Comrade daredevil – Clem Beckett part one ..
The remarkable story of Clem Beckett, whose life is the subject of a forthcoming book. This is part one…
It’s 1919 in Oldham, Lancashire. The streets are lined with back-to-back houses and thumping, productive mills pierce the smoggy sky. If Manchester was the workshop of the world, Oldham was its competitive sibling.
There were hundreds of mills in the Oldham area. The cotton industry and its supply chain – from blacksmiths to bleachers – employed thousands of people, including 12-year-old Clement Beckett. Like many children of that period, Beckett’s father never returned from the war, though in the Becketts’ case, death was never confirmed. With no widow’s pension, the family were in a precarious financial situation and so from a young age Clement’s education was reduced to half-days in order for him to earn money for the family.
But it wasn’t all work and no play: as a teenager, Beckett spent his spare time riding bodged-together motorcycles and bicycles in a nearby slag heap called Glodwick Lows. Here, Clement cut his teeth as a rider, learning to slide, drift, broadslide and jump, and all across gritty dirt terrain. Within a matter of years he would become one of the most notorious speedway racers of the 1920s.
This is the story of Clement Beckett: blacksmith,
Wall of Death supremo, motorcycle racer, dirt-track ambassador, Communist Party affiliate, writer and soldier. And all packed into a life that lasted only 30 years. He was the daredevil who dazzled the world on his Douglas and the self-proclaimed ‘outlaw’ of the then novel ‘speedway’ track. And now he’s the subject of a forthcoming book, Daredevil Comrade, by author Rob Hargreaves, who’s sharing Beckett’s life with The Classic MotorCycle over a two-part feature series. Welcome to part one.
We owe this feature to Oldham Council: were it not for them, it’s possible that author Rob Hargreaves might never have encountered Clem Beckett.
“It all started about 15 years ago, when I was cycling near Glodwick Lows. There was a local interest sign there which explained that it was where local motorcycle star Clem Beckett would practice as a young rider. Back then Glodwick Lows was pitted with abandoned mines and quarries, which have now been reclaimed by nature.
“The sign struck me because it mentioned that Clem Beckett was killed fighting in the Spanish Civil War, which I’ve always been very interested in. I thought to myself that not a lot of people would have looked into this, so I started researching the subject, with a view to writing about it. And the book soon became as much about speedway as it did about politics.”
Clem’s extraordinary life started on the rough cobble streets of Oldham, where he first rolled out a homemade motorcycle at the age of 14, as Rob writes in his book: “He graduated from pushbikes to motorbikes with obsessive enthusiasm, and shortage of money was overcome by hard work and ingenuity. He and friend Irving Anderson scraped together £5 between them to buy an ancient machine. This was a tidy sum – more than an entire month’s pay for an Army sergeant. The bike had automatic inlet-valves, and was fuelled by ether. The lads stripped it down to its tiniest parts and put it back together. Not content to stay on the handy off-road paths and tracks of Glodwick Lows, they roared through busy Oldham streets, unrestrained by rules or regulations, one riding, the other hanging on as pillion passenger.
“Elders gaped their disapproval, but younger eyes followed their antics with envy. A motorcycle ‘craze’ was sweeping the country. Machines retrieved from Army-surplus dumps following the Armistice were being pressed back into service. In their Oldham works, a short distance from the town centre, Bradbury and Co were producing a range of motorbikes, with optional sidecars, for those with the money to pay for them. Featuring in a series of cigarette cards produced by Lambert and Butler, the combination version of the latest Bradbury machine, with stylish sidecar attached, had every appearance of being top of the range – way beyond the means of Clem and his pals in Roundthorn. The firm also cashed in on its prewar reputation as market-leader in machines for competitive hill climbing events.”
Then, alongside terrorising people on Oldham’s cobbled streets, Clement and his friend started their own motorcycle repair business. “He was very enterprising and hard-working and did this alongside his apprenticeship as a blacksmith, which serviced and made tooling for the cotton mills.”
At the age of 16 Clement – or ‘Clem’ as he soon became known – was offered a scholarship but turned it down in order to continue with his apprenticeship and motorcycle antics but soon developed a reputation for being a ‘tearaway’ and anti-authoritarian. He was also tempestuous, both in spirit and decision making, and even paused his apprenticeship to join the Army in the horse regiment. More importantly, it was also at this time when he bought his first motorcycle, a Harley-Davidson.
