JACK SHEMANS
Meriden's unheralded hero
Jack Shemans was pivotal figure in the glory days of the Triumph Meriden factory's racing team - a backroom boy who shunned publicity and had one hell of a pedigree that stretched back to the early days of one of the greatest companies in British motorcycle history. I sat and talked to Jack abiut 5 years ago and don't know to this day why the story wasn't written up at the time. It's too good a tale not to be told...
Jack's father George joined Triumph in 1910 as Seigfried Betjeman's chauffeur and progressed to become a tester, riding for the company in the TT in 1913, 1914 and finally 1921, when he logged his best finish, 11th in the Senior race.
"I remember father telling me they had to open Keppel Gate and close it after them in the early days," said Jack. "In one race he crashed up on the Mountain, hit a telegraph pole and lay there for a quarter of an hour, got up and finished the race!" They were tough old boys racing over Snaefell in those days.
"He rode in the Continental Circus, travelling by train to the big European races in the 1920s and he won a gold medal in the 1920 International Six Days trial as a member of the factory team. Nine Triumphs started and nine won gold. He also did a 500 mile race at Brooklands and had a diploma signed by
AV Hepplewhite (long-term timekeeper at the track). He went on to the Triumph car factory and won the International Alpine Rally three times in a Southern Cross model with a Coventry Climax inlet-overhead and side-exhaust valve engine.
"When the Triumph company went bust, the car side was sold to Standard and the motorcycle business to Jack Sangster. Dad remained with them, at Dale Street in Coventry and when they moved to the new factory at Meriden after they were bombed out. He was in charge of silencer and component parts production."
Young Jack didn't go straight into the bike industry after he left Stoke School in the mid Thirties, but was one of the best three candidates for an apprenticeship at the Daimler factory, where he didn't finish the course as he moved on to the Armstrong aircraft factory and technical fabrication work. With the outbreak of war in 1939 he was drafted into the Army and the Combined Operations Bombardment Unit. "Went all over the world, directing fire to the enemy positions," was his modest summary of time spent as the unit's dispatch rider and fitter.
"When I was demobbed my old job didn't exist and I was looking for something when the local doctor asked me if I'd teach his daughter to drive. We were out one day, passing the Triumph factory at Meriden and I stopped the car and asked the chap in the gatehouse if they had any jobs for fully skilled fitters." He walked straight into an interview with Frank Bruce, who told him the company had just started on the development of a new project called the Spring Wheel; he was hired. "Then I went back out to the car to carry on the lesson.
"The Sprung Hub was Edward Turner's design, he copied it from railway bogies, but made the sliders curved, to keep chain tension constant. When it came out, everyone thought it was marvellous. I moved on to the engine benches when the swinging arm frame came in, where we worked on selective assembly.
You didn't just put things together, you had to do selective assembly, checking them on jigs. That's why Triumphs were so quiet, they used to boast that when you turned one over, all you could hear was the oil pump working."
''.Atone time 80 percent of output went to Australia, then all of a sudden the Aussies put an embargo
on British bikes. Edward Turner had a tannoy put in and addressed all the workers, telling us the wind of change was here and we must find new markets. We were working a three-day week temporarily while Turner was opening up the American market. He had Rita Hayworth (big in every way Hollywood star) there to pose on a bike, but he also opened East and West Coast distributors. Everybody lived in dread of him, he was a hard man but very fair.
"In 1964 I moved up to the experimental department, where we all had to wear ties - it was the Holy of Holies. I remember the Tina scooter was breaking frames and Turner called me in with a micrometer to check the gauge of the frame tube. He said "That's the problem - under gauge!" had it altered and the problem was cured.
"Turner said if we made a good product we didn't need to race - they'd sell themselves. Doug Hele came into the company a year after I'djoined the experimental and he had a ready-made team there. Percy Tait, myself on engines and Arthur Jakeman on cycle parts. We set about the Tiger 100, working through the back door, every weekend for two years. We worked on it for nothing, just for the love of racing. It was a very tuneable engine and we upped the power from about 33 to 52bhp, I actually saw 54 once on a very special motor. Doug's ambition was to get 100 horse power per litre.
"It was very flimsy, we broke everything in the early days. Cranks, cylinder barrel - three fins up, split straight in half - and crankcases at the rear mounting lug..Doug modified the crank with bigger radiuses to cure that problem.
"The Americans asked Doug to do an engine for them and I built it under his supervision. The Yanks were so thrilled with the way it went, they wanted a complete bike done next year. Doug went over with that, on his own."
The Tiger 100 was a centre of constant development. "The timing side plain bush main was inclined to nip up, so I built the case up with weld and remachined it to take a roller bearing, then peened the outside of the case to hide the weld. That came into production, a benefit of racing development."
