Tassie topics

With the help of Mick Damon, I have been working on a 160 page book I have titled “100 Clicks”; the first 100 years of the Tasmanian Motor Cycle Club. I had been thinking it would never be published but now with Mick helping we have put together a small team and it looks like the deadline we have set of “out for Christmas” is well in reach. It was written quite a while ago and now I have the recommended corrections and edits done by Marg Oliver (fellow RD350 racer Tony’s wife) in hand and am now in the process of putting them into the book. Most top riders like “Barny” Horsman were regulars at National meetings at Symmons Plains. The photo of Alan Osborne, Kenny Blake, Bill Horsman and Peter Jones is from the Launceston Examiner collection I scored when I was writing a column in the paper in the late 1970s. They were throwing out old photos and offered to give me the bike ones. I know you have covered the subject but did you

know that John Surtees came to Longford in 1962 to race his car? He upset some senior car people by attending the official (penguin suit) car dinner on the Saturday night. But only for a short time then disappearing and turning up at the low key bike gathering attended by real people he knew like Tom Phillis, the Hintons and Jack Ahearn who he had met in Europe. Sadly Phillis did Longford, Symmons Plains the next weekend and headed to Adelaide and then on to Europe and the Isle of Man. Sam Hughes sometimes tells me about the excitement of the young bucks like him who got to meet Surtees that night.