Victor Austin Bruce

8/4/1897 - 1/1/1978

Record updated 08-Apr-20

The Hon. Victor Austin Bruce was a well-known competitor at Brooklands. In 1926, he became the first Briton to win the Monte Carlo Rally driving a 2-litre six cylinder A.C., with W. J. Brunell as passenger and navigator.

The Hon. Victor Austin Bruce, the 2nd son of Baron Aberdare, was educated in Wye Agricultural College, Wye, Kent, England. He fought in the First World War and gained the rank of Second Lieutenant in the service of the Royal Marines.
 
He was a well-known competitor at Brooklands and his elder brother, the Hon Henry Lyndhurst Bruce, later Lord Aberdare, also raced a de Dietrich there pre WW1. Henry was killed in action in Ypres, Belgium, on the 14th December 1914.

In 1926, he became the first Briton to win the Monte Carlo Rally driving a 2-litre six cylinder A.C., with W. J. Brunell as passenger and navigator. He opted to start from John O’ Groats and actually had a job reaching the north of Scotland, never mind battling back through the snow in his AC tourer to begin his 1,529-mile journey south to the Cote d’Azur.

Just after the race, the Hon. Victor Bruce married Mildred Mary Petre (16 February 1926) a noted motorist and pioneering aviator. The following year she won the Monte Carlo Coupe des Dames driving another of Edge's ACs. She then made an 8000 mile circuit of the Mediterranean, finishing off with a thousand-mile run at the Montlhery track near Paris. Later that year, Victor and Mildred Bruce drove an AC farther north than any car had ever gone before, some 230 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Finland.

Victor and Mildred Mary Petre were divorced in 1941 whereupon he married Margaret Charlotte Beechy on the 19th June. Mildred Mary Petre died in 1990.



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