I’m in the mood for a little nostalgia, and what better Memory Lane to return to than the one which includes those magnificent days when like my peers, I was full of teenage wisdom and immortality.
As I wrote in an earlier chapter, my first career choice on leaving school was to be an apprentice fitter and turner at the local brewery where I was to spend the next five years learning a trade.
I say career choice as though I had spent many weeks planning and deciding my future. It was nothing like that. I needed a job, my Dad said, "get a trade", I applied for the job, was interviewed, found to be of relatively good character and employed. I had no idea what a fitter and turner was - I would soon learn - but I've already told you about that.
Too young for a licence, I spent the
first year or two on a pushbike, leaving home at 7.30 and riding
two kilometres to work to be sure I punched my card in the Bundy clock before eight. One minute late and I would lose an hours’ pay from my miserable six pounds a week.
My route took me the length of Draper Street, crossing the busy Bruce
Highway at Mulgrave Road. I am mindful of my generous use of the term “busy”.
With a population of 25,000, Cairns was still about ten years away from its first set
of traffic lights. The pace was far from hectic and while not exactly sleepy, the
city was a long way from being the tourist magnet that it is today.
As I
approached my 17th birthday, I was determined that my cycling days would
soon end. I needed something classier than a Malvern Star. My father had been a
motorcycling enthusiast in his younger days. The family albums contained many
photos of Dad and motorbikes. He had
been George Brough’s foreman at Brough Superior Motorcycles in Nottingham (check
here for information about the Rolls
Royce of Motorcycles). He was a frequent visitor to the Isle of Man TT in his
early years having once competed in the late 1930s. It may have been his own experiences with
motorcycles in his youth, or his diminished opinion of the skill and ability of
the average North Queensland road user, or the capabilities of the local
council (his employer, by the way) to maintain such roads in a safe condition –
whatever the reason, he was adamantly opposed to my even learning to ride, yet
alone think about ever owning a motor cycle.
So I did what any typical seventeen year old youth would do in similar circumstances – I interpreted his directive as advice and completely ignored it. Thus it was, that a few days short of my seventeenth birthday, I arrived home from work on a 1958 BSA Bantam.
It was 175cc of two-stroke heaven and after no
more than a dozen or so family arguments, my parents accepted my new mode of
transport with just one condition – I was never to be without a motorcycle helmet. True
to my word, I was never without it. Regrettably, it was rarely to be seen on my
head. Instead it was stuffed into one of my saddlebags the moment I was out of
sight of the house – the obliviousness of youth!
How I loved that
Bantam. It wasn’t quite up to my later
aspirations, and I wasn’t yet ready to rub shoulders with the cool guys like
Frewy and Pancho on their Bonnevilles and Rocket Gold Stars – but it was a Bantam
Super, not a pitiful 125 cc Bantam D1, or even the 150 cc Bantam Major, this
was a Bantam Super in case anyone should ever forget it and to me, it might
well have been a Manx Norton.
My lifelong
friends, Mal and Friz also thought it was great. I had just begun studying at night school –
four nights a week, the first year of a seven year Engineering Diploma. I was back
in my old class room at Cairns State High.
Every evening from Monday to Thursday, I was there, listening to my old maths
and physics teachers, now surprisingly articulate and engaging in comparison to
my school days. The Bantam would be out in the street, right alongside Bob
Spencer’s Matchy and Alan McKenzie’s AJS.
For a long time, I could not understand why the engine was often still
warm when I came from class around 10pm.
I eventually learned that while I was diligently studying applied
mechanics and differential calculus, Mal and Friz were joyriding my cherished possession
to Ellis Beach and Yorkey’s Knob and God knows where else. The Bantam had no ignition key – it was just
kick-start and go. Maybe I should have removed the spark plug and taken it to
class with me!
It was a
wonderfully reliable machine. Three
gears, one down and two up and a top speed of just over 50 mph (about 70
kph). Occasionally, if pushed too hard
at maximum speed (and I’m ashamed to say, this was quite often), the engine
would seize causing the back wheel to lock and go into a skid. If the clutch was
not immediately engaged, an unpleasant incident would be unavoidable. I would free-wheel with the clutch handle engaged,
and as the bike slowed to a more respectable pace, gently release it whereupon
without fail, the engine would again kick into life, and I’d continue on my way.