It was a quick engine in serious competition, but occasionally had rather public problems: "In the 1965TT Percy was just into second place when the flywheel bolt broke and he was out!"
Hele had a way of standing his ground, as Shemans saw more than once. "AtDaytona in 1971,the British prepared triples had the front brake calipers behind the folk legs, but the American prepared bikes had them in front. We were asked to change them because they weren't homologated, but Doug won the day after a lot of talking. Dick Mann won that race on a so-called BSA,but it was built at Triumph. They disqualified him because his fuel tank was too big, so someone leaned against the bike and when they measured it again, it was alright!"
Jack's work on the 500cc twin saw him travelling to events as part of a very modest team, including the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix at the magnificent
"The sprung hub was Edward Turner'sdesign, he copied it from railway bogies, but made the sliders curved, to keep chain tension constant. When it came out, everyone thought it was marvellous"
Spa-Francorchamps circuit. "We were allocated the same pit area as Ago because we were considered a works team ... They hadn't heard of Percy Tait and the Italians didn't want to let us in. Arthur Jakeman was a tough lad in those days and we had to force our way in."
So how big was this unknown British works team? "The works Transit, Percy Tait, Arthur and me." Spares for the Grand Prix campaign? "Aspare wheel, one maybe. We certainly didn't have a spare engine. And we slept in the van, too - called it the Meriden Hilton."There was one occasion when the intrepid trio got thoroughly lost in a foggy journey to another European race and they ended up sleeping in the van on the central reservation of an unidentified dual carriageway!
The 1967 Belgian is part of Triumph racing lore today. "Atthe end of the first lap, Percy was in the lead and at the end of the second lap he was still ahead; the MVmechanics were going spare."
According to Percy Tait, Ago was trying to give Angelo Bergamonti on the Linto a tow, but realised the Triumph was disappearing up the road and got a move on to take the lead and score the win the world expected. "Percy averaged 116mph for the race and was a good second to Agostini. Afterwards we got a lot of respect from the MV mechanics," Jack remembered. For a development of a pushrod production engine, it was an heroic result.
Not that the work was very lucrative: "We were not paid extra for working weekends until 1969.Then we'd get a bonus for the extra work, not on our hourly rate, just an extra sum." Nor were working conditions always what you might expect factory engineers to enjoy: "We did two 500s for Paul Smart and Ray Pickrell in the Manx Grand Prix, with Percy there in an advisory capacity. The workshop was a scrubby little garage and the bench was a plank on two upturned chimney pots. One day Raybroke down and hid the bike behind a hedge so it wouldn't attract attention, and it took a long time for the blokes to find him. Pick was pretty cold by the time they arrived and needed a pee. Percy said to do it at the side of the van, then got into the van and drove away."That was typical ofTait the joker.
Jack had a great respect for Ray Pickrell: "He was brilliant, the hardest rider. Ifhe got threaded up, which the 500 would do, he wouldn't let it off. And such a quiet, unassuming bloke. The first time he went down Bray Hill flat out, we'd been in the Casino until 4am the night before, but once he'd done it he was okay."
Another man he admired a great deal was
Malcolm Uphill, who would reward the work of the experimental department with historic Production TT victories in 1969 and 70. "Malcolm was the most stylish. He knew the TT course better than anybody and the exact gearing he wanted for the conditions. He'd stand up, wet his finger and feel the wind. If he reckoned it was against him somewhere on the course, he wanted the gearing down half a tooth.
"Everything we learned on the 500s was passed on to the triples; cam timing, port sizes, pipe lengths and carbs, all ready to convert the triple into a racer."
That knowledge was well applied when the factory tackled the Bol d'Or for the first time, with Paul Smart and Tom Dickie sharing a triple with Shemans and Jakeman once more in attendance. "I think it was
Paul who dropped it in practice and we set to and sorted it out, but there was no time left for proper practice. Come the race and they were doing really well, in the lead. You had to keep on top of the lap scorers, or they'd nick you a lap, so you had to do your own lap scoring." He knew how popular the British invasion was in the pre-race presentation, when there would be a rocket fired and the national flag of the target team floated down; the crowd booed the Union Jack. They never quite got over meeting the Duke of Wellington and his lads, did they?
"Arthur and me were on the go for 24 hours on top of getting the bike sorted out. I've never been so knackered in my life!"The Trident took the chequered flag, defeating a Japauto Honda to do so. "Paul and Tom confessed to Arthur and me that they hadn't planned to race for 24 hours, but they were so impressed by the way Arthur and me had worked to get it mended that they just rode it and actually won."
One of Jack's developments brought a new word into the Triumph technical lexicon. He developed a trio of Amal's Concentric carburettors with a special gas flowed inlet trumpet to replace the more difficult to tune GPs."They gave about half a horsepower less, but the bike was more tractable."The works tuned engines gave between 82 and 85bhp and the minor power loss was acceptable with the easier ride; eventually every team bike was modified. In a tribute to Shemans's work, Doug Hele referred to the new units as 'Shemozzles'.
