At the 2002 Goodwood Revival Meeting was an elderly gentleman who was 'iron-badged' - he had access everywhere. His name is John Brierley and he played his part in motor racing history though he has never driven a racing car. I am proud to claim a small part in getting John welcomed as an honoured guest at Goodwood.

The only thing that Stirling Moss recalls of the day which ended his career, was knocking off the silencer from his Lotus Elite as he left The Fleece in East Street, Chichester, on his way to Goodwood. The landlord of The Fleece, John Brierley, got a jack and helped Stirling to put the silencer back on.

A little over a year later, Stirling was back behind the wheel of a racing car once more, at Goodwood, and the only outsider invited was John Brierley. One can think of drivers of the time who might have had many reasons for inviting the landlord of a pub along, but Stirling was virtually teetotal.

John's story is a sidelight of motor racing history, although his photographs will certainly live on. He was born in Yorkshire in 1915 and there was little exceptional about his life until 1942 when he found himself a P.O.W. building the bridges - there were two - on the River Kwai.

John made an art of turning any old watch into a Rolex, even an Ingersoll or a Timex, and the Japanese guards would do anything for a Rolex. They might even stop beating prisoners around the head with rifle butts. Prisoners were 'paid' in a 'scrip' for what was essentially slave labour, beyond the reach of the Red Cross/Crescent and any of the manifold Geneva Conventions. John put the currency in danger by creating his own 'scrip', using half a potato to make his stamp.

He suffered many diseases and it was while he was in the hut for the sick that he spent his time trying to keep his brain intact by designing post-war motorcycles in his imagination. His drawings were done with pencil stubs on scraps of paper, and had to be hidden, but those he managed to preserve are exquisite. The editor of The Motor Cycle certainly thought so because he ran an article on John and his designs early in 1946.

Before the war John had been employed in his uncle's meat business, while really wanting to be in engineering, but with the accolade of a major feature in a top magazine, he was able to get taken on as a mechanic with a motorcycle dealer in Chichester, epicentre of the universe.

Life settled down again and then, just outside Chichester, a disused airfield, the former RAF Westhampnett, became the Goodwood circuit and one day a chap called Ken Carter arrived at the 'bike shop. Ken had a Cooper-JAP, one of the first, and needed help tuning it, then he needed to find a place to store the car near to a circuit, and since John could oblige on both counts he was drawn into motor racing.

John Brierley was in the swim at the right time because if you went to almost any race meeting you bumped into everyone in the sport. When he took over as landlord of a country pub near Goodwood, the Hare and Hounds at Stoughton, Ken Carter and other racers came to stay. There were the likes of Stirling Moss, Alan Brown, Peter Collins and Les Leston, all sharing basic facilities because, as John recalls, "We did not even have electricity, we had oil lamps, but the drivers from London loved that.

"Since there wasn't a bobby for miles around, they could test their cars up the road with nobody minding. Then there were all the pranks like the time Stirling and Ken Gregory brought down a couple of chorus girls and the other guys sprinkled cayenne pepper in their pyjamas. You could hear them taking cold baths at three in the morning."

Stirling recalls that Ken Carter set up the ruse and it was not three in the morning, it was four. He says, "You can tell it was the 1940s, boy, we were wearing pyjamas."