We flocked like pilgrims to Pall Mall on Thursday – not to gaze once more upon the splendour of the RAC Club or to pick up another of those door-stop books in which motor sport appears to specialise.

No, it was to see Sir Stirling Moss. And once we had arrived we formed a ring-fort of affection around this bald and diminutive great man and were strangely loth to leave him.

Moss was much more than a wonderful driver. Like Denis Compton and Stanley Matthews, who were a little older, Moss was a giant figure of the 1950s, a symbol of the spirit of those bleak times, when sport did so much to distract people from the dreariness of post-war austerity. There was still rationing in the early 50s, powdered eggs, grey bread and sweet shortages. But as Neville Cardus wrote: “There was no rationing in an innings by Compton.”

And it was the same with Moss, who raced between 1948 and 1962. He could have been a star of the 60s, too, but a serious accident abridged his brilliant career.

So at the RAC club, sitting beside the old idol, we F1 reporters who travel the world, following the seasons like migratory birds, had never felt more richly privileged.

Moss talked about the drivers who had died, for the history of Formula One is wrapped in wreaths. This is a sport that looks back not only at its dead days but also its dead people. He talked, too, about winning the 1955 Mille Miglia and how he almost won the world championship in 1958. He won four races to Mike Hawthorn’s one but lost out on the title by a single point. Hawthorn was almost disqualified from the Portuguese Grand Prix near the end of the season. But Moss launched an ardent defence of the Ferrari driver, who was reprieved and retained his second place.

We had heard all these stories before, of course, sometimes from Moss’s own mouth, but there was nothing boring about the repetition. The old stories fell over us as comfortably as old clothes. As Chanu said in Brick Lane: “The thing about getting older is that you don’t need everything to be possible any more, you just need some things to be certain.”

Moss never won the world championship, though for seven straight years he was either second or third. And for a few years, after the retirement of Juan Manuel Fangio in 1958, he was the finest and most famous racing driver in the world. He was so good that Ferrari not only wanted him to drive for them but were prepared to have the car painted blue, the team colour of his friend Rob Walker. Moss’s versatility was astonishing. He could have clambered on top of a tractor or a lawnmower and driven it faster than anyone else.

In a book on the great drivers my highly regarded predecessor Alan Henry judged him to be the greatest driver of them all, even ahead of Fangio, Jim Clark and Ayrton Senna. I would not go that far. Clark, surely, must be the greatest British driver of them all and, if Lewis Hamilton keeps adding to his collection of trophies, he will also have to come into the frame.

But when good judges weigh up the credentials of the leading half a dozen or so drivers, Moss always comes into their careful consideration. And it is worth remembering that Enzo Ferrari rated Moss ahead of Fangio and placed him alongside Tazio Nuvolari.

It is much more than that, though. I never saw him drive but his name was there, in my earliest consciousness, in that imaginary chapbook of tales and ballads we are all given by our parents. And, in 1973, 11 years after Moss had retired and I was booked for speeding for the first time in my Hillman Avenger GT, the policeman said: “Who do you think you are? Stirling Moss?” He did not invoke the names of Clark, John Surtees, Graham Hill or Jackie Stewart, world champions all of them. No, it was Moss, Sir Stirling Moss, Mister Motor Racing himself.

When the famous composer Camille Saint-Saëns was 85, in 1920, he said: “The harvest is gathered in. At the age of 85 one has the right, perhaps the duty, of falling silent.” Moss, at 85, has no such inclination. And those of us who attended the RAC Club on Thursday were most grateful for that.