Hated Hailwood!
‘What a lot of people don’t remember, is that Mike Hailwood was hated at that time because he was so rich’ – Don Morley
Mike ‘The Bike’ Hailwood became one of the most loved motorcycle racers of all time – but it wasn’t always so. With massive financial backing from dad Stan, and his talent, many in those first paddocks he went into didn’t think much of the soon-to-be greatest rider ever…
Such is the love for Mike Hailwood now, almost 40 years after his untimely death, it’s easy to forget things weren’t always that way. Hailwood had to earn that love the hard way, by his skills on a motorcycle and by the humility of his character because, for the first few years of his career, he was hated in UK race paddocks.
Don Morley remembers the anti-hailwood feeling well and saw, at first hand, how it came about. Morley is one of the most respected photographers in the world: he was friends with Muhammad Ali (and took some of the most iconic pictures of him), he photographed The Beatles on their first UK tour, was caught up in the murderous Munich Olympics in 1972, has been shot at in war zones, was head-hunted by Margaret Thatcher and witnessed the shooting of US president Ronald Reagan. He was also great friends with Mike Hailwood and was tasked to take some pictures of him in his first ever race at Oulton Park on April 22, 1957.
“I was working for Motor Cycle News and an old chap came up to me and said ‘My lad’s riding today. It’s his first race – are you the Motor Cycle News guy?’ When I told him I was he said: ‘Any chance of you taking a picture of my boy?’ I asked what number he was riding under and then, when the 125cc race got underway, I made sure I took some photographs of him. His name was Mike Hailwood and it turned out that the old chap was Stan Hailwood, Mike’s father, and the managing director of King’s of Oxford which was the biggest motorcycle dealer in the country at that time. So I sent Stan a picture of his son racing and about a week later I received a letter from him containing £5. I was earning about £10 a week back then so it was a lot of money to me.”
It certainly wasn’t a lot of money to Stan Hailwood who had become a multi-millionaire thanks to his chain of bike dealerships that covered almost every major town and city in the country. It was Stan Hailwood’s immense fortune that was the cause of all the resentment against Mike.
Don adds: “I got to know Mike from his very earliest days but what a lot of people don’t remember is that he was hated at that time because he was so rich. Whenever Mike got beaten by someone like Bob Mcintyre, Stan Hailwood would go straight over to him and offer stupid sums of money to buy his bike. He would never take on board that Mike had just got beaten fair and square – he just believed that the other rider’s bike had to be better than whatever Mike was riding so he tried to buy it.”
Mike Hailwood turned up for his first ever race meeting being chauffeur-driven in his father’s white Bentley Continental while everyone else rocked up in beaten-up vans or ratty old cars with trailers. Of course, he also had the most competitive bike for the 125cc class he was racing in – a singlecylinder four-stroke MV Agusta – and, soon afterwards, a full-time mechanic to look after it: a far cry from the experiences of most racing debutantes.
“This carried on for two or three years – Mike Hailwood was the most unpopular person in the paddock,” Morley says. “Keep in mind that he was only 17 when this started so he was very young. A lot of people gave him no credit at all for his riding – they said he was just buying his success, which was pretty stupid because he still had to be able to ride the bike. It was nothing but jealousy but it wasn’t helped by Mike turning up in the paddock in an E-type Jaguar or a Bentley and having teams of mechanics working for him. It took a very long time for Mike to be accepted and he was pretty insecure about that.”
Adding to Mike’s problems in the paddock was his apparent aloofness which was, in fact, just intense shyness.
“There were quite a few stories, especially in the early days, that he was above himself and wouldn’t sign autographs,” Morley says. “That was a great shame because the truth was that he just didn’t know how to handle being famous – he was too humble and modest. And he was like that throughout his career. Three weeks before he died he came with me to Daytona. Ted Macauley (Hailwood’s great friend who organised his 1978 Tt-winning comeback) was there as well but he mostly stayed by the pool while me and Mike would go and watch the practice sessions. A little lad came up and asked for his autograph and Mike went red as a beetroot. He couldn’t understand why this kid wanted his autograph when the likes of Kenny Roberts and Freddie Spencer were standing nearby. He really didn’t know how to play the fame game – he was far too nice a guy. The attention he got was always a bit of a problem for him.”
Stan Hailwood even involved himself in his son’s friendships, trying to nurture them whenever he felt it would be to Mike’s advantage. Ted Macauley first met Mike when he was covering the TT for the Daily Mirror in 1961. The pair hit it off straight away and became lifelong friends – with or without the assistance of Stan.
