A few weeks ago I was in The Bay Horse Inn at Totnes musing over motor bikes with AR, a friend who is a keen biker and whose late departed and fondly missed father, DR - once an illustrious habitué of the soon to be re-opened Bull Inn at Totnes - had also been a daring race rider in the infamously dangerous Isle of Man TT races. AR explained to me that over the years many racers at the Isle of Man circuit had been fatally injured after losing control of their bikes and being thrown off at high speed.
I told AR that the only motor bike I had ridden - on a summer's afternoon in 1962 - was a 1955 Francis-Barnett Falcon 70 which had a two stroke 197cc Villiers engine. It had been manufactured in Coventry where I then lived. I can spume this froth because my best friend at the time, RH, provided it for me on a number of occasions before and after he purchased this motor cycle.
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| The Francis-Barnett Falcon 70 also lovingly known as a Franny Barnett |
RH left school at the age of 15 (as one could in 1962) to take up an apprenticeship at ‘The Dunlop’ where tyres were manufactured for cars and motor bikes but he gathered the money to buy his two wheeled steed by using what others might think were ghoulish methods. His wages as an apprentice were insufficient to allow him to save up for a motor bike but on weekday evenings he and I worked as part-time gravediggers and the money for that was good. I wasted my monetary substance on riotous living but RH was sensible and saved enough from his grave digging wages to purchase his Franny Barnett in the Spring of 1962.
One weekend at the height of summer that year we decided to go camping and used his motor bike as our means of gaining our destination. I rode pillion to him and we pitched our tent near the village of Brinklow, in deeper Warwickshire.
On Friday evening at the Raven Inn, Brinklow, RH, who looked 18 was served with a pint of shandy while I looked my age and was served with a lemonade. We listened to the bibulous patrons of the pub, informally, but in loud unison, sing, as was the custom in those days, all the old folk ballads, as well as the songs of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Patsy Kline, Petula Clark The Everly Brothers, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith et al.
Next day my friend, cheered by the bonhomie of the previous evening, generously asked if I would like a shot at riding his motor bike. I was very nervous about it but enough of me wanted to go along with the idea that I agreed to it. For my trial we found an unmetalled track off a quiet lane between Brinklow and Stretton under Fosse.
Before I continue I should give you the warning that we were living in the pre-compulsory crash helmet era and I was helmet free as I mounted the bike and tentatively twisted the accelerator. I was relieved to find that though the motor bike felt bulkier, balance-wise at least, it was like riding a push bike. I had accelerated to a speed of about 15 to 20 mph when the bike seemed to take on a mind of its own and just at a point where the track turned right I found I could not follow it and rode straight on into a wooden five bar gate. The Franny came to an abrupt halt. I was thrown high into the air over the gate and while still in flight I did an involuntary somersault and miraculously landed standing on my feet facing the direction of my travel. Someone disinterestedly watching this might have thought it was an acrobat's circus stunt. It wasn’t. If I owned any wits, they I had now been well and truly scared out of me. For a moment while suspended in the air I had thought life was about to turn into death. I’ve never ridden on a motor bike since.
I survived the incident unimpaired and apart from the need to make a few twists to the metal of the front mudguard the Franny Barnett was also largely undamaged. RH sportingly accepted responsibility for the accident saying he should have had "the sense not to allow an idiot" to ride his bike. The old gate was a little battered but still capable of its function to keep livestock secure in the meadow.
I survived the incident unimpaired and apart from the need to make a few twists to the metal of the front mudguard the Franny Barnett was also largely undamaged. RH sportingly accepted responsibility for the accident saying he should have had "the sense not to allow an idiot" to ride his bike. The old gate was a little battered but still capable of its function to keep livestock secure in the meadow.
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| After my crash I would say the gate at Brinklow was in slightly better nick than this one above Princetown on Dartmoor |
I slept only fitfully on the night that followed my rocket-like launch into the afternoon Warwickshire sky, and in a fragmentary moment of sleep, no doubt haunted by my experience, I dreamt of the tragi-comic death of a young man who, wearing no crash helmet, loses control of his motor bike at high speed and crashes into a farm gate and narrowly avoids - by exercising extraordinary agility - landing on his head upon a colossal boulder, which would have, had his head collided with it, broken his skull into smithereens. Like me, the young man in my dream lands on his feet. His is a magnificent, cinematic feat - the zenith of the career of any stuntman - but regrettably, on landing, our acrobatic hero surprises and enrages a bull which is inconveniently positioned near to our hero’s landing point. Fearful and alarmed by what it fears is an attack from the skies, the bull charges towards him and gores him, thus causing his slow and bloody demise.
OK, you may now have concerns about the darker reaches of my mind, but I was only 16 going on 17 at the time, had just survived a potentially fatal mishap and, in those days, I had been reading quite a bit of Hemingway.
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