Hailwood’s incredible 1978 TT comeback shocked the world...
40 years on, Andy Kershaw relives bunking off his A-levels to witness Mike the Bike make TT history
In January 1978, it was announced that Mike Hailwood, after a break of 11 years, and a career in between as a Formula One motor racing driver, was to make an Isle of Man TT comeback. News of this was greeted with a mix of incredulity, concern, delight and scorn. Mike The Bike, for goodness sakes, would be 38 years old by the following June (people aged more quickly in those days) and he’d not raced a motorcycle regularly or seriously since the end of the 1967 season when he’d retired as nine-times World Champion, 12 times an Isle of Man TT winner and a Honda factory rider. Mike’s status as a living legend of motorcycle racing was undoubtedly justified. If fans disagreed, during saloon bar debates, on who was the greatest of all time, they certainly agreed that Hailwood’s name jostled for the top spot only with those of two others - Giacomo Agostini and Jarno Saarinen - as the most naturally gifted motorcycle racer of them all. News of Hailwood’s TT intentions was greeted at our house by parental indifference and my private resolve to be there, come hell or high water. Lucky then, given the inconvenience of the Irish Sea and the imposition of my A-Levels, that I was prepared to face both.
It should have come as no surprise to anyone that I would run away to the Isle of Man, even during my A-Level fortnight, to watch Hailwood ride again. I had, after all, gone AWOL to the TT for the previous three years. My first escape had been for the races there in June 1975. It was also my very first solo adventure. Anywhere. Secretly, I’d saved up for months – almost a tenner. In those days, it was possible to catch a boat around midnight from Liverpool which dumped its queasy passengers onto the quayside in Douglas at around six the next morning. With a day return ticket, it was then possible to watch a day of racing and catch a boat back to Liverpool at around tea time.
For those with money, a passage on those Isle of Man boats of yesteryear was quite an elegant experience. For those of us on a tight budget, it meant a recreation of the hellish scenes in steerage of A Night To Remember, confined to dormitories below the waterline, in the enforced company of emotional, heavy-drinking Scots and over-familiar Scousers.
In theory, and in the idealised adverts of the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company – showing happy daytrippers not being sick and dappled with Manx sunshine – this was a splendid arrangement. But the tempting adverts, travel posters and my dreams did not account for the whimsical Manx weather. Throughout my day trip in 1975, it never stopped lashing down. I tramped along Douglas promenade. From a bucket and spade shop, I bought a plastic rain-hood, the kind favoured by old ladies on coach trips.
In a café, I eked out a mug of tea to last an hour or more as I wiped condensation off the window to monitor a heaving sea and the hammering rain. The talk among knots of fellow TT fans, sitting around me and gently steaming, was of racing postponements and a possible cancellation.
I splashed up the hill to look at the start-finish area, the grandstands and the scoreboard, features with which I was already intimate, just from the photographs in my TT books. I felt a small sense of achievement to be admiring them in reality, and to have got there by myself.
Close to where Victoria Road meets the TT circuit, I found a bus shelter and sat down in it. I read my TT programme. Then I read it again.
The gentle hiss of the downpour was disrupted, mid-morning, by the crackle of a two-stroke racing engine. I stuck my head out of the shelter to see a chap on a Yamaha TZ 350 racing bike making his way leisurely, and within the speed limit, up Victoria Road. He turned off towards the paddock, leaving a little trail of froth on the road . And that was it – the only race bike I saw at my very first TT. By the time I’d eaten my sandwiches, drained my flask of coffee and studied more Manx rainfall, it was time to paddle back to the harbour.
But my enthusiasm, if not the rest of me, remained undampened. I was back in 1976. Well, almost.
And so it was that, in the intense heat of that June, I was sprawled on the deck of another Isle of Man steamer at Fleetwood quayside, for a crossing to see that year’s Senior TT.
On that occasion, I didn’t even see the Isle of Man. The boat had engine failure before we’d had chance to cast off. As the sun got hotter, we made the most of it and huddled around someone’s transistor on the ship’s open deck, riveted to the Manx Radio commentary as a most dramatic Senior TT race unfolded.
The great John Williams of Cheshire, race leader for all of the six laps, despite the handicaps – almost from the start – of a broken clutch and steering damper, was only 400 yards from home and victory when he stalled his factory Suzuki. Unable to restart it, John pushed his dead machine heroically to the finish line, roared on by a packed
grandstand, where he collapsed and fainted from heat exhaustion... but he still finished seventh.
