the road

[dorset]

not my ride. someone else's. 

 

The Road

The extravagance in which my surplus emotion expressed itself lay on the road. So long as roads were tarred blue and straight; not hedged; and empty and dry, so long I was rich.

Nightly I’d run up from the hangar, upon the last stroke of work, spurring my tired feet to be nimble. The very movement refreshed them, after the day-long restraint of service. In five minutes my bed would be down, ready for the night: in four more I was in breeches and puttees, pulling on my gauntlets as I walked over to my bike, which lived in a garage-hut, opposite. Its tyres never wanted air, its engine had a habit of starting at second kick: a good habit, for only by frantic plunges upon the starting pedal could my puny weight force the engine over the seven atmospheres of its compression.

Boanerges’ first glad roar at being alive again nightly jarred the huts of Cadet College into life. ‘There he goes, the noisy bugger,’ someone would say enviously in every flight. It is part of an airman’s profession to be knowing with engines: and a thoroughbred engine is our undying satisfaction. The camp wore the virtue of my Brough like a flower in its cap. Tonight Tug and Dusty came to the step of our hut to see me off. ‘Running down to Smoke, perhaps?’ jeered Dusty; hitting at my regular game of London and back for tea on fine Wednesday afternoons.

Boa is a top-gear machine, as sweet in that as most single-cylinders in middle. I chug lordlily past the guard-room and through the speed limit at no more than sixteen. Round the bend, past the farm, and the way straightens. Now for it. The engine’s final development is fifty-two horse-power. A miracle that all this docile strength waits behind one tiny lever for the pleasure of my hand.

Another bend: and I have the honour of one of England’ straightest and fastest roads. The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me. Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the wind which my battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with my speed to a shriek: while the air’s coldness streamed like two jets of iced water into my dissolving eyes. I screwed them to slits, and focused my sight two hundred yards ahead of me on the empty mosaic of the tar’s gravelled undulations.

Like arrows the tiny flies pricked my cheeks: and sometimes a heavier body, some house-fly or beetle, would crash into face or lips like a spent bullet. A glance at the speedometer: seventy-eight. Boanerges is warming up. I pull the throttle right open, on the top of the slope, and we swoop flying across the dip, and up-down up-down the switchback beyond: the weighty machine launching itself like a projectile with a whirr of wheels into the air at the take-off of each rise, to land lurchingly with such a snatch of the driving chain as jerks my spine like a rictus.

Once we so fled across the evening light, with the yellow sun on my left, when a huge shadow roared just overhead. A Bristol Fighter, from Whitewash Villas, our neighbour aerodrome, was banking sharply round. I checked speed an instant to wave: and the slip-stream of my impetus snapped my arm and elbow astern, like a raised flail. The pilot pointed down the road towards Lincoln. I sat hard in the saddle, folded back my ears and went away after him, like a dog after a hare. Quickly we drew abreast, as the impulse of his dive to my level exhausted itself.

The next mile of road was rough. I braced my feet into the rests, thrust with my arms, and clenched my knees on the tank till its rubber grips goggled under my thighs. Over the first pot-hole Boanerges screamed in surprise, its mud-guard bottoming with a yawp upon the tyre. Through the plunges of the next ten seconds I clung on, wedging my gloved hand in the throttle lever so that no bump should close it and spoil our speed. Then the bicycle wrenched sideways into three long ruts: it swayed dizzily, wagging its tail for thirty awful yards. Out came the clutch, the engine raced freely: Boa checked and straightened his head with a shake, as a Brough should.

The bad ground was passed and on the new road our flight became birdlike. My head was blown out with air so that my ears had failed and we seemed to whirl soundlessly between the sun-gilt stubble fields. I dared, on a rise, to slow imperceptibly and glance sideways into the sky. There the Bif was, two hundred yards and more back. Play with the fellow? Why not? I slowed to ninety: signalled with my hand for him to overtake. Slowed ten more: sat up. Over he rattled. His passenger, a helmeted and goggled grin, hung out of the cock-pit to pass me the ‘Up yer’ Raf randy greeting.

