My Thirty Years of Speed (Sir Malcolm Campbell)

'My Thirty Years of Speed' is the autobiography of Sir Malcolm Campbell.

Born on 11 March 1885, he developed a passion for speed early in his life. A pilot in the Royal Flying Corps during World War 1 Campbell had already started racing cars at Brooklands in 1910, and in 1912 suffered the first of many near-fatal accidents. He christened his first and subsequent cars ‘Blue Bird’, after a stage play by Maurice Maeterlinck. First breaking the land speed record at Pendine Sands in September 1924, he then went on to become the first man to exceed 150mph in the following July. In February 1931, he set a new land speed high of 231.4mph at Daytona, Florida, for which he was knighted by King George V. His final land speed record attempt was on the Bonneville Salt Flats at the age of fifty when his last ‘Blue Bird’ topped 300mph in September 1935. His narrative is riveting as he describes the thrill and challenges of racing at speed as well as his adventures treasure-hunting and near death scrapes in aeroplanes.