The Brits called them “scratchers.” And through a magazine such as Cycle World, back in the Sixties, we who read it for roadracing news got the word straight from the riders’ boots, as it were, and the word was that a Fast Guy on a GP bike at Brands Hatch scratched bits of his bike or himself on the pavement as he battled for position in Druids or Paddock Hill Bend or Clearways. Hence, “scratcher.”
Hence, too, some members of my generation of young Yanks itching to go racing in England on any suitable mount for a leather-clad lad under a Cromwell pudding-basin helmet and RAF goggles, ready to bang fairings with the best of the East End boys who saw roadracing as a way out of their dreary lives and jobs. Win there, and keep winning, and maybe someday you’d get the factory ride, the dolly birds, the fancy cars, the fancy houses. That’s what the curriculum of the University of Brands Hatch offered to the few who were the best of the best scratchers.
And that’s why a few roadracers like me, stuck in the mostly dirt-trackin’ world of AMA-controlled racing in the ’60s, joined “outlaw” roadracing clubs like the AFM (American Federation of Motorcyclists) on the West Coast or the AAMRR (American Association of Motorcycle Road Racers) on the East Coast. We Americans might be grinding hardware for all we were worth at Vacaville or Marlboro, but we all knew that the best roadracing was in Britain.
No racetrack time you could get anywhere else prepared you as well or as quickly for the big show—Grand Prix racing—where Yanks were all too often dismissed as second-rate roadracers. Thanks to the stories in our magazines, we knew how we were perceived, and it galled like a burr under a cowboy’s saddle blanket. That, among much else, stirred race-minded, red-blooded American passions as the craziness in Vietnam mostly did not, although the undeclared war in Southeast Asia pulled a whole lot of us into uniform, and it was my turn in 1968. I expected to go to “The Heat” in early ’69. Instead, I was sent to England. (Yeah, it was a hard-luck assignment, but somebody had to do it.) I got there a few months later and discovered that racing in Britain was a world unto itself, as much unlike what I’d imagined it to be as it was like it. Although some of that world remains, much has been lost as Britain emerged from postwar penury to postmodern prosperity.
In the late 1960s, Britain was midway through that transition, but it was still a place defined by sights, sounds and smells unlike those of America—and, as the neuroscientists tell us, odors are the most powerful triggers of memory. That’s why, four decades later, I can still recall the aromatic signature of two- and four-stroke diesels used in everything from London taxis to buses and trucks, the usual two-stroke smoke and smell emitted everywhere by mopeds, scooters and motorcycles, coal and coke smoke from council-house chimneys and factories alike. And then there was the typical pub fug comprising the particularly pungent cigarette smoke from cheap Woodbines and Players Gold Leaf swirling in dense clouds above warm, potent brews in pint glasses, while the blokes dealing with the need to drain the brews made frequent use of the “bogs” or communal urinals most old pubs still had.
The racing circuits were no less rich in odors. There was of course the delicious sweetness of Castrol R, but also the uniquely British smells, such as that which wafted from the kitchens where they made bacon sandwiches, the bacon still greasy with fat when plopped onto the buttered bread. Many a queasy pre-race stomach, confronted with such fare, rebelled at places like Snetterton, built, as so many other British circuits were, on an abandoned WWII Royal Air Force airfield. Owners of such unhappy innards frequently found themselves in the Snetterton paddock ’loo, where upon closing the stall door to one of the WCs, said stomach owner could read a wonderfully apt and uniquely British graffito: “Would the gentleman with the four-speed arsehole kindly shit in bottom gear, as this toilet is not equipped with mudguards.” The neat lettering suggested the work of a hand well-schooled, and reading it never failed to bring a smile, reminding me of how droll was British wit, on racetracks as everyplace else.
