Ninety Years On: The Bentley Drivers Club

Most car clubs can tell you roughly when they started. The Bentley Drivers Club can tell you almost to the afternoon, because it began with one man walking round the car parks at Brooklands in March 1936, tucking a printed card under the wiper of every vintage Bentley he could find. The card said, in effect, we should form a club. Ninety years later, that club is one of the oldest and most respected single-marque organisations in the world, and 2026 is its birthday. This felt like the right moment to give one of our showcase clubs a proper turn in the light.

A club that started with a windscreen card

The man with the cards was Keston Pelmore, and the response was better than he can have hoped. Twenty-six people turned up to the inaugural meeting, held at his bachelor flat off the Fulham Road before the crowd forced a move to a nearby hotel. Within a month someone had organised a run to the Old Bell at Hurley in Berkshire, and thirty-one Bentleys turned up to it. By the end of 1936 there were fifty-four members. By the outbreak of war in 1939 there were a hundred and ten.

Put that in context. In 1936 a vintage Bentley was not yet an heirloom. It was a used sports car, a few years out of production, the sort of thing a keen young man bought because it was fast and available rather than because it was precious. W.O. Bentley's own company had already been swallowed by Rolls-Royce in 1931. The cars could easily have drifted quietly into scrap and neglect, the way most fast cars of any era do. Instead a few dozen owners decided they were worth keeping, worth driving hard, and worth gathering around. Nearly every Cricklewood Bentley still on the road today owes something to that decision.

The people who gave it weight

What turned a windscreen-card idea into an institution was the calibre of the people who joined early. Woolf Barnato agreed to become the club's first President, and you could not have asked for a better figurehead. Barnato was a Bentley Boy in the fullest sense: he won Le Mans three years running from 1928 to 1930, he chaired Bentley Motors, and he famously raced the Blue Train across France in a Speed Six and beat it. Among the other early members was Dr Dudley Benjafield, another Le Mans winner from the marque's golden run of five victories between 1924 and 1930. These were not distant patrons lending a name. They were men who had actually driven the cars in anger at the Sarthe.

And then there was the man himself. W.O. Bentley, who always said he was surprised as well as delighted that the cars he had built should hold such a grip on their owners, agreed to become the club's Patron in 1947. He remained an active, gently bemused presence for the rest of his life. There is something quietly moving about a club that could count its own designer among its friends, and that direct line back to the man who drew the cars is part of why the BDC still carries the weight it does.

From a London flat to Wroxton

The club grew up fast after the war. Briggs Cunningham signed on as the first overseas member in January 1946, the year the first Summer Rally and Concours d'Elegance was held in Kensington Gardens. The first race meeting followed at Silverstone in 1948, a fixture that has run more or less ever since. By 1950 membership had passed a thousand.

For decades the club was run from Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire, but the modern home is grander. On 1 July 2007 HRH Prince Michael of Kent opened the W.O. Bentley Memorial Building at Wroxton, near Banbury, and that is where the club sits today: an archive, a meeting place, and a working headquarters rather than a museum behind glass. Membership now runs to roughly 3,700 across the UK, Europe, North America, Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, tied together by the club's long-running magazine, the Review, and by very active regional sections. Crucially, you do not need a pre-war Bentley, or indeed any Bentley at all, to join. The club welcomes owners of everything the marque has built from 1919 onwards, and enthusiasts who simply admire the cars from the fence.

Ninety years, and a summer to match

The BDC is not marking its ninetieth by holding a single dinner and calling it done. The centrepiece is the Summer Concours, and this year it moves to Crewe from Friday 24 to Sunday 26 July, taking over Bentley Motors' own headquarters and the grounds of Rookery Hall. It is a full weekend rather than a Sunday: an early arrival on the Thursday, a colleague day inside the factory with tours and displays, a scenic tour on the Saturday, a gala dinner, and the concours proper on the Sunday. That the modern factory is opening its doors for the occasion tells you how seriously Bentley Motors still takes the independent club that carries its founder's name.

If competition is more your thing, the BDC's race meeting returns to Silverstone's National Circuit on Saturday 15 August, the seventy-eighth time the club has run it. Do not picture a modern race weekend. This is deliberately a summer garden party with a race programme attached, pre-war machinery sharing the track in spirited but civil fashion, Morgan and FISCAR grids in support, and families spread across the grass with picnics. It is one of the most genial days out in British historic motorsport, and one of the best value.

There is a nice bookend later in the year, too. On 31 October the club returns to The Dorchester on Park Lane, eighty years almost to the season since it held its very first dinner dance there. Ninety years for the club, eighty for the dinner: the BDC clearly enjoys an anniversary, and who could blame it.

Worth knowing, worth joining

I have a soft spot for clubs that take their history seriously without turning it into a museum, and the Bentley Drivers Club is the model. It keeps the oldest cars running, it keeps the newest owners welcome, and it still counts the founder's blessing among its assets. That is a rare combination, and it is exactly the sort of organisation this site exists to champion.

If any of the above has you reaching for the calendar, the club's own site at bdcl.org has the full 2026 programme, membership details and event booking. You can find its full listing, along with hundreds of others, in our club directory. Ninety years on from a card under a wiper blade, the Bentley Drivers Club is in rude health. Here is to the next ten.