LJK Setright

LJK SEtright aka Road & Track's cartoon character "Nigel Shiftright" thre must have been some culutre shock misunderstanding and conflict at some point between them.

I always enjoyed his articles, John Barnes of Cavallino once mentioned him as an example of superb writing.

He certainly was well above average in understanding what most of his colleagues missed.

Here is a very nice example of his writing, my favorite amongst many dozens of Maserati Khamsin test drives that I have collected in the world's magazines. He points out how brilliant the car is when most hacks did not get it at all and he does it very well with beautiful prose....

http://www.maseratikhamsinregistry.com/art_001.html

As to his clothing my 2 cent guess is he was a bit of an eccentric and that was his stand.

best regards,

Marc

 

LJK was a rabbi and a scholar. Really great read, with non-automotive esoterica mixed with complex engineering discussions.

 

He reminds me of Rasputin.

 

One of the earliest books I had about Ferrari was LJK's. I bought CAR for his columns, along with Fraser, Bulgin, et al. Used to read his stuff in Punch in the library in med school.

I recall him being a rabbi, but I haven't found notation. I thought he became one when he was here in Texas.

Found this nice obit.

Mark Williams
The Guardian, Monday 19 September 2005 00.03 BST
Article history

Tall, sporting long flowing locks and beard, monocle, a wide-brimmed hat and with a Black Russian always in his cigarette holder, Leonard Setright, who has died of cancer aged 74, presented an image which set him apart from a new wave of motoring journalists that emerged during the 1970s. But it was not only his visual persona that distinguished him. LJK Setright, as he bylined himself, was a writer whose intellectual rigour was underpinned by an exhaustive knowledge of both engineering and classical culture. He deployed both to impress - if not bamboozle - his audiences in such magazines as Car and Bike.

Car's youthful founding editor, Doug Blain, was somewhat bemused by the first piece Setright submitted - on aeroflow dynamics - in 1970, but was tickled by its arch prose and abundant self-confidence. So Setright joined a triumvirate of uniformly audacious columnists who became, in his case for more than three decades, synonymous with the magazine. Setright soon established himself as an idiosyncratic, even mischievous writer - he peppered his copy with Latin quotations and once referred to feet as "bicrural extremities" - but his opinions betrayed an authority that few dared challenge and many envied. His engineering interests led to many influential books, including Some Unusual Engines (1975), two volumes on the expensive and, of course, eccentric Bristol marque (1974 and 1998) and With Flying Colours (1987).

Setright was born in London, the son of Australian émigrés. His mother Lena was a fashion buyer and his father Henry an engineer, who invented the Setright rotary bus ticket machine and the Tote betting system. Setright's passion for all things mechanical stemmed from that childhood "when engineers were worshiped". He was educated at Southgate county school in Winchmore Hill where he developed an penchant for music and unconventional attire. An accomplished clarinet player, he joined Ray Potter's five-piece jazz band, and when Setright acquired his first car, a yellow 1920s Citroën Cloverleaf, he and Potter regularly visited the Goodwood racing circuit, igniting another enduring enthusiasm for the deerstalker-capped teenager.

Setright studied law at London University but hated it as a profession. Gaining great satisfaction but little income as a classical musician - he co-founded the Philharmonia Chorus in 1957 - he decided instead to pursue journalism and in 1960 joined the leading contemporary magazine, Machine Age, eventually becoming its editor. Then, in 1965, he took a job in public relations for the Firestone Tyre Company - in later life he was to be quietly involved in the development of radial tyres at Pirelli.

He won the Gwen Salmon Trophy for automotive photography and became a fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in 1969, and joined the Institute of Rubber Industries in 1970. But it was at Car that he found a natural home for his talents. Setright was soon testing cars and motorcycles, as well as entertainingly dissecting the finer points of their design technology and lambasting the horrors of public transport or the bogus economics of speed limits.

As a driver, Setright was formidably fast to the point where at press launches he was usually given a vehicle of his own rather than have anyone else share one with him.