It was the stuff, again, of Ripping Yarns, and my disappointment to miss the TT for a second year running was eased, as we trudged down the gangplank of our disabled boat for an unexpected afternoon in Fleetwood, by the moral victory of an inspirational, modest, quiet, toughguy sportsman from the Wirral. Two years later, John was killed at the Ulster Grand Prix.
On my third attempt, in 1977, I saw – at last – the TT for real. Playing truant for a week, and with only a fiver in spending money, I took an old tent in a small rucksack but no sleeping bag. I figured, as it was summer, it would be warm enough at night anyway.
It was f***ing bitter. I’d camped on a site near the bottom of Bray Hill. First thing next morning, I walked down to the town centre and bought some plastic rubbish sacks from the Co-op. What little insulation they offered also retained evaporated body moisture as condensation. For my second sleepless night, I was desperately cold and wet.
The days, however, were a dream. Without money to catch a bus to other vantage points, I either walked to sample spectating alternatives or settled for the drama of Bray Hill, down which the fast men hurtle between pre-war semis and suburban street furniture in excess of 170mph. From Mr & Mrs Bradley’s corner shop, where Tromode Road meets Bray Hill itself, I bought lumps of cheese and bags of nuts and raisins and washed them down with cartons of milk.
Sitting on the Bradleys’ wall, in the warm sunshine, chewing on my cheese, and thrilled by the racing, I decided this was as close to heaven as being alive could get.
‘We were dreading disappointment, for him more than us’
Mike Hailwood, like my other great hero, Bob Dylan, paid scandalously little regard to the Joint Matriculation Board’s A-Level timetable when drawing up his plans for 1978.
If Bob had been inconsiderate to have one of his Earl’s Court concerts clash with the A-Level Economics exam, then Hailwood was equally cavalier when it came to A-Level History. His TT return was scheduled for just a couple of days before the test which was to be my best chance for a passport to Leeds University. There was nothing else for it. I would have to combine both. Following the reliable strategy of the 1975 and 1976 disasters, I took the overnight day-trip option to see Mike’s first race and prayed for good weather.
Off the boat in Douglas, and again on a budget of small change, I walked the four or five miles to Kate’s Cottage. There I settled down for the day with my sandwiches, my race programme and my history exercise books.
Before the race began, I boned up on the Causes Of The First World War. I could scarcely concentrate. The sense of anticipation was allconsuming. Those around me were reaching a state of near panic. If we weren’t entirely fearful for Mike’s life, we dreaded disappointment, for him more than us. Fairytales, I kept telling myself, are just that. It won’t happen. He’s been away for 11 years. He’s no youngster. His familiarity with the course will have faded. Modern bikes are vastly more powerful animals than those of Mike’s heyday. The best we could hope for was that he wasn’t humiliated and that he survived to tell a tale.
Years later, after I had become great friends with Jim Redman, Hailwood’s 1960s Honda team-mate – a six-times World Champion and six-times TT winner himself – Jim told me that as I was sitting on the grass bank that morning, revising my history, he was arriving on the Island at the last minute and hastening to Hailwood’s hotel to try to talk his old pal out of this folly.
“I thought he was crazy,” Jim confided. “I flew from South Africa to beg him not to do it. I told him he must be mad and that he was too old. I also thought for some time that Mike was drinking too much.” Wily old Redman’s advice went unheeded and Mike set off in the Formula One race on his big 864cc Ducati twin carrying the number 12 and the adoration and anxieties of thousands. He led from the start and was never seriously challenged. When Hailwood boomed down the mountain on the final lap, past my perch, just three miles from home – and history – the grass bank from Kate’s to the Creg was a washing line of flapping programmes. Grown men around me were in floods of tears, embracing each other. My eyes, too, prickled at the effortless splendour of the spectacle and the romance of his achievement as he roared by to the finish to win – from John Williams - by two clear minutes.
Within the hour, I was to learn from Redman years later, Jim and Mike walked into the bar of the Palace Hotel in Douglas where Jim bought Mike a drink with an apology and the reminder that “There’s no fool like an old fool.”
‘Still on a high, I sailed through History A-Level’
“Yes, he really did it,” I was able to tell them at school the next day, “and I was there.” This was the first occasion I’d been an eyewitness to history. Still on that high, I sailed through History A-Level.
‘The best we could hope for is that he survived’