Anon

Some fellow petrolheads have been asking what I think about the movie Anonymous, and the thesis that the true author of the Shakespearean canon was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. You can make a case for anything provided you ignore evidence. In 1616, two of England’s leading poets, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson journeyed from London to Stratford to be with Shakespeare as he lay dying. Game, set and match, I think.
There are more than 60 candidates for the “true” authorship of Shakespeare (Moliere has only three dozen claimants, but Jack the Ripper has about 90.) Someone once published a paper claiming it was an Arab author, Sheik Zbiar. This scholar was found hiding in a drainpipe in Libya.
Conspiracy theorists argue that it was impossible for a country hick to know so much. In fact, anyone who regularly completes a cryptic crossword in a decent newspaper needs considerably more general knowledge than Shakespeare demonstrated.

Some people just cannot get their heads around the fact that there is such a thing  as genius.
Ettore Bugatti had no engineering training, yet he was designing engines when barely out of his teens and was soon creating whole cars, the exquisite Peugeot Bebe being one.
Sir Henry Royce began an apprenticeship at a locomotive works, but did not complete it. Royce picked up one crucial thing, that things work best when they are in harmony.
Harry Miller picked up a few hints by working for various car companies. That does not quite explain why a Miller design, taken over by Fred Offenhauser was winning in Indycar racing more than 30 years after Miller’s death.
According to Shakespeare conspiracy logic, Bugatti, Miller and Royce could not possibly have designed the cars that bore their names, because they did not have a college diploma between them. True, they were exploring a new field, but so were many others. Lots climbed on the bandwagon, but only a few survived.
Eric Broadley, founder of Lola, trained as a quantity surveyor, I once asked him how he recruited engineers and he said he trawled universities. Since Eric did not go to university, I asked whether he would employ his younger self. He replied, “No. I couldn’t take the risk.”
Eric’s first assistant designer was Tony Southgate, who’d served an apprenticeship with a company making heating units. Tony handed in his pencil after Audi had finished 1-2-3 at Le Mans. He bought a kit car and went club racing.
Colin Chapman did have a degree, but it was in civil engineering. He was qualified to design heavy-duty stuff like bridges. Chapman’s first assistant was Len Terry who was a gifted artist who used to design posters and playbills for a West End impresario. He also did some of the early cutaway drawings in Autosport.
One thing that unites Broadley, Southgate, Chapman and Terry is that they all built 1172-cc Ford specials.
Another “special” builder was Ron Tauranac, who is surely the greatest designer of production racing cars there has ever been. He also designed World Championship winners, but production racing cars is the most difficult market in the world, and he was on top of it for more than 30 years. Ron began by reading books on engineering and, like other special builders, by learning on the job.
John Cooper had no academic training, but served an apprenticeship in the family business. His father, Charlie, had been a top racing mechanic and, during the second World War, Cooper was a subcontractor to the Hawker Aircraft Company. John began by building a special, so did Gordon Murray.[pullquote]“Some people just cannot get their heads around the fact that there is such a thing as genius.”[/pullquote]
Frank Costin made his name in aerodynamics, with Lotus and Vanwall, but he was trained as a stress engineer. He never used a wind tunnel to design a car, he worked with a slide rule. He also wrote poetry and composed music.
Adrian Reynard did go to college, he was on a sandwich course—part of the time he spent at Oxford Polytechnic, part of the time he spent at Morris Motors. He would have liked to have gone to a university, but he had not the qualifications. Adrian did do well enough to be accepted for a fourth year, which could have earned him a degree. The task he was set was to design and make a lateral strain-gauge accelerometer.
Adrian beavered away and instead made the first Reynard FF1600 car. He failed his course, but when the Polytechnic became Oxford Brookes University, he was the first recipient of an honorary doctorate.
Two guys who made a difference at Reynard were Paul Owens and Malcolm Oastler, who had both served apprenticeships with municipal bus companies, Owens in England, Oastler in Australia. As both have told me, they learned how to strip and rebuild every mechanical element. To be economical, buses put in huge mileage and the strains are immense since it is all stop-go. The thing is that Paul and Malcolm looked at how things worked.
It would be tedious to list every designer who learned on the job and I am not qualified to speak about Indianapolis crew chiefs. I do know, however, that George Bignotti came to England when March was making its first Indycar, and it was Bignotti who made the raw design into a winner.
The idiots who deny Shakespeare, do worse than engage in a pointless argument, they deny the ingenuity of humankind. Leonardo da Vinci was trained to put paint on canvas, he did not enroll in a science or anatomy course, but he made advances in both.
Our distant ancestors learned how to cultivate certain types of grass and somehow converted grass into bread, and cakes, and pies, and beer, and whiskey.
The last time I looked in on a Formula One design office, I saw a hundred very bright people seated before video screens. On the one hand I was impressed by the effort that went into making a midfield car, but what bothered me was whether a person of genius could ever emerge from that office pool.