There is no need to say that this did not do the engine a whole lot of good and I was soon leaving a trail of blue
smoke visible from the Kuranda Lookout. “It’s the rings” said one of my
workmates, “an easy job – get down to McGregor Motors, pick up a new set
of rings, you'll fix it yourself in no time at all.”
No time that
is, if you’re an experienced fitter or motor mechanic – but, for a second year
apprentice, not quite the same thing. Had
I been a little more experienced or informed, I might have also known that just
because it was blowing smoke, it didn’t necessarily follow that the problem was the rings. All two-stroke
engines blow smoke sometimes because the lubricating oil is mixed with the fuel
and if there is an excess of oil, some of it doesn't burn during the combustion process, instead it comes out of the exhaust system in the form of smoke. How was I expected to know?
However, I am
not delivering a technical dissertation here. Some engineering genius had told
me I needed to replace the piston rings and that was good enough for me. All started out well and I did an excellent
job of stripping down the engine. I
disconnected the fuel lines, removed the spark plug and after a bit of a tussle,
removed the four nuts on the cylinder head. Then with the help of a screwdriver
I loosened and eventually removed the cylinder head without breaking anything
apart from maybe slightly damaging the head gasket. OK, I may have spilled a few large drops of dirty
oil on the clean concrete slab underneath my parents’ high-set “Queenslander”
home where I was working; and I may have slightly broken one, possibly both of
the old piston rings as I removed the
cylinder barrel from the crankcase; and there may have been another gasket
which couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether to stick to the barrel or the
exhaust manifold. Fine, I admit it, I was
in difficulties.
Eventually,
I decided to do what anyone else might have done under similar
circumstances. I re-assembled everything
to the best of my ability and when for some obscure reason, the engine would not
come to life when I tried to kick-start it, I asked my father for help.
Here’s where
the story gets somewhat mortifying. It
would be fair to say that at that point in my life I did not enjoy the closest of
relationships with my father. Who
did? It was only years later, after I
left the nest and spent a couple of years globe-trotting that our relationship
improved. He obviously learnt much while I was away.
It was a
Saturday morning. My friends, Mal and
Friz (the same two who had the habit of road-testing my bike once or twice a
week), had dropped by to see what I was up to (we did a lot of that) and I had just asked Dad if he would mind when convenient,
having a quick look at the Bantam because I was having trouble getting it to
start. I should mention that he was workshop superintendent for the City Council’s large fleet of trucks,
road graders, bulldozers and every other motor vehicle that the council owned, so he ought to know something about small two-stroke motorcycle engines. “OK, let’s have a look at it,” he
said.
It wasn’t
long, before he looked up at me from where he had crouched beside the bike and
said, “Have you been tinkering with this?”
“No,” I
replied in my most convincing witness-stand voice, “Do you think it might be
the rings?”
“Don’t
bullshit to me, Michael!” he said, in a tone which still
rings in my ears over half a century later – and which my so-called mates,
never let me forget.
Humiliation and shame aside, the result was that my father soon had the bike back in shape, newly decarbonised, new rings and gaskets. He gave a kick to the starter pedal, a flick of the throttle handle and it purred like a satisfied tomcat.
I would like to tell you that it taught me a lesson, and eventually it did
– but alas, not immediately, I had bigger things in mind.
As I
approached my eighteenth birthday, it was time for me to step up a level. After all I was a third year apprentice, and
now licensed to carry pillion passengers, but who would want to go out with a
guy on the back of Bantam BSA (even if it was the Bantam Super), when
there were guys riding around on much bigger and throatier machines.
One of the older
members of the motorcycling fraternity, an electrical fitter who lived a few
streets away had decided to move up from motorcycles to motor cars, and word
got out that he was keen to sell his Norton.
This wasn’t quite the streamlined silver Dominator 650SS, that was the
talk of the town, but to my eyes, it was nonetheless an amazing machine and a
steal at forty pounds. I thus became the
happy owner of a 1954 Norton Dominator 500cc twin, and I was a king!
Parental anxiety aside, I could not have been happier. I was no longer going to be confused with a noisy lawn mower as I rode past, this was a real machine, and everyone knew it. As the ads said the Bantam was "the small machine with the big performance", the Norton on the other hand was all performance. The question was, could I handle it?
