Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1980's

~ m rOB LINE v.n()."~jl ~ II) SWftIffll; (.0 00 Q') ~ ~ Q.) c: ;::3 ~ Neale Shilton is welcomed to Sweden by a Tor Line hostess. rrh"e~lfist Triumph ride By Neal S1l1lton' I have good reason to remember that the evening of Friday, March 29, 1968 was wet, dark and depressing outside the windows of my office at the Triumph factory.· It was probably just as wet and dark 2~ years earlier when I was about . . b f to J~m the ~ompany ut ar from depressmg as I put away 20 my Army uniform and prepared the riding gear which was to prove quite inadequate for the 1000 miles per week which the new job demanded in English weather conditions. Now those miles and years had gone by and I had just finished typing the letter which announced my resignation as the sales boss. My thoughts were as depressing as the cold rain which beat against the office window and on the roof of the quiet factory no longer alive with the sounds of lateworking machines and men. As I left my desk to switch off the lights and go home, the telephone shrilled. The call was from British Television, Birmingham, appealing for a rider to make an urgent journey to a town 80 miles northwards and bring back to the Birmingham stu.dios a news film for showing on the 10:00 p.m. bulletin. The time was then 6:30. I had arranged for test riders to carry films in, the past but always for football games and with plenty of time. In fact I had done several myself and welcomed the fee which was good for a couple of botties of scotch. What was the urgency this time? The Foreign Secretary, George Brown, had suddenly announced his resignation and would be giving his reasons in a statement to be made at 8:00 p.m. to the officials of his constitueney in Belper where the'TV cameras were now, heading. The whole country was waiting for his statement on the 10:00 p.m. screens and if the British National Television Corporation was not to be ridiculed by millions of its license-paying viewers, the interview film had to be in the Birmingham studios by 9:50. The voice on the telephone was that of the news' program chief and he was anxious..His supremo in, London had left him in no dO\lbt that his future prospects would be questionable if George Brown was not on the national network at 10 of the cloc~. As I talked on the phone and explamed that all the test riders' had long since gone home, I looked out of the window on theforbiddingnightand.agreedtodo the ride but blew the chance to deman~ treble fee. In the factory was the new 40 cubic inch Police Thu~derbirdSaint which had been prepared fOT what was to be my last long-distance publicity journey for the company. I had been invited to ride to Sweden and ope'1 the International Motorcycle Exhibition in Stockholm on April 3. The schedule was to leave Meriden on Sunday, March 31, get the evening boat from an east coast port to Gothenburg, then do a fast ride from there to Stockholm on April 2 with two Stops en route for press and TV interviews, There would be a press reception at the end of the journey timed for 7:00 p.m., which meant a tight schedule on roads which I had been warned were still suffering from the ravages of the Swedish winter. In fact, the winter weather would not ease before the end of May. I had accepted the invitation in February a few days after a meeting with Lionel Jofeh, the boss of BSA/Triumph, when he had had promised to change the policies which I was sure would lead to disaster for the two factories. Putting my job on the line I had given him a promise in return. Unless there was active evidence by the end of March that the policies had changed direction, he would have my resignation and its reasons would be made "known to the entire workforce at Meriden. The Jofeh promise was broken but I kept mine and the letter arrived on his desk at Birmingham on April 1, exactly 22 years from the day I joined the Triumph company. By the time he read it I was two hours from the Swedish coast and not looking forward to the ride to Stockholm. Not because of the bad weather and road conditions but because the Triumph down below on the car deck of the ship was a lethal piece of machin- ery. At 6:45 on the' Friday evening I had ridden it out of the factory into the wet night and headed nonhwards to BeJper in the county of Derbyshire. At the bottom of Meriden hill there was a ripple on the road surface, well known to the Triumph test riders and myself and caused by the braking of trucks as they entered the village speed restriction lone. Countless times I had ignored the undulation as the front forks and rear suspension dipped momentarily but nothing more than that and without any effect on straightline stability. Over many years the uncertainty of Triumph handling in tne higher speed ranges had become something of a legend, though accepted as a characteristic, but in all of my many hundreds of thousands of miles, I never had any problem. Until now. The front end shook like a dog coming out of water. This was the one time when I had not road-tested a machine on which I had to do a long distance journey and it was an omission I was to regret all the wa y to Stockholm. I also regretted that the road testing of every Triumph had ceased several years earlier when the test roller equipment qad been installed in the factory. Road dirt and especially winter salt on the underside of the mudguard blades and on the wheels had caused problems when machines were uncrated weeks later in America, Australia and other destinations. The electrically-driven equipment, which simulated the loads imposed on engine, transmission; gearbox and brakes, could not monitor handling behavior. The Belper mission had to ..rontinue and with the lights of Birmingham reflected from the rain clouds in the west I rode northwards towards the cathedral town of Lichfield, where I joined the road which changed direction northeast to Burton on Trent, the original center of the English beer industry. Then on to the city of Derby, the home of Rolls Royce. The rain was incessant and the road surface unfriendly, especially to a machine which behaved like it had 80 psi in the front tire, but at least the pools of water evidenced the bumps to be avoided. The lights of Derby appeared and I took the ring road, hoping that it wO!