They were hoping I was a flash in the pan, giving them best. Open went my throttle again. Boa crept level, fifty feet below: held them: sailed ahead into the clean and lonely country. An approaching car pulled nearly into its ditch at the sight of our race. The Bif was zooming among the trees and telegraph poles, with my scurrying spot only eighty yards ahead. I gained though, gained steadily: was perhaps five miles an hour the faster. Down went my left hand to give the engine two extra dollops of oil, for fear that something was running hot: but an overhead Jap twin, super-tuned like this one, would carry on to the moon and back, unfaltering.

We drew near the settlement. A long mile before the first houses I closed down and coasted to the cross-roads by the hospital. Bif caught up, banked, climbed and turned for home, waving to me as long as he was in sight. Fourteen miles from camp, we are, here: and fifteen minutes since I left Tug and Dusty at the hut door.

I let in the clutch again, and eased Boanerges down the hill along the tram-lines through the dirty streets and up-hill to the aloof cathedral, where it stood in frigid perfection above the cowering close. No message of mercy in Lincoln. Our God is a jealous God: and man’s very best offering will fall disdainfully short of worthiness, in the sight of Saint Hugh and his angels.

Remigius, earthy old Remigius, looks with more charity on and Boanerges. I stabled the steel magnificence of strength and speed at his west door and went in: to find the organist practising something slow and rhythmical, like a multiplication table in notes on the organ. The fretted, unsatisfying and unsatisfied lace-work of choir screen and spandrels drank in the main sound. Its surplus spilled thoughtfully into my ears.

By then my belly had forgotten its lunch, my eyes smarted and streamed. Out again, to sluice my head under the White Hart’s yard-pump. A cup of real chocolate and a muffin at the teashop: and Boa and I took the Newark road for the last hour of daylight. He ambles at forty-five and when roaring his utmost, surpasses the hundred. A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness. Because Boa loves me, he gives me five more miles of speed than a stranger would get from him.

At Nottingham I added sausages from my wholesaler to the bacon which I’d bought at Lincoln: bacon so nicely sliced that each rasher meant a penny. The solid pannier-bags behind the saddle took all this and at my next stop a (farm) took also a felt-hammocked box of fifteen eggs. Home by Sleaford, our squalid, purse-proud, local village. Its butcher had six penn’orth of dripping ready for me. For months have I been making my evening round a marketing, twice a week, riding a hundred miles for the joy of it and picking up the best food cheapest, over half the country side.

[dorset]

this was one of lawrence's broughs. he owned five of them in all, not a small achievement when you factor in that only three hundred were ever made.

 

[dorset]

the last day:

By Nigel Winter

12:52PM BST 20 May 2015

 

The incident was over in seconds; the distant roar of a powerful motorcycle, probably travelling far faster than anyone appreciated. And then the cycle was knocked from under a schoolboy, who was left dazed to ponder who it was that was lying face down by the roadside. Only one man on the Isle of Purbeck rode such an expensive motorcycle. That man was Lawrence of Arabia.

From that moment on, a corner of Dorset went into lockdown. Lawrence was taken away in an army truck, a guard was placed on his cottage and there was a media blackout. No one came. No one went.

The two schoolboys involved in the incident (one of whom had been knocked off his bicycle) who had started the day looking for bird's eggs were wide-eyed and in custody. Most people in Britain did not believe MI5 actually existed. Most people in rural Dorset had not even heard of the organisation and now the county was teeming with its curious members.

Thomas Edward Lawrence CB DSO's beloved 998cc Brough Superior motorcycle had a tarpaulin thrown over it before it was secretly driven away on the back of a Ford truck. This was the very motorcycle that Lawrence prophetically described as "…a skittish motorcycle with a touch of blood in it".

