✪ Readers' Tales
interested in our bikes. Pete had a BSA C15, then progressed to a Dommie 99, both in his favoured caff racer style with clip-ons, rear-sets and swept back exhaust.
That afternoon I managed to break the inlet manifold of the Norman, after stupidly forgetting the sequence of reassembling the top of the engine. Again it was Roger who came to the rescue, getting someone he knew to braze it back together. He went on to own the gear cutting firm he worked at and successfully race and now runs his racing team – Team Winfield.
A few years later Pete was sadly in the news when he was murdered while caravanning in Turkey.
I lost touch with Roger when I went to college in London, and then to university (Nottingham) and then worked in various locations from Scotland to France. While I was at college in London I had the Norman and used it to commute on from my digs to the college. One evening the doorbell rang and a lorry driver asked whose bike was parked outside – he’d just reversed over it with his lorry!
The insurance money enabled me to get a Matchless G12CSR – but that’s another story! years, it only being in patches that I remember and yet those are so clear to me they might as well have been only yesterday.
I remember that winding dusty trail on a shimmering day, with pale shades of orange and the loose stones, both small and large, and all around in this wonderful clough
(note, a ‘clough’ is local Northern dialect for a narrow valley). The Bantam was trundling along, and the signpost soon well behind us. I remember the tyres skipping and sliding this way and that, a new experience this holding onto handlebars not knowing which way they were going to go, and the track slowly becoming a trail without so much as telling anyone. And those easy worn steps so far apart and put there for the rain to save the loose from washing away from the trail. I spent a while walking alongside the Bantam – one wheel up, then the next, without a soul in sight. Ahead was a winding orange strip against earth-coloured greens, in and out, up and down like a road to Mandalay. The sign had said Glossop, but I was beginning to wonder.
The views to the left went for miles but I remember nothing of them, just the close sloping away of the tussocks and the hills to my right rising to their crests, the Bantam skipping along over the loose surfaces, before walking again when they become larger.
I knew nothing of time, just the moving of the sun and the odd bird or two dipping into the heather then back out again, my thoughts merely wondering where we were. Ahead were boulders as big as buses, not loose since the Ice Age, where the trail splits to the high side and low side and some through the middle. I don’t remember any problems getting round them.
The 40 years nigh came to an end when I joined the local hiking club, and that’s how I can fill in some of the gaps above... but of course it wasn’t long before I mentioned this bike trip bit to the members of the club and yes, it brought me questions I could not answer! “You were on the Pennine Way, and
My interest in bikes began in 1964 when my school friend Marshall introduced me to his cousin Andy Cale – his family were into cars, but Andy liked bikes. He built what I think was a 1930s 350 Triumph with twin exhaust ports, but no pipes.
We rode this around a small 'track' in his family’s orchard – about 50 yards, trying to see who could do the most laps without stalling or falling off.
While still at school I bought a 1953, 197cc Francis Barnett Falcon (I still have the log book). The kickstart did not work so I learnt bump starting. It also had an 18mm lawnmower spark plug which would overheat frequently.
On the day I left school in 1965 a car pulled out on me at a crossroads in town – the bike buried itself in the front wheel arch and I took off over the bonnet, landing on my back in the road. Passers-by helped me to a shop doorway and within what seemed like seconds an elderly lady appeared with a cup of tea!
My parents and elder brother hated motorbikes, but I had an ally in an uncle who had courted my mother’s sister on a 500 BSA.
Having left school I started work in a local bank which involved evening classes at Hereford Technical college, approximately 15 miles away. As there were no late buses I needed transport so managed to persuade my parents to let me buy a bike. This was a 1963 Tiger Cub.
I soon realised that banking was not for me and got a job with the Post Office as an apprentice telephone engineer, based in Hereford. The Cub had regular use, and frequent breakdowns – usually cured by my helpful uncle, until I learned to repair it myself. However, cold winters soon persuaded me to buy a car, so biking stopped until 1974.
I re-kindled my interest by going to the Isle of Man TT races on the back of Andy’s Vincent Black Shadow. In 1975 I brought a 650 BSA which I used to get to the TT races with Andy – he on his newly built Egli Vincent. The clutch on the Egli failed so it was left on the Island and we came home on the BSA until it also expired at Worcester. We then had to hitch the remaining 15 miles home.
We borrowed a van to retrieve the BSA, the Egli came home on a lorry – someone Andy knew in a firm that his business dealt with travelled regularly to and from the Island.
Towards the end of the season Andy and I went to watch a club race meeting at Moreton Valence. In the 250 race there were two guys in 'pink' jackets circulating at the back of the field. I uttered those fateful words: “I could go quicker than them,” to which Andy replied: “Put your money where your mouth is then!”
