Glen Kidston

Who was Glen Kidston?

George Pearson Glen Kidston was a record-breaking English aviator and motor racing driver.

Kidston was a member of the well known Bentley Boys of the late 1920s, and possibly the wealthiest of that already wealthy set. His father, A.G. Kidston, was a grandson of the original A.G. Kidston who was a metal and machinery merchant in Glasgow with interests in the Clyde Shipping Company, local solicitors, accountants and banking interests amalgamated into the Clydesdale Bank. Andrew Bonar Law MP was a Kidston, by his mother, and Chancellor of the Exchequer during World War I, being briefly Tory Prime Minister in the year of his death 1923. Kidston was one of the four, core Grosvenor Square-based Bentley team drivers, whose day-long parties passed into contemporary legend.

A former Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy, he was torpedoed three times in the same morning during the action of 22 September 1914 against German submarine U-9 under the command of Commander Otto Weddigen as the fleet manoeuvered. Following repatriation he served in the dreadnought, HMS Orion, with the British Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland, running gunnery orders on open deck under direct enemy fire. Kidston grasped submarine tactics and served on several leading edge British submarines, including the notorious X1, that he served on in North Sea trials. During the trials the X1 embedded itself in the seabed as its gauges were faulty, but was freed after a dangerous period on the sea bed. In December 1926 he received his command of the H-class submarine, the Beardmore-built H24, built at Portsmouth. Away from his duties as a submariner he was an early pioneer of naval flight.