I got knocked off my bike by a mobile library yesterday. As I was lying in the road, screaming in agony, the driver rolled down her window, put her finger to her lips and said ‘Shhhh…’.
Untrue, of course. But with urban myths spreading like wildfire in this age of the social media, I fear that one day that story may be taken as fact.
There’s a bit of a debate going on in The Classic Motorcycle as I post regarding Bert Hopwood, designer of British motorcycles and author of “Whatever Happened to the British Motorcycle Industry”? One hack is accusing the other of perpetuating the often-repeated allegory that Bert never rode a motorcycle, when in fact he was a dispatch rider during the Second World War.
Another instance of urban myths penetrating the bike world can be witnessed almost on a regular basis in Classic Motorcycle Mechanics, where it’s claimed that the motorcycle ridden by Tom Cruise (for whom I’ve frequently been mistaken) is a GPZ 750 re-badged as a 900 in order to accommodate the actor’s 5ft 7ins frame. Paramount Studios deny it, the cast and crew deny it, Tom himself denies it. Even his ex-wife Nicole Kidman denies it, which is perhaps even more pertinent since it is an open secret that Nicole is a BM member. I frequently receive private messages from her on this very subject, and though her communications are forthright she always ends her posts to me with a positive and upbeat postscript. (“Still miss you, tiger…Grrrr…..xxx NK.”)
But let’s move on to a story everyone has heard. When I started riding, the motorcycle test could be taken on a machine of any capacity from 51cc to 250cc (the upper limit for learner riders) by those who were aged 17 or over. This was a constant source of space-filling articles for the red-top newspapers, who never tired of pointing out that theoretically a teenager could gain a pass on a Honda C70 and immediately hop on to a 120 mph-plus superbike, though this rarely happened in practice. (Callow youth riding a step-thru and sporting a “17 today” sticker on his open-face Centurion pulls up beside the examiner after completing his test and is told he has passed. He instantly consigns his 70 cc steed into a litter bin and strides over to the brand-new, taxed and insured Kawasaki Z900 that awaits him at the roadside nearby, which he immediately ploughs into a bus queue of pensioners waiting for the number 21 to convey them to watch Matt Monro at the ‘Talk of the Town’ club in Hemel Hempstead. Come to think of it, that could become an urban myth in itself.)
To be fair, the test was absurdly simple, consisting of little more that a couple of laps around the block, while the examiner - on foot - followed your progress by walking down back streets to monitor your performance on a pre-arranged route. And it was this aspect of the test that spawned the story. Please take a look at this extract from a BBC website-
“Motorcycle tests used to be conducted with the examiner sending the rider off on a route whilst he wandered round observing from street corners. The emergency stop was tested by the examiner suddenly jumping out in front of the rider waving his clipboard. In Stockport one examiner testing a rider on a blue scooter jumped out in front of a blue scooter - the wrong one - and was run over.”
A true story? It’s too good not to be, isn‘t it? And the same type of accident occurred in Wallasey, only the riders were on identical 250 Hondas. And it also happened in York.
And Sydenham.
And Bristol. Aberdeen. Derby. Manchester. Aberystwyth. Sunderland. Bideford… so many places, in fact, that it would be easy to get the impression that the current labyrinthine test requirements were put into place as a response to complaints from late night drunks who were constantly tripping over all the abandoned and stricken motorcycle test examiners lying prone in dark back streets. No, not all of them; there’s an occasional variation to the story, which involves the examiner being immediately whisked to hospital, leaving the rider on test circling the roads for hours on end vainly anticipating a signal to perform his emergency stop.
The geographical location varies according to those who are telling the story. These narrators number many; but the one factor they have in common it was that they themselves were not involved in the collision. It was usually their cousin’s mate’s brother, who, if located, will correct the original storyteller’s mistake and identify the person concerned as their own sister’s manager’s husband. No report of such an accident has ever appeared in a newspaper, not even the aforementioned red-tops. And if there is anyone still alive who was actually involved in - or even witnessed - this alleged incident, then they must be on extended secondment at a Pollyfilla factory in Ulan Bator (formerly Urga) because he or she has never been traced in this country.
All this made me wonder whether such an accident ever occurred at all. That BBC reference certainly exists, but only as a comment submitted by Joe Public in response to a Beeb online article about driving tests posted in March 2005; it’s highly likely he was simply relating the legend he’d heard.
Even DVLA examiners have an instinct for survival; the idea that any one of them would leap out of an alley/jigger/ginnel (delete according to geographical location) like a ferret with Ralgex on his testicles directly in front of a moving motorcycle is difficult to take on board. In my own case, the examiner was so far in front of me when he gave the emergency stop signal that even after I came to a halt it would’ve been easily possible for a pack of wild dogs to run between us. (I know this because after I came to a halt, a pack of wild dogs ran between us. Two of them bit him. The Birkenhead test route was in a rough area.)