The Brough Superior SS100 on which Lawrence met his end appealed to his complex personality. His life after Arabia was a mass of contradictions. He wanted to avoid the fame that Arabia had brought him and disappeared into the ranks, albeit after telling the press. He was troubled after the revolt in the desert and anxious to see that Britain kept her promise to the Arabs. The spectre of public revelation of his illegitimacy haunted him.

Motorcycles presented him with the escape. And it was another showman in the form of George Brough who built him the "Rolls-Royce Of Motorcycles" and personally guaranteed that each of the eight Lawrence owned in his lifetime would top 100mph.

Lawrence was gushing in his appreciation: "Yesterday I completed 100,000 miles since 1922 on five successive Brough Superiors… thank you for the road pleasure I got out of them… your present machines are as fast and reliable as express trains, and the greatest fun in the world."

And he should know. His trips could range from 500 to 700 miles per day visiting friends from Winston Churchill to Nancy Astor and managing to race with a Sopwith Camel biplane en route. Lawrence of Arabia was never destined to die in an old people's home. Instead, 80 years ago this week, his life was drawing quietly to a close in a secluded corner of England, shrouded in almost obsessive secrecy. For six days he fought for his life until on May 19, 1935 he succumbed to his injuries.

The coroner Ralph Neville Jones was called and duly inspected the motorcycle in the course the inquest. The boys who entered police custody stating that a black car had been involved in the accident now emerged denying any such knowledge, thereby planting the seeds of a conspiracy theory that has never been established or comprehensively dismissed.

After the accident, the motorcycle spent three months in the garage in Dorset that had serviced it. George Brough offered to renovate the bike for the princely sum of £40 but Lawrence's brother Arnold baulked at the price – the bike cost £180 when new and the average wage was £3 per week. Eventually the bike was sold back to Brough, who carried out the repairs. It was then sold to a Cambridge dealer in whose window it languished for "publicity purposes".

Publicity. Lawrence once said: "I suppose they'll come back to rattle my bones." Of course they would, he'd make sure of it. Even before David Lean's masterpiece starring Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, the American journalist Lowell Thomas knew a star when he saw one. His first account of the desert campaign alone ensured Lawrence's immortality. His passing was front page news. Clouds Hill was besieged by souvenir hunters and pressmen as if to portend media habits to come. Arnold Lawrence had to quickly have bars installed at the windows of his brother's remote Dorset cottage. On Monday, May 20 the papers hit the newsstands: "Lawrence the Soldier Dies to Live Forever" rang out the Daily Sketch. And there, immortalised beneath Lawrence, was his purposeful Brough Superior.

Long before The Great Escape or Girl on a Motorcycle, a popular figure was giving momentum to the motorcycle as a brand. But George Brough's tiny factory was otherwise employed throughout the war and motorcycle production never resumed thereafter. Of the 3,000 models produced some 1,100 remain on the road, helped by a flow of spares that continued to be produced right up until 1969. By this time the world had inescapably moved on and the chequered flag fell for the very last time. Or so they thought.

Small numbers and Lawrence's association guaranteed the Brough's value and a decent one will today set you back £100,000. Six of the eight Lawrence Broughs are beyond certain identification. But the final Lawrence Brough splits its time between the Imperial War Museum and the National Motor Museum. Many have tried to purchase it, without success. One vintage motorcycle dealer in southern England received an approach from the agent of an unidentified Middle Eastern buyer who put £750,000 on the table; it didn't come close. The real value "could" be in excess of £1.5million.

But the right brand has a phoenix-like quality, as both revitalised Triumph and now Indian motorcycles can testify. And now a hand-built Brough Superior for the 21st century has emerged. Instantly recognisable and cunningly modernised, today's SS100 will set you back £50,000, which is roughly the equivalent in real terms with the price in 1935.

The current Brough Superior Limited makes every bit as much of its association with Lawrence of Arabia as the late George Brough intended. Clearly he remains very good for business. Even so, if you are interested in purchasing one of these very exclusive motorcycles, arranging a corresponding race with a Sopwith Camel might not be so easy.

 

the last bike:

 

if you haven't read the seven pillars of wisdom, your life is incomplete.