Lifewasn't always smooth with the triples. Likethe 1971Trans Atlantic Challenge and the first round at a chilly Brands Hatch: "For some reason we'd decided to run on R40.We'd always been on Duckhams 20/50, but someone had decided we'd change. But it was too cold for the oil to circulate and Pick's big ends went. We took the bike down to Paul Smart's boatyard in Maidstone, Norman Hyde brought a new crank down from the works and me and Arthur rebuilt the engine in four hours - on 20/50. Ray won both races and I remember standing in the middle of Brands Hatch, and Doug Hele saying "Who is this Pickrell?
"We did tests on the viscosity of the oil and at the temperature it was that day. R40just wouldn't go through the oil ways, so we enlarged them. That was introduced to the production T160s, another spin-off from racing."
It was around this period, with Paul Smart in the team, that they hit a problem with one of the triples at Daytona. Paul's bike refused to start and after an urgent search and analysis session it emerged that the handlebar-mounted ignition switch that Lucas had made especially for the bike was just shorting out. Nil sparks, nil performance.Jack threw away the faulty switch and used whatever was around to fabricate a working version, taping the broken end of a hacksaw blade that just had to be pressed to earth to kill the engine. Paul finished the race, but Jack couldn't remember just where, and the works fitted something more serious when they got back home. But Paul Smart kept that hacksaw blade fragment as a souvenir and when the bike was rebuilt by Jack
in Norman Hyde's workshop many years later, that hacksaw switch was taped back in place.
It wasn't all racing in the experimental department and Jack built a variety of units in the constant search to improve the product. "Like a 180 degree crank triple - very smooth but it had a funny exhaust note. And I built a T140 with a dummy cast iron horizontal piston on a balancer shaft. It smoothed the engine a hell of a lot and the idea was that it would eventually be the oil pump."Where that went he couldn't remember, only that it was fitted into a Norton frame. He also put together a T140 unit with a 180 degree crank: "Not very successful vibration wise ... "
"Out of the 180 degree triple came the four cylinder engine that I built. Four sections all spigotted together and held with countersunk Allen screws. There were never any drawings made - it was a secret between Doug Hele, Alan Barnett the foreman and me. There was a hell of a lot of Devcon plastic metal used and if it can still be run, it's a tribute to that plastic!"
This was the unit that Doug Hele unveiled to NVT chairman Dennis Poore, who had long complained that the company was losing ground to the Japanese makers because it did not have a four cylinder model to compete; his was the decision to pursue the rotary engine that went on to power Nortons for both road and record-breaking racers.
The closure of the Meriden works saw the experimental work moved into Kitts Green in east
"In one race he crashed up on the Mountain, hit a telegraph pole and lay there for a quarter-of-an-hour, got up and finished the race!" They were tough old boys racing over Snaefell in those days."
Birmingham. "There was nothing there when we moved in," recalled Jack. "We started off cleaning the floor and painting the walls, then getting benches in." From that humble beginning came the development oftheT160.
But he had a lot of happy memories of the humorous side oflife with the company. "LesWilliams was one of the greatest pranksters," he explained.
"He put a plastic bag of ice inside one of the tester's helmet and when it got a bit warm it all melted down his face."That was as the man was moving on a bit, down the A45 dual carriageway to work, and the poor chap thought he was haemorrhaging.
"Or wiring the door handles up through high voltage coils. Someone would open the door and get about 12,000volts through his hand!"
No man could pull such tricks and not get a response from a bunch of original thinkers. "Les used to come to work on a Tina scooter and was complaining about it getting slower and slower. We'd stuck a cork up the silencer with a one eighth hole drilled through it, so it wouldn't blow out but would slowly coke up.
"Les had built a four-wheeled Tina (In the Meriden heyday) and Edward Turner drove it up the road. He was impressed, but there was no separate taxation class for it, so it was dropped."
When Triumph at Meriden was closed and the famous sit-in began, Jack moved on to work at
Norman Hyde's, where Doug Hele spoke of his team and described Jack as "The best technical fitter I ever saw."We have to bear in mind that he worked on new engines at a time when prototypes were built from components produced to the design drawings, which meant a skilled man like Jack_Shemans making sure everything fitted as it should and modifying by hand if that was necessary. Computer aided design left that work behind, but in es1rlierdays a fitter of Jack's standing would fettle the collection of parts presented to him until he had a unit ready to be fired up and begin the process of maturing into a working and reliable bike.
He ended his days building engines for private customers, both for road and racing use. Always the quiet one, never given to shouting, he earned respect from all who worked with him in the best way possible - by doing the job really well. Ci!iill