It is amazing what looking at an old photograph can do. I have told the story below many times in many different surroundings but it was only yesterday that a friend posted up this picture on Facebook and, amazingly, it features the two motorcycles that are featured in the story, parked side by side.
In 1961 we were living in Caringbah. A good friend of our family was a motorcycle policeman based at Sutherland. He used to often drop in to our place while on duty and have a cuppa with mum and dad. His name was Wes Jarvis and he had been an attendant at mum and dad’s wedding in 1948. His dad was employed by the Water Board and was the curator of Fort Denison, that outcrop of rock in the middle of Sydney Harbour that had been used as a prison for many years back in the convict days.
He was about 6’6″ tall and built like a brick outhouse and Paul and I, being young boys, idolised him. We used to love listening to his stories of policing and chasing bad guys. At the time he was riding a gleaming Triumph like the one in the picture. Then, one day he turned up at our place but, instead of riding the Triumph, he was riding a BMW like the other bike in the picture. Wes was NOT happy, he hated the thing as did most of the other guys at the station. However, they were stuck with them and so they had to put up and shut up.
After a couple of months, Wes told us that there was a revolt in the offing and that the boys were figuring out a way to get rid of the slow BMWs and get their Triumphs back. And this is how they did it. They would park their bikes on the footpath at known “hot spots” and, when a speeder roared by, they would ride the bike down over the gutter and head off in pursuit. It didn’t take long before this rough treatment started showing up in constant problems with the BMW’s mufflers. Soon the bikes were spending a lot of time in “dock” having their exhausts repaired. It didn’t take very long before the “powers that be” decided that the German bike was just not robust enough for tough Australian conditions and they were withdrawn, replaced by the latest model Triumph. Needless to say, the “boys” ceased their “footpath” antics, the bikes lasted well and more speeding motorists were caught because the Triumph was actually fast enough to do so.
Of such anecdotes is the rich tapestry of motorcycling comprised.