Les Williams
Les was a stalwart of Triumph and managed Slippery Sam – but did you know he also had a habit of stealing people’s food? We look back at the man
We lost Les Williams last year – one of the characters who made Triumph at Meriden so successful. But this is not an obituary – lots of good scribes have done that already – as he had a sense of fun that hasn’t all been told in detail.
You may have read about some of these tricks, but I hope when you read this it makes you smile and remember a man who was seldom in the limelight, but still a big influence.
He was called up to do his National Service in 1952, but opted to sign on for three years as a regular soldier. As
Williams was Triumph through and through, a race engineer and team manager for ‘Slippery Sam’. But, as Jim Reynolds explains, Les had a hunger for practical jokes and for other people’s food…
an apprenticed motor mechanic and a keen rider, he got a place with the
Royal Corps of Signals and then made it into the famous White Helmets display team, in which he was both rider and mechanic. The team used to tour the country every year, performing at county fairs and gymkhanas before ending the year with two weeks starring in the Royal Tournament at Earls Court, where the big finale was the fire jump through a blazing hoop of straw. This was traditionally the event where the officer in charge of the team would step up and do the jump and, according to Les, this was because there was a lot of ‘posh totty’ from Mayfair and the like, who would be impressed by such heroics.
Corporal Williams had a plan and when the team set up the ramp and fire hoop each evening, he saw they moved the jump a foot further on than the previous evening. Over the two weeks of the show the officer on his Triumph TRW was getting marginally quicker each night and the braking distance was getting shorter. Sure enough, on the final night, the flying officer couldn’t stop the bike in time and he put it in the fence. You can only hope that the poor soldier found a sympathetic young lady to bathe his wounds or whatever else was needed.
Out of the army and established at Meriden, Les had a reputation in the service department for nicking other mechanics’ grub if they didn’t guard it carefully. One day he saw a cream bun carelessly left on a bench and promptly grabbed and scoffed it, only to find that it had a wheel spindle nut buried in the cream that broke his tooth. He blamed Hughie Hancox for the trick and Hughie always denied it, but he suffered Les’s revenge. He went to his locker for his gear to ride home on his Tiger100, put on his smart black helmet with goggles in place and handy to pull down once he was up to speed – a traditional way of avoiding them misting up if you had to wait in traffic – and set off down the A45 towards home. Into top gear, he took his hands off the bars to move the goggles firmly into their proper place, only to find he was blind – Les had sprayed the lenses with black paint and Hughie and the Tiger went bouncing down the road. Another repair job for the lads in the Service Department!
Bob Haynes always enjoyed his packed lunch, normally with a healthy fruit portion packed in there somewhere. Les got hold of a hypodermic needle, loaded with heaven alone knows what to inject into Bob’s lunchtime treat and turn the fruit from orange to green. When Bob peeled it and immediately rejected the weird-looking segments he found, Les stepped forward and ate the lot.
One of the development testers, Bert Whatmore, had a reputation for always arriving just in time after a rapid dash up the dual carriageway from his Birmingham home. Les decided to add an extra hazard to his hurried journey to work and put a partly filled plastic bag of water inside his helmet webbing, where it was thin enough not to make a difference to the fit. Next morning , as Bert was hurrying up the A45 at a fair old rate of knots, he felt liquid running down his neck and had a panicky moment when he thought he was having a haemorrhage. He made it to work, albeit maybe a wee bit late.
When the BSA Group decided to close the Triumph works at Meriden, the experimental and development work was moved to Kitts Green, just down the road in east Birmingham, away from the upset and grief that would lead to the historic sit-in and the formation of the Meriden Co-operative. Les was the foreman in charge of day-to-day work, with his sense of mischief much in evidence. Like wiring up the door handles to give anyone opening the door to the department an electric shock – nothing too severe, just enough make them jump. And when the Trident was fitted with an electric start, one example sat on a bench with cables apparently connected to a remote recorder. Not so. When important guests were shown around, it was not unknown for the Trident to fire up when Les pressed the button of his very own remote control. Can you imagine what the official reaction to that would be today? An immediate demand to know if the risk assessment report was available.
As an aside, the habit spread with
the development of better remote control switching. One guy used to park his
Suzuki GSX-R up at the Borders Classic Bike Show in Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire. He’d sit with his cup of tea, watching the curious crowds looking at the line of visitors’ bikes gleaming in the sunshine. Once in a while, the man would pull out his remote control, point it at the Suzy and fire it up, with nobody touching it. I did tell him that if we had a heart attack emergency that we’d ban him, but that never happened.
Tommy Weir was one of the Kitts
Green team and was walking down the workshop one morning with his cup of tea in one hand and a slice of buttered toast in the other. Les stepped forward, took a bite out of the toast, then put it back on Tommy’s plate. And when an amazingly tall man walked past the workshop windows, visible only through the clear glass along the top of the windows, fitters looked up and wondered who could this be, this man at least nine feet tall? It was Les, sitting on a mate’s shoulders, wearing a long coat with the rim of a trilby hat pulled down to hide his face.
The team weren’t as soft as they might sound after all that nonsense. There was a trial planned with oil coolers for the Trident and a batch of five experimental units was ordered. The parcel was waylaid by Norman Hyde and Les and repacked in a much bigger box, with some cranks in the bottom to get the weight up a bit. They then faked a delivery note from the makers for 50 units and delivered the package to a shocked Doug Hele’s office.
When Triumph at Meriden closed its doors, Les bought ‘Slippery Sam’, the Trident named after a leaky incident at the Bol d’Or 24-hour race in France. ‘Sam’ was more than a good bike, winning the 750cc Production TT five times in a row as both a factory entry and later a private entry by L P Williams. It was retired only after the ACU introduced a rule that bikes in that race had to be no more than five years old, but before then Les had a practice outing on his bike, wearing official rider Mick Grant’s helmet and lapping at about 96mph. That’s not quick by today’s standards, but on a 1973 Trident, by a non-racer, it was a very impressive outing. Not that Les would shout or boast about it – that wasn’t his way.
He spent his last years back in his native Wales, near Brecon, and when the memories of ‘Bill The Mill’ under whom Les had first worked in the motor trade at Central Garage in that town came to light, he took on the task of sorting out a mixture of hand-written and typed notes to tell the life story of a man he remembered with affection and respect. ‘Bill The Mill’ is the title and a fascinating insight into rural life and work it is, complemented by Les’s own story of joining Central Garage and some of the adventures he survived before leaving to spend three years in uniform. I wonder if the starting handle from the wrecked Albion lorry he helped recover is still impaled in that roadside tree?
It’s 150 pages of memories and rural history, the cover showing Priory Mill in Brecon, where Bill lived as a lad, hence ‘Bill The Mill’.
It was produced in a small batch by
First Spanner Publishing, a title dreamed up by Les and his designer friend Neil Morris and there’s a follow-up due out soon under the title ‘The Triumphant Tale of an Old Motor Mechanic.”
We’ll let you know about that one when we’ve read it.
Leslie Powell Williams – a remarkable man who was a privilege to know.