Peter Kneale's
Updated June 11
2023.
© Copyright Jan Siljestrom, Orebro, Sweden.
Here is an interesting article written in the official TT-program 1968.
Thanks to Hurple Pelmet for the information.
For Ever on
the Map
By
DENNIS MAY
In literal fact, only
six riders ever put themselves on the T.T. map, so be careful how you use this
cartological figure of speech. Walter Brandish is commemorated at Brandish
Corner, Archie Birkin at Birkin's Bend, Wal Handley at Handley's Cottage and
the Walter Handley Memorial Seat, Bill Doran at Doran's Bend, and Jim Guthrie
and Les Graham by their respective courseside memorials.
There you have the entire membership of the smallest
and most exclusive non-club associated with the world's greatest road circuit.
You can't even stretch it to eight by including Kate of Kate's Cottage and
Sarah of Sarah's ditto, because no matter what their other claims to fame,
these ladies weren't T.T. riders. Neither was Ginger Hall.
Brandish Corner, a fastish left-hander between
Creg-ny-baa and Hillberry acquired its name in 1923 when Walter Brandish, who
finished second in the previous year's Senior, crashed there during practice
and broke a leg. This recalls the only case on record of a lady spectator
undressing in public-well, partly undressing-at a rider's request, in the cause
of safety.
The late Geoff Davison, whose numerous and
indispensable books about the island races are his indestructible memorial,
tells the story in T.T. Tales. Following fairly close behind Brandish, Geoff
stopped without difficulty, dropped his bike and sprinted back the way he'd
come, realising that unless he could hang out warnings, fast, a chain-reaction
shunt was inevitable. It was then that he spotted the woman in the red blouse,
peering worriedly over her garden gate. She didn't argue or act coy or
anything... just de-bloused in a flash and surrendered the non-standard flag to
Geoff. Situation saved.
Brandish, as it transpired, never negotiated Brandish
Comer in a race, once it had borrowed his name. These practice injuries
sidelined him for that year and he didn’t return to the Island after '23.
By a coincidence that is really neither here nor
there, the Brooklands shed that rejoiced in, or anyway, tolerated my services
in the late twenties, immediately neighboured the sheds of two members-to-be
of the non-club; so I knew them pretty well. One was Archie Birkin, whose
brother, the great Tim Birkin was of Bentley and Maserati fame, was to die in
1933 from car racing injuries; the other was Walter Handley.
Birkin's Bend, like Brandish Corner, owes its name to
a practice episode, in this case a tragic one. Prior to, and in 1927, the date
in question, riders shared the circuit with normal traffic during training.
Archie, intent on holding his line through the hitherto nameless right-left
swerve about a mile north of Kirk Michael, didn't see the trademan's van
coming, and vice versa. They collided, and that, alas, was finis for C. A. C.
Birkin.
The T.T. and racing's other major leagues, were at
that time benefiting by a year-by-year intake of young, enthusiastic and for
the most part extremely likeable combatants from the senior universities, and
Archie, a Cambridge U.A.C. man himself, typified this school. Wins he could
take, or leave alone – racing was what mattered. I can see him now, with his
voluminous silver grey bags, black shirt (a fashion he'd pioneered at
Brooklands), slicked hair and straight-grained pipe, as though it were only
yesterday.
Wal Handley's T.T. crashes, in the course of an Island
career that lasted thirteen years and included twenty-eight races, were
numerous and mostly dramatic, so the particular shunt that put him on the map
must presumably have been a real lulu; nevertheless, oddly enough, nobody seems
to be able to remember when it occurred or which mount came from under him.
Where it happened is no secret, of course: Handley's Cottage, scene of many
another riders' downfall, is a foxy S-bend a few hundred yards short of the
12th mile-stone.
Elsewhere – at Quarter Bridge, to be exact-the great
hearted Wal is commemorated by the Walter Handley Memorial Seat, giving
successive generations of T.T. fans the opportunity of resting in peace as they
reflect how richly he deserves to. Publicly dedicated in 1948, seven years
after he'd crashed to his death in his wartime capacity as an Air Transport
Auxiliary officer, the Seat bears the apt inscription: "None ever passed
this way more bravely".
It's on record that, the very first time he saw the
T.T. course, Wal started his maiden practice lap counter-clockwise, instead of
clockwise. However, this small misunderstanding disposed of, he proceeded, in
the race itself (1922 Lightweight) to break the lap record in his very first
lap, obviously from a standing start. And in case that wasn't enough to erase
his "I'm-going-this-away" gaffe from the memory of tongue-clicking
officialdom, he further proceeded to lead all nine of the T.T's that he rode
between his 1922 debut and 1925 inclusive, for greater or lesser distances…
The fact that Handley actually won only four T.T's was
a measure of his consistently cruel luck and his apparent belief that the bikes
of his day ought to have had stamina to match the relentlessness of his
throttle wrist. They hadn't. He'd been born twenty years too early. I remember his
brother Tom telling me that, by his book (Tom's), the greatest race Wal ever
rode in the Island was one of the many he failed to finish-the '29 Senior.
After falling off at Greeba, with negligible damage to his AJS and none to
himself, he stayed where he was to render sorely needed aid to three others
who'd come unstuck at the same spot. These included Doug Lamb (Norton), who'd
been mortally hurt. When he'd done all he could, Wal quietly retired. The
A.C.U. afterwards wrote him an official letter of appreciation.
