Memories are made of this...

The Classic MotorCycle isa memory jogger, it really is.

There I was, flicking contentedly through the August 2021 issue, admiring the photo on page 29, on the cover of Motorcycle

Sport print from May 1969 and I thought ‘I recognise that photo,’ it was on the cover of an article called ‘a pretty average Wednesday’ written by my boss and later motorcycle pal Ted Ulrich as EU (late Edwin Ulrich) about our forays to Brands Hatch in the ‘Good Old Days.’

Ted wrote for Motorcycle Sport on occasion and was kind enough to depict me freezing my knackers off in the gravel paddock while a bare-backed ‘chap’ adjusted his chain. Charles Mortimer also featured in the days when you could chat with the likes of John

Hartle, Bill Ivy and Dan Gurney as we queued up for a bacon sarnie and a cup of tea from the ladies in the wooden canteen, while little Teddy Mayer from one of the car teams shuffled by after Bernie.

Then I turned the page to 31 and I thought ‘I know that man’ on the right of the picture. The face of Frank Sheene. I had reason to be very grateful to Frank in 1959. I had just emerged from a frightening morning of final examinations in the Queens Square Examination halls of London Uni. An exam I had failed a year previously in Belfast, hence my first solo trip to England, I was alone and miserable, as I thought I hadn’t done very well in the morning paper.

I wandered about, fearful of the afternoon, when I thought that new sound was like a two-stroke getting a bit of a hammering, howling away at high revs. Most of my pals then were motorcyclists, road racer Jim Sharpe (350cc Manx), Ray Turkington (499cc Manx) and Billy Johnson on his filed-head Bantam. Exam nerves vanished – I had to follow this up. So, I ventured down the ramp into a large yard in the corner of which was a bit shed with an open door. As I approached the door, it became clear that this was not an ordinary two-stroke, but a racer. Nervously rounding the corner, I saw a man whom I recognised immediately from probably the Cookstown, the Mid Antrim or perhaps the Temple road races. I went over to him, he shut off the motor, and I said: “Excuse me, sir, are you Frank Sheene?”

He, like me, was taken aback, he said: “Yes, who are you?”

I replied: “I’ve seen you race in Ireland and aren’t you Barry’s dad?”

“Yes indeed” he said, and we had a lovely, long chat about Irish road racing, it was the best medicine I could have had. I, of course, almost missed the start of the pm exam. I passed the exam and, to me just as importantly, I met a very nice man who had the same interests as me, so ‘thank you’ The Classic MotorCycle of August 2021, for reminding me of it.

That encounter was in my 85-year-old mind like yesterday – only 63 years ago. Gordon McCammond, via email.