John Wyer is a towering presence in the history of Aston Martin and motor racing. Starting as AML Racing Team Manager from 1950, he set the standards and evolved the culture that ultimately resulted in Aston Martin’s world sports car championship win of 1959. By then, he’d been elevated to AML General Manager before leaving in 1964 to lead Ford’s Le Mans project that delivered four consecutive victories at the historic circuit in the late 1960s.
The trophy is a fairly substantial piece of silverware that dates from 1964 and has been awarded every year since then. There are seven multiple winners of the trophy whose engraved names therefore appear more than once.
I am fortunate to be the current holder of the trophy, following nomination by Mark Donoghue, duly seconded by the Committee of Management (CoM). Sadly, I was unable to collect the trophy in person and so fellow member, Andy Webber, kindly collected it on my behalf at the Awards Luncheon in January 2019. I subsequently took it along to an Area 4 meeting on the basis that the nature of the piece means it’s not usually visible to Members as it spends most of its life in the home of each year’s winner.
Shortly after getting the trophy home, I met with Paul Hindle, who, writing as ‘The Cad’, is the author of a series of interesting articles about Club Trophies published in
AM Quarterly from 2014 to 2016. That conversation inspired me to investigate more about the John Wyer Trophy currently in my possession.
How hard could that be, I wondered?
An initial trawl through the last 20 years of
AM Quarterly revealed only the trophy’s recipients. No surprise there.
I then contacted AMHT and enjoyed some interesting conversations and e-mail exchanges with Terry Farebrother. Terry is an acknowledged expert on all things Aston and very helpful too. The first thing we discovered was that there wasn’t a complete list of all of the trophy’s recipients with the records. There is now, albeit we spotted at least one engraved winner’s name spelt incorrectly!
Terry kindly then delved into the Committee of Management Minutes from 1963/4 which revealed that in 1963 discussions were ongoing regarding "a need for some re-assignment of trophies and indeed a greater number of them". At the CoM meeting, on 28 January 1964, Minute 5 (a) reads: “Wyer Trophy. Coram to see whether John Wyer would present to the Club a Concours trophy for post-war Astons”. In this minute, ‘Coram’ refers to Dudley Coram, then chairman of AMOC.
There had been a cocktail party in the previous month at the Rubens Hotel, Victoria, London where John & Tottie Wyer had been thanked for their service to the Company and the Club and to make a presentation to them of a hostess trolley. The trolley was purchased following a collection from Club Members. The letter inviting contributions [attached] is a charming reminder of how such things were organised before the days of e-mail and internet-based donation systems!
That’s where the trail goes cold.
However, I then noticed that the trophy has a maker’s mark – ‘Swatkins of Birmingham'. A quick internet search showed that they are still in business. Might they have records from 1964? I wondered as I picked up the phone.
Sadly not. They told me that "the trophy cup has been hand made with a hand chased fluted pattern and hand engraved”. However, that was in the time of the current MD’s grandfather and all records were destroyed in 1985 “because they were no longer required”… until now! C’est la vie, as they say in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter.
What next?
Firstly, adding to the records the details of the cars that the award represented alongside each owner’s name and year will add interest and perhaps pleasantly surprise some current owners. Club publications should reveal this information reasonably easily, albeit recognising that it's just one of many jobs on the archivist’s to-do list so may take a while (unless some kind volunteer takes it on).
Secondly, if you’re reading this article and have something to add, no matter how seemingly small and unimportant that might be, please contact me or Terry Farebrother at the Aston Martin Heritage Trust.
Did John Wyer actually commission the trophy that bears his name or did the AMOC buy it to honour his retirement in this most fitting and lasting way? Will we ever know?
I’ll leave the last word on this (for now?) to Terry: "I suspect that Wyer said to Coram, 'You arrange it and I’ll fund it'."