“When i got back from the isle of man,
Stanley Hailwood wrote me a letter from his house in Nassau saying he noticed how well Mike and I got on and he pointed out that this was very rare for Mike as he was quite a reserved man,” Macauley recalls. “So Stan encouraged me to keep up my friendship with Mike but I suspect his real motives were business because any story we ran on Mike was seen by five million people! Stan understood publicity, which is why he was a double millionaire by 1946 (equivalent to £71 million now). Can you imagine that? But it was remarkable how well me and Mike got on right from the start.”
Journalist Mick Woollett also found himself being manipulated by Stan Hailwood who asked him to make sure he gave his son ‘a good write-up’ at one of those early race meetings. In his biography of Hailwood he wrote “It would have been easy to dislike the whole Hailwood set-up, and Mike in particular. But he was so completely different to his father, so modest and unassuming,
that you could not help but like him.”
Desperate to be accepted in the racing paddock on his own terms, Hailwood eventually broke free of his father’s domineering presence and decided to stand on his own two feet.
Don Morley says: “It took a lot of courage for him to eventually break away from his father and say ‘Dad, I don’t want you to come to the races anymore, I don’t want your money, I want to do my own thing.’ Mike wanted friends in the paddock and he wasn’t getting them. He was an absolutely lovely guy but he was very, very insecure.”
Get them he would though. Despite all the early hostility towards him and his father, Mike’s supreme skills on a motorcycle couldn’t be denied forever and, while he would always have the very best of machinery, he earned factory rides with the likes of MV Agusta and Honda on his own merit and not because Stan bought those seats for him. Once people got over their initial jealousy and realised that Mike was shy and reserved rather than aloof, he was eventually accepted and would ultimately become one of the most popular racers of all time.
Ted Macauley, like Don Morley, testifies to the complete lack of arrogance or aloofness in Hailwood, even in his later years when he was incredibly famous. “There was no level of arrogance or conceit or self-importance about Mike at all,” he says. “It was a remarkably humbling experience to be with someone like that. If Mike could have avoided all the attention that he got then he would have, for sure. It was as if everybody knew that, if they could trap him in a corner, then Mike was well-mannered enough to give them time. He would never, ever push past someone or push someone out of the way. And he was never rude enough to say: ‘I haven’t got time.’”
Once he became accepted in the paddock, Hailwood made the most of it by partying his way around the Grand Prix circuit or even just standing in paddock bars for endless hours chatting happily with anyone who cared to join him. Shy as he was, Hailwood was a social animal and missed the camaraderie of the paddock when he retired after the 1967 season. Morley says: “Before his famous TT comeback in 1978 Mike was living in New Zealand and I went out to visit him there. He was bored and wanted to come back to Europe to party. I mean, he wasn’t a massive drinker or anything like that, but he did like to go into the paddock bar and he’d stand there all day chatting to everybody and anybody.
“In the last year of his life he came with me to a few foreign Grands Prix races and just spent the whole time in the paddock bar. He didn’t get drunk – he just enjoyed that sort of company.”
Hailwood’s legendary Tt-winning
comeback after 11 years in retirement was as much a shock to the man himself as it was to race fans the world over, according to Morley.
“He went car racing for John Surtees after retiring from bike racing but he wasn’t as good at that. Surtees thought Mike could achieve what he himself had done but I don’t think Mike was ever going to be a world champion in car racing. He missed bikes enormously after retiring.
“People tend to forget that his actual comeback wasn’t at the TT in 1978 but in the Swan Series and the Castrol Six Hour race in Australia in 1977. Then he got the deal to come back to do the TT – a deal organised by Ted Macauley – and I met up with Mike when he got over to the Island. It was obvious that he’d been completely unaware that the whole world had taken up on this Hailwood TT comeback whereas he had no thoughts of winning at all – and no thoughts of even doing well. He honestly thought he could just have a wobble round, see old friends, and have a massive party for a fortnight! Once he realised the pressure he was under it weighed really heavily on him.
“I stood with him at Braddan Bridge looking at the lines being taken by just ordinary road riders and I’ve rarely known anyone so bloody worried. By then he realised that the world expected great things from him and yet he didn’t want or, even expect, great things from himself.”
The rest is history: Hailwood cemented his legend for all time by winning the TT Formula 1 race on a Ducati in what has often been described as one of the greatest comebacks in sporting history. He won again in 1979 before retiring for a second and final time. He was tragically killed just two years later when his car was struck by a truck performing an illegal U-turn. His children Michelle and David were in the car, Michelle was killed instantly, Mike passed away two days later and David survived.
Through his skill, courage and humble character, Mike Hailwood had defied prejudice and jealousy and won the hearts and minds not only of those in the paddock but of racing fans worldwide long before his victorious TT comeback. And perhaps that was his greatest victory of all.