There was another emerging interest in Clem’s life, one that would eventually cost him his life:
“By the end of 1928 Beckett had become the idol of the crowd.”
communism. Clem joined the Young Communist
League of Great Britain after attending a talk by Tom Mann at Oldham’s Temperance Hall. “There was increasing interest in communism following the First World War and the Russian Revolution,” explains Rob. Indeed, the Communist Party of Great Britain was just four years old when Clem joined the YCL.
“He became more involved and engaged with politics as a young man, which I find fascinating,” said Rob, “because while he was a communist he was also hugely enterprising and entrepreneurial. He was a paradoxical figure.” Nonetheless, Clem would remain a Communist Party member all his life.
He returned to blacksmithing and completed his apprenticeship in 1927, but it was clear that being in the saddle – whether horse or horse-powered – was his forte and in 1928 Clem, along with his friend Irving Anderson, visited Audenshaw Speedway.
Rob writes: “This had been formed by North and
South Manchester Clubs, together with the Stalybridge Club. The two boys had joined the latter and on July 21, 1928, Clem made his first appearance at White City, still very much junior to the better known riders,” said Rob. “He made an immediate impression by beating Abel Drew, one of three Irish brothers, in a ‘challenge’ match.”
“Dirt track riding was in its infancy and new techniques were developing. But Beckett rapidly established a record for broadsliding and by the end of the year he had become the idol of the crowd,” said Rob. Clearly, Clem’s stints at the slag heap had paid off.
But it would be two weeks before Clem really made his mark on the speedway scene, as Rob writes: “He quickly established his ‘star’ reputation by beating Arthur Franklyn, and setting a new track record. A few weeks later he won another match race, against Ron Johnson, part of the Australian ‘invasion’ (although
born in Scotland), breaking the track record again in front of 38,000 cheering spectators. Crowds at
White City were soon above 45,000, far exceeding those watching Manchester United or the Lancashire cricket team.”
Clem couldn’t have timed it any better. Speedway racing – an import from Australia – was the latest craze in the late 1920s. “It was huge,” writes Rob: “This was speedway’s golden hour. Even the lofty Manchester Guardian was obliged to enlighten its middle class readers as to the impact of the ‘new sport’. A ‘new type of athlete’ was attracting a ‘new type of audience, extraordinarily versed in motorcycling matters’. In an uncannily prescient aside the paper’s ‘Special Correspondent’ encapsulated the national obsession with the internal combustion engine, describing the scene at the end of a meeting at White City:”‘When the racing was over, they streamed away from the track in cars, on motorbicycles, in sidecars, on pillions – exploding, ejecting blue fumes, honking, rattling like machine guns: the mechanised army of the modern city”’
It wouldn’t take long for word to spread about Oldham’s very own daredevil rider. Clem was riding more and more, honing his skills and earning a supplementary income. “He even beat the famous rider Sprouts Elder,” said Rob.
“Throughout the summer and autumn of 1928, new dirt tracks opened all over the country, often constructed inside greyhound circuits, which had the advantage of fans being able to use existing stands and other facilities,” writes Rob. “By the end of the year there were at least 50, 20 or so within a
30-mile radius of Manchester.
They had varying degrees of success, and for good riders the rapid expansion created a sellers’ market. For
Clem and others who had established reputations it was a happy hunting ground; they were in demand, and could command large appearance fees.”
Clem lapped all this up and was soon racing at tracks across the country. He was earning decent money, too, and would often appear at two or three meetings a day. It was glamorous work: idolised by crowds and chauffeured from track to track. Clem’s career was on a rapid ascent, along with speedway racing. But with it came a price, one that forced Clem to find his thrills elsewhere. Of course, the agile and mercurial Clem Beckett rose to the challenge, possibly influencing the continental motorcycle scene in the process. But that’s for the next instalment…
Before then, we must thank Oldham Council for that modest sign at Glodwick Loss, without which Rob Hargreaves would not have written his fascinating book on Comrade Daredevil.
To be continued...
‘Comrade Daredevil’ will be released by Pen and Sword in early 2022.