Book Review
“Clem Beckett – motorcycle legend and war hero”
Author: Rob Hargreaves
Introduction: Dolores Long
Foreword: Jim Henry
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire S70 2AS
Email: enquiries@pen-and-sword.co.uk or www.pen-and-sword.co.uk
Tel: 01226 734222 Hardback, 160 x 240mm (portrait); 239 pages with 34 photographs and illustrations. ISBN 978-1-39909-842-7 £25 (UK), $34.78 (US), $44 (Canada), $44.52 (Australia)
Clem Beckett was 14 when he first rode a home-made motorcycle over the cobbled streets of his hometown. It was the start of a lifelong love affair with speed and machines.
For Beckett, the motorcycle was a means of escape from the uncertain future of Oldham’s stricken milling industry in the aftermath of the First World War.
Beckett’s zest for life, his natural exuberance and determination to be a winner, overcame the disadvantages of a poor home bereft of a father. As a pioneering Dirt Track (speedway) rider, he broke records galore, and as a volunteer in the Spanish
Civil War, he broke down class barriers. Whether as a tearaway teenager, an outspoken sportsman, or a member of the Communist Party, his life was characterised by broadsides of irreverence towards authority.
With many of Oldham’s 300 or so mills closing, resulting in grinding poverty, it is not surprising that young apprentice blacksmith Clement Beckett was completely taken in by the Communist Party’s propaganda promising “a workers’ paradise.”
“He became more involved and engaged with politics as a young man, which I find fascinating,” says author Rob Hargreaves, “because while he was a communist, he was also hugely enterprising and entrepreneurial. He was a paradoxical figure.” By 1928, Clem was making a very good living from speedway – as much as £100 a night – taking flying lessons and enjoying speedboat racing.
To Beckett, the appeal of revolutionary politics was youthful rejection of “old fogey” values and the dominating role of tweedy gentility in motorcycle sport.
Reviving faded memories and anecdotes of his career as a pioneer speedway rider, this book traces Beckett’s extraordinary rise from blacksmith’s apprentice to superstar, in a new sport which typified the energy of the ‘Roaring Twenties,’ and was characterised by risk-taking and serial injury. Ever the showman, and banned from the Dirt Track for trying to protect his fellow riders from exploitation, Beckett took to riding the Wall of Death.
Observing the rise of fascism on his travels in
Europe, Beckett’s increasing involvement with politics led to marriage to the mysterious Lida Henrisen, and inexorably to volunteer service in the British Battalion of the International Brigades in Spain. A narrative spiced with anecdotes and new revelations about Beckett shows why from boyhood to the poignant circumstances of his death in battle, Clem Beckett inspired love and loyalty