Ian Young
18-11 2021 11:03
wrote:
I’ll never forget the day Tony Dron telephoned. I was a 21-year-old wannabe journalist willing to write about anything - even old cars - if it got me into the industry. He’d heard about me through a mutual friend of my father, and Dron - his cut-glass accent and deep, baritone voice coming down the line like a 1940s radio broadcast - made an instant impression. ‘I can offer you three days a week, £100 a day,’ he said slowly and deliberately, ‘and then we’ll just see how it goes. Sound fair?’ It felt more than fair, it felt like a divine summons from a world where the air was just that little bit sweeter.
Over the next five years I spent a lot of time with Dron and I’m proud to consider him a mentor, even a father figure at times, although I’m pretty sure some of the advice he passed on would have made my own father wince with alarm. Above all, however, I was lucky enough to sit next to him in a variety of driving machines - from state-of-the-art race and rally cars to a 40ft canal barge - and I can categorically say that he was a man who had an affinity with the dimensions of space and time that was far beyond the understanding of most mortals. And such respect for those machines, too. Pure mechanical poetry.
He often spoke of his admiration for the WW2 fighter pilots who defended this island during the long hot summer of 1940, and I recall he was moved to narrate onto tape ‘The Last Enemy’ (the story of burned fighter ace Richard Hilary). Dron was cut from the same cloth as these men, which is about the greatest accolade I can think of. Ian Young
Ian Young
18-11 2021 11:03
wrote:
I’ll never forget the day Tony Dron telephoned. I was a 21-year-old wannabe journalist willing to write about anything - even old cars - if it got me into the industry. He’d heard about me through a mutual friend of my father, and Dron - his cut-glass accent and deep, baritone voice coming down the line like a 1940s radio broadcast - made an instant impression. ‘I can offer you three days a week, £100 a day,’ he said slowly and deliberately, ‘and then we’ll just see how it goes. Sound fair?’ It felt more than fair, it felt like a divine summons from a world where the air was just that little bit sweeter.
Over the next five years I spent a lot of time with Dron and I’m proud to consider him a mentor, even a father figure at times, although I’m pretty sure some of the advice he passed on would have made my own father wince with alarm. Above all, however, I was lucky enough to sit next to him in a variety of driving machines - from state-of-the-art race and rally cars to a 40ft canal barge - and I can categorically say that he was a man who had an affinity with the dimensions of space and time that was far beyond the understanding of most mortals. And such respect for those machines, too. Pure mechanical poetry.
He often spoke of his admiration for the WW2 fighter pilots who defended this island during the long hot summer of 1940, and I recall he was moved to narrate onto tape ‘The Last Enemy’ (the story of burned fighter ace Richard Hilary). Dron was cut from the same cloth as these men, which is about the greatest accolade I can think of. Ian Young
