Another wee bit of sad news for those of us of a certain age. Wendy Jones passed away last month at the grand old age of 90 and the funeral was held last week, but I’ve only just found out.
Throughout the 1970s Wendy was a Publicity Executive for ‘The Scotsman’ newspaper and it was Wendy who was behind the newspaper sponsoring the Scottish Rally Championship first with Shell, then with British Airways and finally with Gaelic Oils and it was she who was primarily responsible for the newspaper sponsoring Andrew Cowan throughout that decade. Wendy wasn’t just good at bending the ear of her bosses, it was she who introduced many other co-sponsors to the Scottish Championship and for Andrew’s rallying.
She was full of energy and ideas, one of which was organising the shopping trolley special stage at the 1979 Scottish Championship awards in the Royal Scot Hotel in Edinburgh. She had gone to the trouble of purloining some supermarket wobbly wheeled trolleys and had set up a zig-zag ‘special stage’ on the dance floor of the function room, even going to the extent of acquiring numerous small fir trees to line the course whereupon drivers sat in the trolley while their co-drivers pushed them round the course and all timed by stopwatch.
What a night, bedlam ensued, trolleys were tipped, drivers tumbled and co-drivers bruised. Sadly the exercise was never repeated and no wonder. It needed all of Wendy’s charm and gracious persuasion to assuage a rather irate hotel management. Goodness knows how much the repairs to the dance floor and furniture cost that night. Mind you the bar profits would have been quite stupendous, given the crowd in attendance !!
She was no stranger to the world of motor sport, for her first job was with David Murray who founded the Ecurie Ecosse racing team in Edinburgh where she was the very soul of discretion. Thank goodness, for the tales she could have told would have damned the careers of many a young racing driver in those carefree and sometimes riotous days before red tape and rules changed the sport forever.
Wendy wasn’t one for posing in front of the camera, more content being behind it or directing the shoot and even when she left the newspaper she was always busy on some project, show, exhibition or escapade, even involving me on occasion with my Esso connections.
She was a lady of her time - courtesy and good manners her watchwords, firmness and resolve her ethic. She was indeed, quite a dame.
The
pic shows, back row left to right:
Ken Wood, Dom Buckley, Roger Turnbull, Jonathan Osborne (‘Motor World’
magazine), Ian Muir, Rob Baillie, Willie Crawford and Jon Baillie.
from left to right at the front are:
Bill Taylor, Ian McIvor, Drew Gallacher, Wendy Jones (from 'The Scotsman'
newspaper) and Ian Wilson.
