L J K Setright – A Celebration

When the world was young and the Ford Fiesta 1300S Mk 1 was causing a minor sensation in outer suburbia; this writer was a devotee of Car magazine. It was not just the GBU section that contained such observations as ‘Chrysler Hunter – For: Price? Against: Just about everything. Sum-up: Horrid’. One of the principal reasons for investing in the title every month was the column of Mr. Leonard John Kensell Setright – aka LJK Setright. Here are some of his words on the original XJ6:

“Boasting the world’s best and quietest ride, together with enough performance and style to justify its place in what Jaguar owners like to think of as society, this beautifully low and gracefully proportioned saloon made superfluous any four-seater that was more expensive.”

Note the ‘…what Jaguar owners like to think of as society’. Setright was not one to pander to readers. His pictures gave the impression of an Edwardian gentleman who had strayed, Adam Adamant fashion, into the late 20th Century but was prepared to give the hoi polloi the benefit of the doubt.

An air of mystery reinforced this forbidding image – ‘It cannot be too widely known that Setright does not indulge in correspondence’. His voice, which was reminiscent of Vivian Stanshall’s dulcet tones, perfectly matched his magazine persona.

It came as a genuine surprise to my younger self to learn that Setright was born in 1931.

If one had to identify just one of the elements that made Setright so eminently quotable, it was his gift for conveying enthusiasm, passion even, for the car in question while never insulting his audience’s intelligence. Nor was he a self-parodying automotive snob, observing ‘when Ford made an E variant of the Mk 2 Cortina we had a crisp, well behaved and lively car that was smart enough to take anywhere.

And in matters of encapsulating the very persona of a car marque, Setright had very few peers. Here are his 1977 thoughts on the contrasting images of Rolls-Royce and Bentley:

“RR Shadows are for businessman, matinee idols and accountants. The Bentley, in contrast, has always been very much an ‘officer and gentleman’ car: it must accommodate four tall men sitting ramrod-straight, but it need not accommodate five, and the four will not be lolling around like a lot of beat-weary pop singers, so the cabin does not have to be particularly wide.”

The phrase ‘beat-weary’ is utterly delightful.

Setright’s final column for Car was in 1999, and he died four years later. This obituary in The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/sep/19/guardianobituaries.pressandpublishing - gives a vivid impression of a true polymath – clarinettist, lawyer, scholar and writer. His book Drive On!: A Social History of the Motor Car remains essential for any automotive library, not least for this passage on the Citroën DS:

“No car had ever been cleverer. No car was ever braver. The DS should have inspired the world to embark on a new course of motor engineering, to accept and advance the new standards that Citroën had set.”

But Setright understood the DS and indeed every car he encountered. That is why he will continue to be read.

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