[ In early 1970 at Croft, Yorkshire, Thompson (left) drains gearbox oil from his 1969 A1-R 250cc GP bike. Remote-float 26mm Mikuni carbs had been replaced at the suggestion of Kawasaki’s Al Goslee with 30mm Amals and the original crimson-and-cream factory colors with then-new “Green Meanie” war paint. (Photo by Gordon Keown) ]
Before I left for England, AFM expert and U.K. ex-pat David Scott had warned me that another aspect of racing with the scratchers would be less amusing and involve probable visits to the hospital. He was right. For, just as British racers were jocular, helpful and generous to anyone in the paddock, once the Union Flag dropped and they bump-started their bikes, they became ferocious competitors, dicing for every position. This had inevitable consequences, and many a racer—including me—spent time in this or that emergency room. But what I hadn’t heard about was the spectacularly dedicated and professional quality of the people who showed up as corner workers, circuit medical officers and what we now call emergency medical technicians. Even at club races, you could count on the uniformed members of the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade to collect you from whatever mess you’d gotten yourself into. As one of the first to race in Britain with a then-new second-generation Bell Star helmet, I was asked by the Snetterton medical officer during practice sessions to be a teaching aid for the Brigade members at the track that day, so they could learn when and how to remove the Star without causing collateral damage to a rider who might have suffered a broken neck or back. It was a sobering experience but vastly reassuring, too. The medical officers themselves were selfless, working for no pay and routinely saving lives, including mine (but that’s another story).
The professionalism of the medical volunteers at club races reflected a major difference between roadracing in the States and in Britain at the time, in that each circuit had on its virtual staff a coterie of volunteers for every task who’d show up, race after race, every day of every weekend, for car or motorcycle racing. Over time, like the racers themselves, they got very good at their jobs. British racers, who had grown up in a racing world of such support, took it for granted. Just as they took for granted social support for what they did from the commercial world, which usually offered “racer’s discounts” on just about everything.
A letter I received from the Executive Director of Adcola, a manufacturer of 12-volt soldering irons, exemplified this sort of support. Dated May 1, 1970, Mr. P.R.J. Lamb wrote to tell me that he was sending not one soldering iron—which I’d ordered—but two, and that he was returning my check for the difference between the retail price of one iron and the price he was charging, which was “the lowest at which we can sell these machines.” He also included “two sticky labels suitable for fixing to the fairing,” for “as a motorcyclist and roadracing spectator,” Mr. Lamb wished me “a most successful season.”
I knew that in the States, AMA racers who rode in local dirt-track events got similar treatment from some retailers, but the differences for roadracers like me were substantial. Even the price for getting onto the track at circuits like Snetterton was low by American standards; I still have a receipt from June 17, 1971, “Temporary Permit for Testing Car/Motor Cycle” at Snetterton, at a cost of £1.80, which allowed us to test all day. And until a fatal accident on that circuit involving a racing car and GP bike in testing, we would often find ourselves with the likes of Team Lotus, headquartered at Hethel, not far away, and I was once nearly blown off the track by the wake generated by Graham Hill’s Lotus F1 car passing me on the Norwich Straight at Snetterton.
And then there was the rain. We must have raced on plenty of fine, warm, sunny days, but the memory holds most clearly those days when it was cold and wet. Opinion in the paddock was evenly divided over whether or not to wear any kind of rainsuit over leathers, but most of us decided the effort wasn’t worth it. You got wet anyway, and the suits tended to balloon at speed, slowing you down. So you just got used to racing in very wet leathers.
[ Isle of Man, 1970: Thompson rounds Quarter Bridge in practice for the Junior (350cc) Manx Grand Prix on his Kawasaki A1-R. Enlarged to 350cc by tuner-racer Terry Shepherd, the Shepherd-Kawasaki was fast but plagued by ignition gremlins, which ended Thompson’s MGP efforts that year and the next. ]
Riders with more money spent it to buy an extra set of leathers from Lewis Leathers on Great Portland Street, London, but few of us could afford such luxuries, even though a good many of us spent a lot of time at Lewis’ crammed shop downstairs—the real racers’ department, in effect—getting our suits repaired or buying replacement right-foot boots, which Lewis stocked because the standard British racing circuits were run clockwise, and many of us wore away so much of our right boots that they couldn’t be re-soled.
This reflected not only a “style” of racing, but the realities conferred by the way our GP bikes were set up, and the tires most commonly used. Avons and Dunlop KR-series “Triangulars” were found on every grid, on every size of machine, though I first arrived at Snetterton in March of ’70 with my Kawasaki A1-R wearing the same oval-section Goodyear racing tires I’d run at Daytona the year before. No, using year-old race tires wasn’t good, but money wasn’t there for new tires, so like many of my racing mates, I used what I could afford, and that didn’t include new tires until they were absolutely necessary.
