Fred Taylor

English photographer Fred Taylor, was a life-long enthusiast and a great essentially amateur motor sporting photographer with a wonderful eye. He was able to cover many motor races throughout Europe due to his occupation as warehouse manager for British Road Services, which eased the crippling cash restrictions upon private travel which so limited the general public during the 1940s-50s and early-’60s. Fred Taylor attended many minor-race circuits that the professionals simply did not access during that period.  A lifelong bachelor with a modest – yet useful – private income, he was also an enthusiastic lothario who allegedly took a different girlfriend to almost every race. He actually lived into his 90s, unmarried and still enthusiastically attending motor race meetings both at home in England, and abroad.  All of Taylor’s films were professionally processed, the majority by Wallace Heaton, in Bond Street, London, and his images were also printed there. His work held in the GP Library Collection has an incredible span, from the 1930s until 1960-61, and it covers venues as disparate as Shelsely Walsh hill-climb, Brooklands Motor Course, the Mille Miglia, Lyons-Parilly, Sempione Park in Milan, Reims, Pau, Monza, Pescara and AVUS Berlin, to name just a few.