WONDER WOMEN The amazing story of the first all-female stunt team
From beating the White Helmets to jumping Tiswas, this is the story of the UK’s first all-female biking stunt team
In 1972, 17-year-old lab technician Mary Connors was idly flicking through a local newspaper when she spotted a small ad: Girls required to ride motorcycles, full training given. “I honestly thought it would be delivering pizzas,” Mary – now Weston-Webb – tells MCN. “But I was bored with working in the lab so decided to find out more. I went along to this strange place in Syston, five miles north of Leicester. The sign on the door said ‘Stunt School for Girls – Karate Chop to Enter!’” Pushing open the door, little did Mary realise that what she was about to do would change the course of her entire life and transform her from bored teenager into an international stunt rider as part of the Motobirds – Britain’s first all-female motorcycle stunt team.
The brainchild of Leicestershire showman, Joe Weston-Webb, Motobirds were born out of a desire to do something a bit different. “Joe had an existing stunt display team called the Destruction Squad, six lads and one girl, Teresa King, who did these amazing, daredevil feats for shows. But he was fed up with others copying his act, so one day he hit upon the idea having an all-girl team, because at the time it was something nobody else was doing,” says Mary.
Joe trained Teresa to do bike stunts, then advertised for others to join her. “He had a huge response to the adverts and in the end got me and a couple of others, and they trained us up too,” Mary adds.
With none of the girls having much if any bike experience, training started with the basics before rapidly progressing to more extreme manoeuvres. “It wasn’t how you’d normally learn to ride a bike,” admits Mary. “We were always either standing up or facing backwards or something like that. After learning
‘The sign said: ‘Stunt School for Girls – Karate Chop to Enter!’
the controls, we next learned how to wheelie. Yes, we flipped them a lot when we first started and took our fair share of knocks, but it made us very, very tough.”
Throughout the 1970s, the Motobirds expanded from a team of three, to six then a whole troupe, as they spent their summers touring the UK and getting up close with the stars of the time – in some cases, almost too close. “I did the big jumps,” says Mary. “We would either jump over the other girls or we’d get volunteers from the audience. But this one time, we were at an event with Chris Tarrant and the Tiswas team. I think they must’ve been fairly drunk because we convinced them to lie down for my jump. Only, as I was flat out on the bike making my final approach, Chris Tarrant stood up and I had to swerve around the ramp at the last minute to avoid hitting him! After that, we had to get a bit stricter on what we could jump over!”
Although motorcycling was male dominated at that time, Mary says the Motobirds were always well received, even when going head-to-head with the legendary Royal Signals display team, the White Helmets. “At first we were scared to death about what bikers would think about us, because we could only do what we could do and none of us had bike licences. We thought the proper motorcyclists would ridicule us – but in fact, they were some of our best audiences. “One time, we were at the same event as the Royal Signals display team and we were distraught that we were on the same billing as them.