Most of my racing peers squeezed every bit of life from every component on their bikes, too, and it wasn’t just because of the generally penny-pinched social stratum of roadracers. The primary driver of British consumer behavior at the time was the difficulty of buying on credit, as compared with the situation in America. A Briton usually needed at least a third of the retail price of, say, a new van as a down payment before he could get financing through what was called “hire-purchase,” the British equivalent of a bank loan for a commodity. Consequently, many people saved more, spent less and, in general, lived according to the old Puritan creed: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” British racing was thus full of older machinery being pushed to its limits by riders with no other option, though any who could afford the best new technology had it.
But the Manxes and 7Rs and G50s never went away, in part because a peculiarly British ideal lay behind their being passed along from older to younger riders. The ideal was rooted in the apprentice-journeyman-master traditions of the trades, from which many racers came. The tradition held that a neophyte shouldn’t get a faster, more powerful bike than a Manx until he proved he could extract everything the Manx could yield. But along with many traditions that were succumbing to the riots and revolutions of the era, this one, too, slowly disappeared among my racing peers, so that by 1972 a newcomer to British racing was as likely to buy a factory Yamaha and dive in at the deep end of the speed spectrum as he was to ride a Manx.
A few years after I got to England, the first-rank Yank riders brought over to compete in the “Match Race” series galvanized British crowds and put to rest the myth that Americans couldn’t meet the best British and European riders and beat them. They did so when a postwar golden age of British racing was coming to an end, along with British dominance in manufacturing motorcycles. In the three years and two-and-a-half racing seasons I lived, worked and raced in England, I knew, even then, that however much we racers and motorcyclists were gaining with the new technology and the gradual merging of what had been distinct racing cultures worldwide, we were losing something, too.
[ Two weeks after almost dying in crashing his Norton at Snetterton on Easter, 1972, Thompson is unable to kick-start his bike and so is push-started from the back of the grid, again at Snetterton, by U.S. Air Force captain Bob Cowan. (Photo by Gordon Keown) ]But history is never predictable, and so the something that was being lost was also being rediscovered by classic-bike racers. My English teammate himself was loath to embrace the new-tech world, and so in ’72, when he gave up his 500 Manx and his Aermacchi 350 Single, he did indeed buy a two-stroke. But it was a Scott Flying Squirrel, not a Yamaha, and he and his classic-racer colleagues helped ensure that, decades later, it was not merely the machines that were preserved. To find out what that was, you need not read about it; you need only to attend a classic-bike race anywhere in the world.There, you will find the true essence of British racing from the golden age: comradeship, or to put it more accurately, “mate-ship,” generated by the clubs to which racers belonged and in which they socialized. The biggest British racing club from my era was “Bemsee,” or the British Motor Cycle Racing Club, but in addition, I belonged to a half-dozen others.
Sociologists have written extensively about British sporting clubs and their importance to the national character, and the roadracing versions of British sporting clubs spread their influence throughout what Winston Churchill called “the English-speaking world.” So that, for example, when Paul Dean and I wanted to race the Team CW Isle of Man TT Suzuki GSX-R750 at the 1988 Bathurst, Australia, Arai 500 endurance race, we first had to join the St. George Motor Cycle Club, based near Sydney.
As Paul and I filled in the registration forms for joining the club at Bathurst the night before race weekend, I recall having a strange sense of déjà vu: Here in Oz, we were driving on the left, people spoke “Strine,” which so clearly evolved from British English of the 18th century, and the countryside had been transformed by the hands of other English-speakers, long gone, so that it was in places almost as much like England as it was unlike it. The St. George Motor Cycle Club, like the American Federation of Motorcyclists, and the nations in which they and we raced, were and are bound by ties that still bind us together, not merely as racers or even as motorcyclists, but as Anglophones, if not Anglophiles, for better or worse.
For me, and those like me from the far-flung remnants of the British Empire who were fortunate enough to live, work and race in Britain, attending the University of Brands Hatch, ear-’olin’ our way around the circuits with the other lads, there is no question: It was all for the better.
For those with Lucas electrics, however, it’s another story entirely.
