HOW IT ALL BEGAN
As a Melbourne University music degree student in 1963, Peggy Hyde went looking for cheap transport. She soon found both a motorcycle and a husband. “I was told in a scooter shop in Elizabeth Street that girls rode scooters,” she remembers. “So I walked into a motorcycle shop but the salesman gave me the same statement so he missed out on a motorcycle sale.” Feeling confused, she headed up one of the side lanes that housed small repair businesses. “I walked into Keith ‘Dutchy’ Holland’s shop and asked what was safer, a scooter or a motorcycle,” she says. ‘I dunno, a motorcycle I suppose, was his answer.’ Eventually her search led her to the Horse Market Hotel in North Melbourne, a student hangout of the time. “I was pointed in the direction of Julian Hyde, who had a plaster on his foot – clearly someone with a pretty close experience of motorcycling – to help me buy a bike,” Peggy recalls. A 350cc Matchless single soon became part of her daily life, followed by marriage to Julian. The sturdy British plodder provided a means of travelling from Carlton to Kensington’s Holy Trinity Church where Peggy was choirmaster and organist. By now the student house she shared in Carlton had 13 motorcycles in various stages of functionality, from a Vincent to a 98cc James. Peggy graduated to a Norton Atlas after a major accident when a car turned in front of her. Why such a big bike? “Better performance and handling,” she says. She had been riding for six years when she took up racing. “We had joined the Hartwell Motorcycle Club as spectators,” she says. “I’d never been keen on club road runs because people rode on your back wheel but I realised that road racing was a very skilled art, with a lot of science in it and that particularly interested me.” The Norton was swapped for a new Suzuki T20. “I was interested in new technology and the twostroke T20 had a six-speed gearbox, was light and powerful for its size,” she says. “And it had a very narrow power band.” It never occurred to Peggy to be intimidated riding with men, so it seemed natural to try road racing. “I’d done quite a lot of off-road riding with my husband and friends in places such as quarries, like you could back then,” she remembers. “Being unable to reach the ground, I learned to ride without footing.” The couple’s first meeting was a Hartwell Club event at Winton in late 1967.