Old Bike Mart

Memories of Jacks Hill Café 2

-

In May 1960 I lived just outside

Sutton in Surrey and bought a brandnew Triumph Tiger 110 (240SPD) from Vernon Havers of WF Guiver Ltd of Sutton. I had seen it on display in Guiver’s a week or so earlier and decided I just had to have it.

After buying it, I had to wait another week or so before collecting the bike because I had also ordered a set of front and rear crash bars and spot and fog lights to be fitted. I was in the Royal Air Force at the time and stationed at RAF Bassingbou­rn in Cambridges­hire. It was a great bike, I was 18 years old and I had a lovely wonderful girlfriend, a 650cc Triumph and a job working on aircraft – what else could anyone want at the start of the swinging Sixties?

On the weekend that I picked up the Triumph I headed back to RAF Bassingbou­rn late on the Sunday night. It was pouring with rain and as I headed through Stamford Hill in London (no M25 then) I saw some blurred red lights ahead through the rain on my goggles and just in time I pulled wider into the road to miss some roadworks. I nearly wrecked the bike on the first trip.

RAF Bassingbou­rn was a mecca for bikes in 1960. In the Station Armoury alone there were at least seven bikes – my Triumph T110; ‘Tich’ Mewton with his T110; Johnny Burmester’s BSA Golden Flash; ‘Ginge’ Hogarth’s Norton Dominator; Rod Boilland’s Triumph Bonneville T120 and Rick Richardson’s Triumph Thunderbir­d, as well as another lad’s Vincent 1000 Black Shadow. We were all armourers and if anyone recognises his name here I’m pleased that you, like me, are still around.

On the occasional lunchtime we all used to roar out of Bassingbou­rn camp gates and head about five miles up the old A14 (between

Royston and Huntingdon and now called the A1198) to a transport café called Jacks Hill 2, just past Arrington. (Jacks Hill 1 was on the A1 near Towcester.) We would have a cup of coffee, a roll and a chat, admire the bikes and then head back to work. Jacks Hill had huge windows along one side and we used to park our bikes against it so that we would see and admire them while enjoying our snacks inside.

We would often do the same after work finished and also after a late shift in the early hours of the morning. Sometimes we on the day shift would even get out of bed to accompany the late shift blokes up there in the middle of the night! There were no speed limits then so 80 to 90mph – and sometimes the ‘ton’ – was the normal speed up to the café. I remember one afternoon when I had a chap called ‘Chalky’ White on the pillion and we were racing Ginge on his Norton Dominator. He was flat out on his petrol tank around the 90mph mark and we went by him with Chalky giving him the ‘V’ sign from the back of my Triumph T110. Sometimes on a Friday night I would finish late shift around midnight and ride up to Jacks Hill 2 for something to eat and drink and then head straight down to London for the weekend.

I drove past Jacks Hill 2 again sometime in the 1980s and it was then a place selling agricultur­al machinery, but the big windows were still there. The last time, just a couple of years ago, the building had completely disappeare­d.

If anyone reading this also visited Jacks Hill 2 in its heyday as a ‘ton up’ transport café, I wonder if they might have a photograph of it with its big windows? Allan Carter, Donington, Lincolnshi­re

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom