Guest Blog - Glen Smale

This month, Glen Smale who is the founding editor of PORSCHE ROAD & RACE has written a guest blog for us detailing his car obsession and how it took over his life and eventually led him to The Richard Roberts Archive.

How it all began…

I guess it all started in my early childhood, around the time of my birth actually. Motor cars and motorsport have been in my blood for as long as I can remember, quite literally. I can recall cycling down the main street of East London (South Africa) as a school kid to collect car sales brochures from my favourite dealerships. As a result, my bedroom walls were adorned with car posters and there were piles of magazines and newspaper clippings of cars or motor racing in the corner, which grew larger by the week.

The passion continued through adolescence and at university I spent more time reading the classifieds in the back of Motorsport than I should have. At that time, economics and marketing textbooks were outnumbered by books on Jaguar history and motorsport subjects. At Rhodes University in Grahamstown (SA), I had not one but two Jaguars, although only one worked, and I did a lot of walking.

A proud author (left) during the book signing on the Porsche Club stand at the Classic Auto Show, NEC Birmingham, 2006 - this was my first book, Porsche: The Carrera Dynasty

Fast forward to my late-twenties, and my young wife found out what it was like to be married to a car nut. I jest slightly, but my car passion continued to grow and when I acquired a large collection of very early Autocar and Motor magazines, it all became a lot more serious. My first magazine features written as a full-time freelance journalist began in the early ‘90s, and this is where my archive really came into its own as I realised then how important it was as a writer to have your own source of research material.

In 1999 we immigrated to the UK, where my forefathers hail from, and my family and I settled into a new life this side of the equator. Needless to say, most of our container of family belongings that sailed from South Africa consisted of motoring archives! Upon arrival in the UK, I soon immersed myself in the motoring and motorsport world. I was like a young kid in a toy shop, and I attended every motoring show and motorsport event I could. All along the way, my archive was growing at an alarming rate, until one day I realised that I could not cover everything, all the time. I decided that I needed to focus on one sector of the industry before I burned myself out, and so it was to my favourite topic that I turned, motorsport.

My archive which had travelled from South Africa is taking shape in our double garage in Wales (ca. 2008/09)

Once the decision was made, I was faced with the question of what to do with my huge archive. Now approaching 80 four-drawer filing cabinets and hundreds of large packing boxes, not to mention the photos and slides, it was going to be a mammoth task to find a similarly sympathetic archivist with a passion for motoring history. I mentioned this in passing to a friend of mine in the media centre at Silverstone one race weekend, and he replied casually, “I know a man!” My friend goes by the name of John Brooks, one of the most accomplished motorsport photographers in the UK, and a fountain of stories and recollections that few could hope to match. John is a close friend of Richard Roberts, and so it wasn’t long before the emails were flying back and forth between Richard and I.

Arriving home with the first load of the next archive addition, eleven cabinets of 35 mm slides (2011)

Collecting the photographic archive (14 cabinets) from its home in England where it had been growing over the last 40-50 years (2011)

Yes, the Covid lockdowns have thrown a few spanners in the works, but Richard and I have a good understanding of the importance of preserving motoring records, and soon he and George made their first trip to Wales. Three trips have now been successfully completed, and the evidence can be viewed in the halls and on the shelves in the Richard Roberts Archive…and the rest as they say, is history!!

A typical weekend away at the races. This was the Goodwood Speedweek which was held during a brief window between covid-19 restrictions in 2020