen on the 1930s passenger lists, Povey Cross Cottage. Their next move was to Headley Grove near Box Hill. This address can be found in the Trade, Residential and Telephone Directories on TheGenealogist along with Sir Malcolm Campbell’s phone number of Headley 63. There are also to be found some London listings which were, presumably, for his office based in the West End.

In some of the records we see Sir Malcolm referred to by the military rank of captain and later on as Major Campbell. This was on account of his military service that began in the First World War and continued until December 1945 when he reached the age of 60. In WW1 he had originally joined the army as a motorbike despatch rider and he fought at the Battle of Mons in August 1914. After being commissioned as an officer in the 5th Battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment he subsequently transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. A search of the records on TheGenealogist reveals his campaign medal card and his entry in the Royal Aero Club yearbook that indicates he obtained his aviator’s certificate in February 1917.

Sometimes, when carrying out research into a person’s life, we are blessed when there are numerous enthralling records to gather and which add rich details to the story of their life. In the case of Sir Malcolm Campbell, a wider search of

TheGenealogist also finds us an entry in The Air Annual of the British Empire when in a description of a particular engine (the Napier Lion) the book explains that the engine was used in one of the Blue Bird cars that this record-breaking driver used in his pursuit of speed. Another record that we can usefully use is in the Who’s Who in Sport 1935. From this we can discover the name of a book that he wrote, My Greatest Adventure: Speed and that his recreations aside from motor racing included fishing, yachting and even dog breeding.

Sir Malcolm was a typically British hero who would seem to have been driven to go on breaking world records. As the descendant of a line of London jewellers he became associated in the public’s mind as the motoring journalist that gave this country land and water speed records by using British technology wrapped in a sleek, blue-painted package. His son, Donald, carried on that tradition until his untimely death at the age of 45 on Coniston Water in an attempt at a water speed record in January 1967. Sir Malcolm, on the other hand, was one of a rare number of speed record holders of his time to die of natural causes. He died in Reigate from a series of strokes at the age of 63 and his death is registered in the first quarter of 1948 in the district of Surrey South Eastern, as we can see by searching the civil death index records on TheGenealogist.

From London jewellers to international record-holders the Campbell family left a trail that family historians are able to easily follow by using many of the records that are now available to subscribers of TheGenealogist.