During the winter of 1975/76 I bought a TD1 Yamaha – an evil beast with a narrow, but savage power band; but I managed enough races that year to dispense with my 'pink' jacket.
1976 was a year that changed my life. Not only from the racing point of view, but mainly because I met my wife to be, Marian. She became my best friend, chief mechanic, pusher, organiser and all round helper.
For the 1977 season I bought a TD2 Yamaha special which I rode for two years until another friend, Andy Davis, bought a 250 Ducati to start racing. As it was near the end of the season he asked me to try it out at the last meeting at Colerne. I lapped two seconds a lap faster than I had managed on my Yamaha, so my two-stroke era ended.
As classic racing was
the Kinder Plateau!” … parts of a long walk I now knew, usually taking hikers some 20-odd days… but at last I now knew where I had been after following that sign all those years ago; clockwise round Kinder Edge, riding off it more than on it, yet so deeply buried in my mind is that day that even when walking with the club many years on it still remains only in patches and frustratingly so.
That fingerpost sign is long gone but knowing where it was enlightened me. I must have known I was in Edale, but the sign had said Glossop. Of course I was just 17 and knew nothing of Ordnance Survey maps and hiking trails marked on them.
How many hours behind us as we rounded onto the northern edge is lost, but what I do remember is the sun, it moving away and out of sight as we rounded into deep shade, no loose shale but more a carpet of narrow black peat, slippery and damp, the Bantam slightly higher than I, my hand on tick-over looking down to a steam 400ft below and, beyond it slightly higher up, the constant flashes of the sun moving along the A57 Snake Pass.
Groughs (a natural channel or gulley in peatland) and gullies ran all along the developing, I also bought a
250 Ducati which I used for the 1979 to 1981 seasons. I then built a K4 Honda which I only raced once before selling it to a friend.
In 1982 I bought a 400/4 Honda from Andy Cale and, in 1983, entered the Manx Newcomers' race. Unfortunately the bike blew up at the Gooseneck on the first lap.
Undeterred, for 1984 I rebuilt the engine as a full 500 and rode in the Senior Manx race.
The following year I purchased a 750/4 Kerbyframed Honda for the Manx, and with the 500 won the under 500 four-stroke club championship with the North
northern edge. The beginnings of them crossed this trail, and a blip of the throttle caused the rear wheel to spin – it was too narrow to ride, and guiding it up out of the groughs on to the next one would be easier.
Thankfully this decision of ‘where’ was largely made for me, for about a third of the way along the stream (apparently the River Ashop) no longer had its steep, rock strewn sides, white rapids and pools but opened out to a benign stretch with gravel on both sides. Shallower and wider, with a lush green pasture also on both sides, and that was when I saw that track going up to the A57 from it, and I sensed it was time to go…
Vaguely, I do see myself always higher than the bike, wresting with it and laying it over onto the tops of tussocks, moving from left to right above it, gripping the handlebars yet not pointing the bike downwards, constantly moving zigzag, and waiting for that line where shadow ends to come a little closer.
For those who know these parts it would have been so much easier, for there is a way down, one which is wide enough for two. It can be seen from the road, albeit disused or for the grouse butts and shoots, it’s as straight
Gloucester club. I continued to ride the 750 at the Manx until 1988 when, under the regulations at the time, I became too old to enter.
For 1989 I built a 500 BSA for the new Manx Classic races. I rode it for three years but it consistently broke down so I never finished a race.
In 1992 Andy suggested an Aermacchi Matisse, as he had already built one for John Henderson to ride.
This I did and rode it from then until my final Manx – the 2013 Classic TT, in which I managed to win a third place replica in my class. As my 65th birthday was fast approaching, I decided to hang up my leathers and call it a day, that was my last race.
as a ruler’s edge further east from where I was zigzagging my way down.
What happened next I remember more as an aftermath than the actuality, for almost vertically for five or six foot or so we slid the tussocks suddenly, with no friction giving way to my feet over the carved out edge we went into a gritstone track. No broken bones and no bruises, the 1953 Bantam must have survived for I plainly see myself astride it, jabbing on the front brake and trundling downwards towards the level of those cars, then that long circular approach ‘coming in’ onto a gravelsided stream with deep and heavy tyre marks all around us, and all in glorious sunshine.
I always knew where I had come out onto the Snake Pass. It was always about a half a mile further on (east) from the Snake Inn, 11 miles from Glossop.
To mention this 'bikers’ run' the A57 is still a regular ride out for me, and when I pass the now closed Snake Inn and reach the end of that long stretch of pines it’s up there to my right on the northern edge of Kinder Scout, a line coming down from the tops. Instant memories of a Mist Green Bantam with a rubber bulb hooter and fishtail pipe.