The Mille Miglia and me: 1955-2025

As nephew to Denis Jenkinson, designer Peter Stevens has a special connection to the Mille Miglia, the race Stirling Moss conquered with his uncle sat beside him 70 years ago. It's a story that has come full circle

- Peter Stevens

Scroll back 70 years, to May 1, 1955. My great-uncle Egbert Jenkinson had arranged a huge family get-together in Kettering. Some of the Jenkinson family had moved from there to Suffolk where many had become church ministers, particularly in the village of Glemsford. Egbert had gone to America to seek his fortune and then became a minister himself. One family member was not there: my uncle, Denis. He had told me that he was busy that weekend. I knew that he was navigating for Stirling Moss in a Mercedes-Benz racing car but hadn't quite taken on the enormity of this. Next morning, he sent me a telegram: they had won the Mille Miglia!

He was always ‘Denis’ to me. The family never called him ‘Jenks’, which is what his elder brother Harold was called. We all called him Denis or ‘Farnborough Denis’ because of where he lived. In close collaboration with Moss, my uncle had devised a kind of roller map on which he had handwritten notes on every bend, straight, uphill and downhill section of the open-road course. Denis arranged for a beautiful aluminium box to be made with perfectly engineered rollers to properly hold his long strip of course notes. The box was made near Dartford by M Papier Ltd of Foots Cray.