So it didn’t happen, then. Except that it did. At least once. The name of the rider on test was Frank Spencer. The date was 9th December 1978. And the location was Episode 5, Series 3 of the BBC TV programme “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em”, titled “King Of The Road“. Here’s the first paragraph of a summary of the episode from the “British TV Comedy” website;
“Frank has a new job as a motorbike dispatch rider. He has to take a motorbike test. The examiner tells him to drive around the block and stop when he gets the signal. Frank takes a wrong turning and the examiner steps out in front of the wrong motorcycle. He ends up in hospital while Frank rides around for hours looking for him.”
That’s the only documented and proven example of this type of accident I’ve found. Does any BM-er know of another?
There are a few other untrue but nevertheless widespread bike stories, but, on this thread, I’ll stick to those I’ve heard personally over the years. (One or two also appear on “snopes”, but there seems little point in simply cutting and pasting them.) In the meantime, if anyone else knows of any other “Motorcycle Myths”, please feel free to tell of them.
I love it when some people tell me about examiners stepping out on them on their test, when I know they had done their test after i'd done mine and my examiner never stepped out on me.
Consider me told off. A Ms. Nicole Kidman (see the first post on this thread, above) has sent me a private message pointing out that I didn't make it clear that the film involved in the debate as to whether her ex, Tom Cruise, was riding a Kawasaki GPZ 900 or a GPZ 750 was "Top Gun". Nicole never misses an excuse to pm me, and on this occasion she took the opportunity to use an appropriate alternative postscript - "Take my breath away xxx NK ". Thanks, Nicole.
Raggy makes a valid peripheral point. Motorcycling does have the effect of attracting the attention of bullshi... those who tell porkies, and these aren't necessarily all bikers. I've lost count of the times that elderly pub bores have tried to engage me in conversation on the grounds that I should be interested in their motorcycling experiences of their distant past - as well I might be, if they'd had any. To a man, they all tell me they rode exotic British machines like Vincents and Brough Superiors. If they claimed to have owned something more mundane - James Cadet, Francis Barnett Plover - I might be more inclined to believe them. I did meet a Scientologist in the 1970s who told me he'd once owned a DMW (Dawson's Motors Wolverhampton) and, my word, one would need plenty of faith to believe one of those machines would function adequately as a ride-to-work bike. His fellow-Scientologist Tom Cruse would have been decidedly unchuffed if he'd had to ride a Villiers-engined DMW Cortina in "Top Gun".
Right. Another myth. Anyone heard the one about three-wheeled cars? The story concerning these was that when one was driving, say, a Reliant Regal on a motorcycle licence, the reverse gear had to be disabled. However, this has a grain of truth in it, as it was indeed the legal position on the Isle of Man. The Manxman who alluded to this on a motorcycle website said that the local constabulary would check three-wheeled cars every so often to ensure they couldn’t travel backwards too quickly. However, he himself found the reverse gear on his Reliant very useful. Fortunately for him, the local bobby was a family friend who used to give him a month’s notice of the inspection so he could temporarily disable the appropriate mechanism. (I was disappointed to learn that this policeman was in the habit of wearing a check flat cap rather than a white helmet.) I don’t know whether this legislation still exists over there, or whether it referred to three-wheeled cars rather than three-wheeled vehicles. Even by the late 1970s, one or two Cossack Dnepr combos - which also had reverse gear - were probably making their way over to Douglas amongst the TT traffic, and, of course, these days trikes are common.
This is - or was - an example of the anomalies between the laws of the UK and those of the Isle of Man, which gives me the chance to debunk another urban myth. It is widely thought that the death penalty still exists in UK for treason and for arson in H.M. dockyards. No, it doesn’t. No EU country is allowed capital punishment in its constitution.
However, the Isle of Man is a British Crown Dependency, but not part of the United Kingdom, and as such only an associate member of the EU. And at the Court of General Court Delivery in Douglas in 1992 - 19 years after capital punishment was completely abolished on the mainland - one Anthony Robin Denys Teare became the last person in the British Isles to be sentenced to death. Like the Reliant-inspecting policeman, the judge, Deemster Harry Callow, didn’t stand on ceremony regarding traditional headgear and chose not to wear the black cap during sentencing.
It was known before the trial that Teare wasn’t going to hang. The Isle of Man didn’t have the facilities to carry out capital punishment; the last hanging had occurred there in 1872 at Castletown. What was supposed to happen was that he would be transferred to England, where the appropriate equipment still existed but would never be used, and the sentence would then be commuted to life imprisonment.
As it turned out, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. According to Wikipedia, “Following sentencing, Teare engaged a new lawyer, Louise Byrne, who immediately took the case to the appeal court where the conviction was quashed. A retrial was ordered, and a search for new evidence was made. At the second trial Teare was represented by Peter Thornton QC, an English counsel. William Kelly, a prison healthcare officer at the Isle of Man Prison, gave evidence that Teare had told him on a number of occasions of how he had murdered the victim Corinne Bentley. It was on his evidence alone that Teare was convicted of murder for the second time and entered the history books as the last man in the British Isles to be sentenced to death and the first in the Isle of Man to be sentenced to life imprisonment (all previous life sentences had been commuted from death sentences). Corinne's brother was in court as Teare, head bowed, received a minimum of twelve years imprisonment. He was sent to HMP Wakefield in Yorkshire.” Tynwald abolished capital punishment in 1993.