As Bike's callow founding editor, I sought him as a columnist in 1973, and while superficially aloof, he proved a kindly, assiduously polite, even shy man. However when fuelled with his favourite vintage champagnes, he was known to pick up a clarinet and play dazzling solos with the hotel bands that serenaded journalists on press junkets.

In 1980 tragedy struck. His first wife, Christine, a professional opera singer, drove one of his beloved Bristols up to Scotland and committed suicide. Setright, seeking an abrupt change of life, moved to America, where a visit to a Lubavitch community in Texas reaffirmed his Judaism. Embracing a devout orthodoxy with his usual studious zeal, he became something of an expert on schechitah, or ritual slaughter.

But, inevitably, he returned to journalism. His last book Drive On! (2003) is a fascinating account of the relationship between cars and social development, and it is ironic that in view of what killed him, one of his last essays eloquently railed against manufacturers that now offer non-smoking cars. "It is refreshing," he concluded, "that there remain stalwarts for whom driving and smoking - two of the greatest pleasure known to man - are not to be separated."

He is survived by his second wife Helen, and daughters Hilary and Anthea.

· Leonard John Kensell Setright, writer and musician, born August 10 1931; died September 7 2005

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._J._K._Setright

 

Here is another piece discussing LJKS

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/25466/the-sage-at-the-wheel.thtml

The late Leonard Setright was a rightly admired, genuinely idio- syncratic, provocatively pedantic and engagingly discursive motoring writer who loved any excuse to show off his Latin or to get Milton, Mozart or Ecclesiastes into a car column. He relished his reputation for having been quoted more often than anyone else in Private Eye’s Pseuds’ Corner, was obsessive about tyres, drove very fast, wrote the best book there will ever be on the Bristol (Palawan Press) and one of the best books there will ever be on the social history of motoring (Drive on!, Granta). This, his last, is an unfinished memoir, ranging from his first bicycle, through the legal profession, National Service and test-driving heavy lorries to the launch of the Citroën CX Turbo.

He has been called the Wittgenstein of the motoring press, but he was not quite that; for one thing, Wittgenstein was a trained engineer, whereas Setright was not. He was, however, the son of an engineer (the family firm produced the Setright Register, the ingenious and once ubiquitous ticket machine used by bus conductors) and he had a lifelong, deeply informed passion for engineering. As Michael Bywater points out in his perceptive introduction, Setright was really more an engineering than a car enthusiast, and it was partly this that gave to his motoring writing such a valuable critical edge.

I regret never having spoken to him but I remember observing him at a Mercedes launch (he loved Mercedes sports cars), a tall, rabbinical figure, withdrawn, dauntingly courteous and ostentatiously eccentric with his fedora and his chain-smoked Sobranies. ‘A gentlemanly instance of the Prophet Elijah,’ says Bywater, aptly. He was perhaps fortunate to die before our contemporary puritan ascendancy banished smoking.

Like all his works, his memoir bubbles with unexpected incidentals. Who but Setright would tell you there were more deaths on British roads in the first two years of the second world war than in the armed forces? (The blackout was largely responsible.) Who but Setright would measure the maximum speed at which an umbrella would protect you in an open-topped 1926 Citroën Cloverleaf (18mph)? And who but Setright would dare pen this:

Steering response was enhanced by the fact (seldom appreciated) that suspension of this kind provokes an anti-Ackermann toe-in when the vehicle rolls, so altogether (further enhanced by the correct distribution of masses in the horizontal plane) the nature of the vehicle was to be at once stable and responsive.

He was, of course, describing his 1926 Morgan Aero three-wheeler.

Vivid and cheerful writing such as Setright’s is partly a question of temperament. Whether it’s cars, motorbikes, National Service, cultural curiosities, music or tobacco, his enthusiasm is infectious; and his contemptuous dismissal of alternatives and follies is always entertaining, sometimes self-parodying, often right. He had a sharp eye for cant and I suspect his playfulness, like his reverence for things done well, was based on a secure religious faith. In an affectionate afterword, James May recalls being admonished by the sage: ‘“Do not take notes,” he once almost thundered at me. “Take responsibility!”’ He did, for everything he wrote, and our appreciation of many of the things of this world is livelier and sharper for it.