Pip Harris
PJIM REYNOLDS
eter ‘Pip’ Harris was a native of the West Midlands, brought up in a motorcycle family and encouraged by his dad, who raced an AJS to second in the 1923
350cc Junior TT, to try his hand at grasstrack racing.
Having ridden the old chap’s sidecar outfit quite a bit, it was natural that he’d stick to what he knew and in the late 1940s he picked up a Grindley combo, a little known make by Billy Grindley of Prees Heath in Shropshire.
With good mate Charlie Billingham keeping the sidecar wheel down, they had enough success in local events to look for something a bit quicker for the 1949 season, and found it in a 596cc Norton outfit that London dealer Jack Surtees – father of multi world champion John – was selling on. It had been one of the quickest outfits around the old Crystal Palace circuit in south London and at Donington Park, one of the rare long stroke 596cc overhead camshaft motors built just for sidecar racing. They had a reputation for vibrating like a road drill but going well enough to dominate the class in British racing.
One of the first meetings with the new outfit was at Cadwell Park, in those days a very narrow threequarters-of-a-mile circuit, where local man Jack Beeton normally dominated the sidecar class. “They said you couldn’t overtake with a sidecar through
MORTONS ARCHIVE
the Old Hall bends, but we showed them that you could,” smiled Pip at the memory. He and Charlie won the class at the June meeting and came back in September to repeat the success.
In that same season they won at Haddenham in Buckinghamshire, an old airfield where the course passed ranks of RAF Lancaster bombers, parked up with nothing to do. Third in that race was Jack Surtees on his new 998cc Vincent ‘Black Lightning’, not quite able to match the youngsters on his old Norton single. They were a dynamic pair, good enough to win the Cadwell championship in 1951, from Jack Beeton and future world champion Cyril Smith.
But the sidecar scene was changing, with the FIM limiting the world championship class to 500cc and the national bodies like the ACU naturally following suit. World champion Eric Oliver had moved on to adapt the Featherbed framed Manx to sidecar specification, but his outfit was blessed with a special engine out of Joe Craig’s race shop, where world title winning bikes were born. What Pip Harris wanted was one of the new bikes.
But the 500 Manx was in demand, its Featherbed frame a major step forward from the old lugged and heavier version, and the factory was fussy about who was going to have one. Managing director Gilbert Smith, with a limited number of bikes to allocate, told Pip he wasn’t going to get one – there were more