Ferry stories and tales of TT travels from a golden era
I thought your readers may be interested in these photos I recently found of our family’s first visit to the TT races in 1964.
I was 15 at the time and we went in the family Austin Mini Traveller (mum and dad, my two sisters and myself plus luggage, a bit of a squeeze!)
The first photo (1) shows the queue behind the goods sheds of bikes waiting to load. In those days it was first come, first served so you may queue for hours waiting for a space on the ferry. Hard luck if it was raining! I have waited 4 or 5 hours at times.
The second (above) is taken from the deck of the Manx Maid. It shows three riders pushing A65 BSAs along the floating jetty to load. The riders were three Americans who had flown over to Birmingham and picked up their bikes directly from the BSA factory in Small
Heath. You can clearly see the American market high and wide handlebars. A picture of them was shown in the Motor Cycle collecting their bikes that week.
The third picture (above right) shows a view of the bikes crowded on to the helterskelter-type loading deck at the rear of the ship. There is quite a mixture of ages and types of bike and shows the haphazard way they were loaded in those days.
The fourth photo, left, was taken in the early Seventies and shows how the bikes used to be craned onto the older ferries. As the crane boom swung round the outer two bikes would swing outwards if the operator was a bit too quick. At the end of the swing they would swing back in, which could result in them smashing into the middle bike! I wonder how many bikes were damaged over the years?
Another feature of those days was having the petrol tanks pumped out before loading. If you were lucky, you would be left with just enough to get to the nearest garage before you ran out. This wasn’t a problem at Douglas as there was a garage right by the quay. In Liverpool it was further away – I bet many a bike was pushed a few miles with a dry tank!
When I went over in 1968, I had a Tiger 100. The ignition coils were mounted under the tank and there were cut-outs in the tank to clear them, this prevented the suction pipe going to the bottom of the tank, leaving plenty of fuel in. Another thing that worked a few times was to have a tank top bag, very often the pump operator couldn’t wait for you to unstrap it and would wave you straight past!
I hope these bring back happy memories of visits to the Island.