The T.T. cartographers went further than just giving a
name to a previously anonymous landmark when authority set up the Guthrie
Memorial – they banished an old name (the Cutting) to make way for a successor
with a better claim to a place on the map. II isn't too fanciful to imagine a
symbolical connection between Jimmy Guthrie's sky-high rating in his
profession on the one hand and the exalted site occupied by his memorial, on
the other (this shoulder of Snaefell can be seen from Guthrie's native Scotland
in clear weather); in fact, though, the spot was chosen because it was here
that he retired in his last T.T., the 1937 Senior. Weeks later he crashed
fatally while easily leading the German G.P.
Although by no means inexperienced in other forms of
racing when he first bestrode the T.T. starting grid, his debut in the 1923
Junior gave no inkling of the greatness that was coming to him. In fact, his
handling of a works Matchless was so undistinguished that it was three years
before he got his second ride. First of his six victories, on an AJ.S. in the
250 Lightweight, came three years later again, in 1930.
A man of strong personal allegiances, Guthrie kept all
his eggs in one basket during the last seven years of his life, matching the
engineering brilliance of Joe Craig's works Nortons with his own superb
physical fitness. It was this flawless man-and-machine combination that yielded
five outright T.T. victories (including the then rare Junior/Senior double in
'34) – and one of the most sensational, shim-thickness non-wins in history.
This was the Senior of 1935, in which, after receiving a winner's ovation, he
learnt that Stanley Woods had beaten him by four seconds.
At the diagonally opposite extremity of the course
from the Guthrie Memorial way down in south-west comer, you'll find Doran's
Bend, preserving the memory of a rider whose T.T. fame and popularity were
deservedly disproportionate to the number of his rides and the extent of his
statistical success. In fact, Bill Doran only amassed four Junesworth of Island
experience (1948, '49, '51, '53), yet he won't be forgotten in a hurry. As in
Wal Handley's case, it's hard to be certain which incident, which year, put
Bill on the map, though it may well have been the evening practice crash in 1952
(wrong year, should be 1950. NOTE BY SILJA.) that reduced him to "walking
wounded" rank and kyboshed both his Junior and Senior entries (on works
AJ.S's).
This training oopsy-daisy reportedly occurred at Glen
Helen, which is no significant distance from the very fast left-hander, just
beyond Ballig, that T.T. audiences have known for fifteen years or more as
Doran's Bend.
Bill himself, of course, is best remembered as a
hard-trying, perennially gutful member of the Plumstead taskforce, a mite
overshadowed by brilliant team-mate Les Graham – always crowding but never
quite breaking into the elusive superstar class. It's said that people
remember straight-up wins and promptly forget all other placements, even
worthily high ones; but there was something special about Doran's
runner-up-ship to Geoff Duke in the 1951 Senior T.T.: apart from Bill's
Porcupine twin, the first fourteen finishers were all Nortons. Against
overwhelming odds like those, if you can't give the entire rival pack a view up
your megaphones you can hardly do better than slip in edgeways between first
and third...
Younger and less weathered than its Handley and
Guthrie counterparts, the Leslie Graham Memorial stands a short distance before
the Bungalow, early on the Mountain descent. This is a locality abounding in
the type of fast, open bend of which Les, a stylist par excellence, was a
master.
Like Handley before him, he was a flyer in more senses
than one. A wartime R.A.F. bomber pilot, he gave a personal demonstration of
Per Ardua spirit in the 1949 Senior T.T. that has seldom if ever been surpassed
in Island annals. This was the race of which Geoff Davison, that ace chronicler
of the June scene, wrote: "For breathless excitement I have known nothing
to touch it, and I have ridden in, or reported on, eighty T.T's".
After two blistering laps, three riders were
dead-heating for the lead, a thing without precedence in twenty-nine years of
T.T. history. One of them was Les, at last revealing some of the true potential
of the slow-maturing Porcupine A.I.S. Another was co-Porcupiner Ted Friend, the
third Bob Foster (Guzzi Twin). Then Friend crashes, Foster retires with a
cooked clutch, and Graham, after an interim spell in second place, takes over
the lead (unshared now) on lap six. One to go. Surely he can't lose... Or can
he?
Alas, he can and does, though not through any lack of
the riding virtuosity that is to win him the World's 500 c.c. Championship for
"forty-nine". A few miles from the finish his Porc cuts dead with a
sheared armature shaft. So now for the Per Ardua bit. Coasting the downhill
stretches and pushing where there is no help from gravity, he soon becomes so
exhausted that he doesn't realise he's using the wrong side of the road. Riders
after rider passes the gasping pedestrian in leathers, on the road and in race
position, both. Finally, in a state of collapse but still managing to muster a
smile, he bisects the line-tenth man home. For Prince Philip, watching his
first T.T., this must have been a memorable introduction to our sport.
It was a crash on an MV at Bray Hill four years later,
in the 1953 Junior race, that ended the life of Leslie Robert Graham, who thus
died with his life's greatest ambition – to win a Senior T.T. – still
unfulfilled. "Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it
promises"... but the gallant Les went to his rest with a T.T. victory on
his dossier. In the same week that he was killed, he'd scooped the 125
Lightweight for MV.
Rest a while at the Graham Memorial next time you're
up there in the Stone Bridge vicinity, and spare a thought for the pastmaster
it commemorates. It isn't every season, or even every generation, that produces
men of his quality.
Click to enlarge! This map is updated September 19th 2018.
