The Top Gear Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

that Jeremy Clarkson sat next to the-then Top Gear producer.
    Officially, Clarkson first appeared on Top Gear on 27 October 1988 and was to feature on the original incarnation of the show for more than a decade.

CHAPTER 3
The Hamster and Captain Slow, Part I
    I n the week before Christmas 1969, on 19 December to be precise, Richard Hammond was born into a family steeped in automotive history. Both his grandparents worked in the West Midlands motorcar trade; his paternal grandfather, George Hammond, was a coachbuilder for Jensen, ‘very much in the tradition of crafting cars.’ George also taught Polish airmen to drive during the Second World War while his own father (and namesake) was a stoker on the railways. The previous two generations of Hammonds had been craftsmen, working as glassblowers in the famous Black Country factories in and around Dudley (they lived in Kingswinford, where coincidentally this author was born and bred; my own father worked in precision engineering, making tooling for car manufacturers).
    Hammond’s maternal grandmother, Kathleen Shaw, was employed in the Colmore Depot, a part of the Morris Motor Company. His great-grandfather on his mother’s side was ajeweller but that was the exception, with most other relatives working in industry, mostly in tool-making or a number of brass foundries so the Hammond lineage is saturated with Midlands manufacture.
    A young Richard Hammond first went to Sharmans Cross School in Solihull before attending the fee-paying independent Solihull School for Boys. Like Clarkson’s Repton, this school dates back hundreds of years, in this case to 1560. Being a single-sex school, by his own admission the young Hammond was scared of girls. Although he had been ‘great with girls’ at primary, by the time he went to Solihull School for Boys this bravado had vanished and he would actually cross the street to avoid young females. Then, when he was a teenager, his mother Eileen and father Alan moved him and his two younger brothers – Andrew and Nicholas – to settle in the north Yorkshire cathedral city of Ripon.
    His father ran a probate business in the market square and sent his sons to the mixed Ripon Grammar School. Hammond was brought up a Christian and even revealed that his parents met through the church (years later he was to present a documentary called Richard Hammond’s Search for the Holy Grail ). As he grew into his teens however, he grew disillusioned with religion, particularly when he became more aware of what he felt was the conflict it can cause in society. There is scant biographical information available about his school years and when he does talk of those formative days, it’s usually in a jovial and rather nondescript fashion.
    ‘I’ll never forget standing outside a door,’ he told the Daily Mirror , ‘knowing that on the other side was not only a classroom full of strangers but also some of them were girls. I’d rather have walked into a room full of crocodiles! Then I discovered they were actually quite nice but I was hopeless at pursuing them.’
    He had the usual schoolboy crushes although the biggest one obviously didn’t make too much of an impression as he isn’t sure of her name, possibly Sarah. But when she grabbed and kissed him at a school party, he was frightened away and ‘went off her immediately’.
    From 1987 to 1989, Hammond attended the Harrogate College of Art and Technology to study photography and television production, from where he eventually graduated with a National Diploma in Visual Communication. It was at college that he started to play bass guitar and joined in bands, as well as hanging out with his good friend Jonathan Baldwin (who would become a noted author and academic).
    After graduation, he began working for several regional radio stations, including Radio Cleveland, Radio York, Radio Cumbria, Radio Leeds and Radio Lancashire. One of his shows was the oddly titled ‘Lamb Bank’ on BBC Radio Cumbria