-1ld somewhere signpost the way to Bel per, which I knew was a small town about 15 miles northwards on the road which climbed up to the Derbyshire hills. Few people had ever heard of the place until it became associated with Geor/1;e Brown. but now it had become the locus of attention for the millions of people who waited to hear what he had to say about his resignation from his position as supremo in command of the foreign affairs department of the British Government. The Triumph rider pressed on through the wet night to collect the film which would disclose his reasons to the nation. I rode into the market place of Belper and found the town strangely quiet considering the importance which had been given to it during the day by the news media, but from one of its 25,000 inhabitants I discovered that the scene of activities was at a hotel three miles away. The time was 8: 15 when I arrived there and filtered the Triumph through the crowds of people to the television crew in the car park. George Brown had not arrived and unless he came within the next 15 minutes, there would be no film at the Birmingham studios for the 10:00 p.m. news bulletin. At 8:25 his car appeared and was surrounded by press reporters as it stopped, then moved on as he decided to park in a different place. It was typical of George Brown to make the grand entrance. I helped to carry the camera cables to the new position and as the ex'·Foreign Secretary opened the door of his car the TV interviewer he,ld out the microphone and asked the question to which the whole of Britain awaited the answer. "What statement will you be making tonight, Sir?" Not even pausing as he made his way to the hotel entrance, George Brown replied, "I shall probably be thanking the Belper Labour Party Committee for a good dinner." The TV man appealed for a few comments on the national importance of the occasion and so did the eager group of press reporters, but Brown hecame angry and displayed the rude temperament which had-created headline news more than once in his career. In vain the media pursued him into the botel until a slammed door ended their efforts. I had oneand-a-half hours to get the film to the Birmingham studios and it was going, to disappoint millions of people. However, I completed the mission, watched the news bulletin on a monitor screen and rnde the 30 miles home to Stratford-on-Avon throul'{h the still-pouring ram, wondenng what could be done about the Triumph steering in the short time before I started the journey to Sweden. Incidentally, I was to meet George Brown again three years later at a British trade exhibition in Scandinavia and cause him some annoyance, which was some recampense for the long wet ride I did to get an unpleasant piece of film. After his resignation from the Government and the post of Foreign Secretary, he was given a peerage and became Lord George Brown. He then joined a leading textile manufacturing company in a top executive position and he was their representative at the exhibition where we met. The show was opened by H.R.H., The Duke of Kent. whom I knew from his Army days and when he toured the show, Lord George Brown was very annoyed when I persuaded the Duke to leave the textile exhibit and go with me to the Norton s,tand to see the machine which I had ridden from England. In May, 1985 Lord George again ~ade the headlines and achieved his greatest publicity with a whole page in each of the national newspapers. He had died in retirement. On my ride home I had come to the conclusion that there was no oil in the forks and by the time I had found that I was wrong the following day, it was too late to /1;0 back to the factory and change the whole assembly. Nobody would have been there to help and the fairing added to the complications so I resigned myself to a hard ride to Stockholm. Sunday, March 31, was the day of the annual general meeting of the Triumph Owners Club, of which I was the president, and the meeting was held at the Triumph factory. I presided over the morning proceedings and 500 members waved farewell as I departed for Sweden at noon. One mile along the road at Allesley village on the outskirts of Coventry, I stop,ped at the post office and mailed my letter to Lionel Jofeh. Copies had been left on my office desk for distribution to the union represen tatives in the factory. They were to continue the fight I had waged against bad management and policies. It seemed appropriate that on this last of many Triumph long distance publicity rides, I should be using a sub-standard mac.hine. My route from Coventry to the east • coast port of Immingham was via the city-of Leicester, and then along,the :lId Roman road to Lincoln, where I had arranged to meet a man whom I had admired many times on the Isle of Man circuit. Freddie Frith, honored by his country with the Order of the British Empire. winner of four IT races and many European Grands

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