Ted Mellors
Talented racer and pilot, Ted ended up on a Nazi hit-list and died in mysterious circumstances just after the Second World War.
The almost secret story of the legendary Ted Mellors looked at in this ‘whatever happened to’.
Afew years after Ted Mellors’ untimely death in 1946, the noted author, historian and rider Geoff Davison received a telephone call from Gladys Mellors, Ted’s widow. She had discovered a manuscript typed by her late husband recalling his racing experiences. She didn’t know when it had been written, but they assumed it to have been 1934 or 1935 as the text ended with the 1933 season. Geoff Davison helped get Ted’s story published in 1949 in a book entitled ‘Continental Circus’, adding several chapters of his own to take the story to 1939.
As well asted’s personal recollections of the races, the book conjures up a motorcycle racing world so different from anything postwar, a time when journeys to European races were often undertaken by train, with riding gear, tools, spares and clothes strapped onto the bike, all loaded into the guard’s van. Problems with customs carnets and border guards were compounded by language differences, bribes were often necessary just to be allowed to proceed, and all this undertaken in the uncertain times of the Great Depression.
Ted Mellors was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, in 1907, and began motorcycling at the then legal age of 14. He entered the Amateur TT, the forerunner of the Manx Grand Prix, in 1927, finishing 10th on a P&M Panther, and the following year in the International TT he finished 6th on a Norton, despite a fall at Creg-ny-baa.
The 1929 TT brought him two retirements, but the unfortunate death of former twice European Champion Cecil Ashby in the Junior TT left a place in the New Imperial team who had entries for the following Grands Prix in Holland and Belgium, a vacancy Ted was invited to fill. It meant leaving what Ted himself called ‘a good position with the Chesterfield Corporation’, and there was precious little glamour associated with the works ride, as Ted says in ‘Continental Circus’: “So in the course of time, with these two machines, a box of tools and spares, a bundle of papers and a suitcase each, we were dumped at Birmingham, New Street Station, to make the best of our way to Holland.”
So began nine seasons of racing all over Europe, from Sweden to Spain, from Italy to Ulster, winning over 20 significant international races and Grands Prix. Ted rode New Imperials, Nortons and Benellis (with which he won the 1939 Lightweight TT), but it is with Velocette that his name will forever be associated, riding for the factory from 1936 to 1939, and in the process winning the 1938 European 350cc Championship (the world championships were not inaugurated until 1949). Those were the great days of Velocette/norton rivalry, with BMW, Gilera and DKW ever-growing in threat, and it was to the last-named marque, ridden by Heiner Fleischmann, that Ted and Velocette had to concede the 1939 350cc European Championship.
With the outbreak of war, Ted tried to enlist in the RAF and the Army, but surprisingly as he then held a private pilot’s licence, he was rejected by both. Instead he spent the war working in munitions and as a volunteer in the fire service, during which time he continued developing, and often patenting, his
engineering design concepts, one of which was a rotary-valve engine that was eventually built and tested. These developments and patented concepts are described more fully in Peter Mcmanus’ 2012 biography ‘Ted Mellors, Motorcycling’s Forgotten Champion’.
Any plans Ted might have had to return to racing were sadly ended on June 7, 1946, when he was overcome by carbon monoxide fumes whilst working on a car at his home in Hall Green, Birmingham. Edward Ambrose Mellors was buried in the Robin Hood cemetery in nearby Shirley.
And that could have been the end of this short profile, that is, except for a few paragraphs in Paul Guthrie’s painstakingly researched biography of his namesake Jimmie Guthrie. During his research Paul learned that Ted Mellors’ name, along with that of another well known British member of the Continental Circus, appeared on the Gestapo’s ‘most wanted list’.
Ted was a very intelligent, perceptive and patriotic man, quick to realise the international threat that the rise of Nazi Germany posed, and one can easily imagine that the keen observations of someone legitimately spending time in Germany could be of considerable interest to the British intelligence services. Paul Guthrie is in no doubt: “Although it is purely speculation as to his activities, there is factual evidence to show that Mellors was linked to British intelligence agents until the end of 1939.”
He continues: “However the lifelong secrecy imposed on anyone acting for British intelligence also provides an explanation why people employed by them were careful not to mention much about their activities during the 1930s. A case in point being Ted Mellors, whose writing about his Continental racing exploits stopped at 1933 and he died in mysterious circumstances in 1946.”
Unfortunately most of the archives which might shed some light on these activities remain classified to this day.