Sir Jackie Stewart: ‘Every time I forget a name I worry I might have dementia like my wife’
A couple of days before Sir Jackie Stewart and his son, the filmmaker Mark Stewart, came into the Telegraph offices to take calls at the annual charity phone-in, the great Formula One champion had been at his home in Switzerland. That day, he had just returned from a business trip and was sitting together with his wife Helen, holding hands in front of a warming fire.
“Then one of her carers came into the room and asked if she needed anything,” Sir Jackie says. “And Helen said: ‘Yes, can you tell me when Jackie’s coming home?’” He pauses for a moment at the recall. “I was sitting right there, alongside her. This is my wife of 60 years, my timekeeper, my lap-charter, the woman who used to stand with me on the winner’s podium. It absolutely breaks my heart.”
Helen was discovered some nine years ago to be afflicted by frontotemporal dementia. These days she can no longer walk, her memory is shattered, she has lost all vocal inhibition.
After supporting his wife with the condition Sir Jackie now believes it likely that he could also be diagnosed with dementia one day. “Every time you forget a name you worry. You think: ‘Do I have it? Is that a sign?’,” he says. “Because you know this is a disease that affects so many. Anyone and everyone. Like Helen.”
Sir Jackie recalls that, when it came, Helen’s was a diagnosis neither of them was expecting.
“Both of us went for our annual health check-up at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota,” he says. “One of the main people came up to me and said: ‘Helen has dementia.’ I took it in for a moment then I said: ‘OK, so what do we do about it?’ And he said: ‘We don’t have anything we can do.’ This is one of the best medical institutions in the world. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I said: ‘This is not acceptable to me. We have to find something.’”
Sir Jackie has always been someone for whom the phrase “There is nothing that can be done” is anathema. After all, he came to prominence as a driver in the 1960s and 1970s, Formula One’s killing years, when virtually every grand prix was pockmarked with fatal crashes.
“In the grounds at our house [in Buckinghamshire], I have benches spread round in memory of the drivers killed during my time. There’s 79 of them; all of my mates are dead,” says Sir Jackie, who, in a reflection of the devastating toll of that time, is the only British man still alive who won a grand prix in the 1960s.
“When I suggested at the time this was intolerable and something had to be done to make the sport safer, the people in charge laughed at me. They were war veterans and they said to me: ‘Why are you worried?’ Death was part of life for them. But the safety procedures were non-existent. Here’s how bad it was: on one of the leading tracks, the medical team was led by a doctor who only happened to be there because he was a fan. He was a gynaecologist.”
Presented with an apparently insurmountable challenge, however, Sir Jackie rolled up his sleeves and did something about it. He led a campaign to make the sport safe. It was not an easy ride.
“The world was against me at one point, what I did then was very unpopular. I had death threats because I closed down a whole list of circuits that were murderously dangerous. But I changed things. We made it safe. I did that. These days, in Formula One races, nobody dies.”
It is that energy and determination, that refusal to be cowed or defeated, that he has brought to the campaign to find a solution to the condition that has so curtailed his beloved wife. Race Against Dementia is the charity he set up, which is now run by Mark. It has a single, simple aim: to find a cure for dementia within his lifetime. But given Sir Jackie is 84, that adds a certain urgency to things.
“We needed a new way of doing business,” he says. “We want to tap into the technological pace of Formula One because it’s the fastest at solving problems of any business. From one grand prix to another there will be six major changes for each team. Yes, F1 is glamorous, colourful. But it is also effective.”
What his charity does is support researchers as they work on understanding the condition, both financially and in terms of sourcing whatever equipment they need.
“The technical opportunity to research today is better than it’s ever been,” Sir Jackie says. “We find brilliant young people with PhDs from all corners of the world and back them. We started with one or two, now we’ve got 18. And we give them five-year contracts, so they are not distracted by the worry about funding. We take them to F1 centres and see how they can link up, what they can learn about teamwork, say, from watching the Red Bull pit crew in action.”
The race against dementia, he adds, is one in which speed is of the essence.
“More people in this country now die with dementia than from any other condition. Cancer is being rapidly diminished as a killer, but still we have no cure for dementia. Unless we find a way to stop it, one in three people born today will die of it. And the thing is, it destroys families like no other illness.”
This, he says, is what is so difficult: watching loved ones be so afflicted. Plus the added trauma of being obliged by circumstance to move them away from the family home.
“I’m lucky in that I have the financial resources to keep Helen beside me. She has round-the-clock attention from a team of top nurses. Most people, though, can’t do that. They simply cannot afford it. So their fathers, mothers, husbands and wives end up having to go into homes.”
He has experience of watching what happens there.
“Right now, Roger Hill, the best mechanic I ever had, has dementia. He is in a home. When I go to visit him it’s so depressing. He sits in a chair, in a line watching television, with his fellow patients. He has sat next to the same woman on one side and man on the other for years: they have never exchanged a word. The memory of what a man he was, the relationship we had, it just cuts you to the core.”
This is the remarkable thing about Sir Jackie. Back when he was driving, he was climbing into death-trap F1 cars knowing his chances of not making it to the end of any race were significant. Yet he kept his cool, showed no fear. And in his new battle against dementia, he again maintains an outward sheen of businesslike endeavour despite the personal pain.
“I tell everybody I never went fast enough to hurt myself. But actually, I had to remove emotion,” he says of his time winning world titles. “I managed to go to the funerals of my mates and never, ever cried. Until Jim Clark died.”
It was then, at the memorial for his great fellow Scot who crashed into a tree on the Hockenheim Circuit in 1968, that he lost control of his emotions.
“After the ceremony, Dan Gurney, an American driver, and I went back to the Clarks’ farm. Jim’s mum and dad welcomed us. They were dry as a bone, Scottish, you see, brought up to keep feelings in check. Dan burst into tears seeing them in that light. That set me off. I couldn’t stop. These were the tears for everyone who had been killed. They just kept coming.”
And once more, even as he diverts his enormous energy into his charity, underneath he is clearly in turmoil.
“Yes it hurts. Because it’s Helen. It hurts like nothing else,” he says. He tells me about another recent exchange that took place as he and Mark were on their way out of the house. “Helen asked me where we were going. We’re very honest, so I said, ‘We’re going to an event for Race Against Dementia.’ She said, ‘Oh yes, I think I have that. But don’t worry, I’m fine.’”
“But it is no good me just crying about it,” he says. “To a large extent I have to remove emotion again with this campaign. The point is we have to find a way. And that will take money.”
At which, Sir Jackie, the lifelong campaigner against injustice, returns to the phones to take calls from generous Telegraph readers, too many of whom, like him, have been tainted by this woeful condition. He is not one who is going to falter in the race against dementia.
Race Against Dementia is one of four charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal. The others are the RAF Benevolent Fund, Marie Curie and Go Beyond. To make a donation, please visit telegraph.co.uk/2023appeal or call 0151 284 1927