the tender age of 14, when John found a
derelict 1927 Indian V-twin abandoned
in a ditch, lugged it home on the train
an<;l restored it back to running order,
shortly. before doing the same thing
with a truck in similar condition, in
which he then drove himself to sChool.
His father, Bruce, was the owner of a.
cycle shop, and later became one of
New Zealand's leading property developers and founded a company which
John took over when Bruce died four
years ago. Befpre that, though, he'd
forged his own multifaceted career,
dropping out in favor of a long-haired
hippie lifestyle in the New Zealand
wilderness during his 20s, which only
ended when he bought an abandoned
stables in a suburb of Christchurch back
in 1979, using it as a base for making
and selling glass lamps and other items
of furniture.
Hang-gliding, motorcycling, restoring old British sports cars he'd bought
on the cheap, all had to be fitted in with
restoring the stables as a future home
during the evenings after work and on
weekends, doing all the work himself
even down to casting his own doorknobs and bathroom faucets, because he
couldn't find any he liked. The house
the Britten family lives in t9day is the
same one, complete with a two-story
conservatory covered by a glass roof
which opens automatically via John's
self-des.igned hydraulic system when
temperatures rise to a certain level.
It was all good practice for building
Britten motorcycles, though John's
future wife Kirsteen, a London-based
fashion model from Christchurch whom
he married in 1982, couldn't have
guessed that at the time. She and their
three children were a focal point of
John's hectic life, in spite of his efforts to
cram two full-time careers into one ijfetime.
With his own property development
company established in the 1980s, John
had time to fulfill his long-held ambition to build his own motorcycles, and
the Denco-Britten was the first step. Fast
but fragile, the closest it ever came to
winning a race W
