CYRIL SMITH REMEMBERED, AGAIN!

Dear CR

I’ve just received the latest issue of CR and nice to see a sidecar article on the late great Cyril Smith. However, there were a few minor discrepancies. Whilst Cyril and Eric Bliss did set the fastest lap at the Dutch TT at Assen in 1957 before retiring with a badly burnt out clutch, it wasn’t a lap record. Pip Harris and Ray Campbell set a new benchmark in 1956 of 3m 50.1s, whereas Cyril and Eric’s lap in 1957 was 3m 51.2s.

Eric Bliss started riding with Cyril at the start of the 1957 season so the photos on pages 24/25 taken at the TT alongside their Norton Watsonian #22 are from the same year and not 1956 as captioned. Unfortunately, I don’t know who the little girl is that is perched over the rear wheel of the outfit. Sadly, Eric passed away earlier this year on August 22.

As is mentioned in the article, Cyril’s unequal struggle of pitching the Norton against the more powerful BMWS ended at the TT in 1959, after another engine failure due to a broken inlet valve. He sold the outfit to pay off the mounting debt. Eric recalled that they travelled back to Liverpool on the ferry and then to Birmingham where Cyril was based. Eric got on a train to Watford to return home and that was the last time that they saw each other: a sad end to a great partnership.

Gary James

The Editor says: “As we’ve mentioned before, we do wholeheartedly apologise for any issues. On the issue of words, well, I have to trust our contributors. To deeply research every fact and point would see me not able to put the magazine together every month. On pictures, we have information embedded in each picture we take from our archive. To check every single picture would also be difficult as we have a staff of – well, just me! I often have to rely on the original archivist from way back in the day. I’m in my early 50s so often with the older features I have to rely on the original information. All I can say is that we rely on the good nature of our readers who – hopefully – realise that editor and contributors do their very best, but often have memories that fail them! I will say this again: to err is human, to forgive is divine. We hope that all our readers forgive the odd discrepancy.”