Well, that was somewhat morbid. On the lighter side, the Isle of Man football team isn’t allowed to enter the qualifying matches for the World Cup as it insists on playing all its matches over three legs. And I’m sure there’s a BM-er out there who could explore the subject of “The Birch” in more detail than I would care to. It’s that kind of site.
I've just found a version of my original post on "snopes", along with a few true Driving Test examples. See below.
A friend of mine recently told me a story concerning a young lad who was taking his motorcycle driving test for the first time. He had gone through all the various sections of the test and was left with just the emergency stop to do.The examiner asked him to drive round the block several times and said that he would step out into the road at one point and the boy would have to stop sharply — the expectation was that the would have to keep the motorcycle in a straight line and upright.Well, off round the block went the boy. However, he was delayed for a while as a delivery lorry was blocking the road. As he turned the final corner to drive down to where the driving examiner had been, he was surprised to see an ambulance and the examiner being placed on a stretcher. What had happened was the examiner had made rather an error. He had stepped out in front of the wrong motorcycle and the driver, not expecting this, had been knocked down.
Origins: The earliest print reference to this story is 1978 when it turned up in a collection of legends published that year. Healey and Glanvill, however, state the legend has been around in verbal form since the introduction of the bike test in England soon after World War II.
There's something especially satisfying about picturing a driving examiner run down during a test. Each of us has had to face the rigors of becoming licenced to drive, the wrestle with impersonal bureaucracy followed by a harrowing examination of our driving skills (during which, often as not, glaring shortcomings in our abilities come to light). It's natural for some of those feelings of resentment to be transferred to the person orchestrating the test.Driving exams are occasions fraught with opportunities for things to go terribly wrong. During one in 1995, a 78-year-old Illinois woman ran over her son, killing him. The examiner had the door open and was telling her to use her turn signals, and for some reason she got nervous or confused and put the car in reverse.Most mishaps that happen during driving examinations are of the minor variety, but every examiner has his or her war stories to tell. One from Fullerton (California) recalls an applicant who was pulled over for driving under the influence while taking the test. An examiner in Toronto (Canada) almost had his life ended when the son of the woman whose vegetable garden the applicant had just sent the car plowing through came after him with a 2x4. (Moral of the story; never back through a fence at the DMV.)It's not unusual either for applicants to show up driving stolen cars. As for fatalities, another examiner from Toronto recalls the time when a bus driver he was putting through his paces suffered a massive heart attack while attempting to execute a turn.But sometimes it's funny. Paula Anderson, nicknamed the Wicked Witch of the West, recalls the time she took a woman down a one-way street."Every time I told her to turn, she said she couldn't because the sign said she could only drive in the direction the arrow was pointing," Anderson says."When we came to a field at the end of the street, I told her she had to make a decision because we weren't driving an all-terrain vehicle."
I thought it was bubble cars that had no reverse gear, and the problem was that the door was at the front so if you parked close to a wall or the car in front, you couldn't get out.
James May, on Top Gear, demonstrated that it was possible to get trapped in a bubble car in the way described above. One hears so many stories about bubble car gearboxes; I read somewhere that one particular model had as many reverse gears as forward ones. And those front doors were modelled on aircraft canopies. It’s no coincidence that so many of them sported the names Messerschmitt and Heinkel.
OK. After that pleasant stroll into the world of Reliants, combos and bubble cars, let’s get back to two-wheelers.
On a freezing winter day, two policemen in a patrol car came across a motorcyclist stranded by the roadside. It turned out the ignition lock on the machine was frozen, so one of the policeman obligingly urinated on it. The warm “water” melted the iced-up lock, and the motorcyclist was able to ride away.
Shortly afterwards, the Chief Constable received a letter from a local vicar expressing his gratitude towards the two bobbies who had helped his daughter when she was having difficulty starting her bike.
Let’s take a look at the daughter first. Her physique could have been mistaken for that of a male, because of all the clothing she would be wearing on a cold day. However, she must’ve also had a masculine voice (unless she remained mute and relied on pointing and gestures, and how does one mime a frozen ignition lock?) and a mannish face. (She would’ve had to have her visor raised; otherwise it would have steamed up due to the weather).
This is just about possible. But why did she stop in such an isolated area? It must’ve been a remote location - a policeman isn’t likely to unzip his fly in the town centre. Did she break down? Unlikely - she rode straight off afterwards. Admittedly, the bike’s engine could have died and she only found that the ignition had frozen after she’d repaired the original fault, but working on the motorcycle would have been impossible in that temperature - she’d have had no feeling in her hands. Did she stop for a fag? Even the long “100” cigarettes don’t take so long to smoke that there would be time for the ignition to freeze.
“snopes”, in citing an even more ludicrous situation but along the same lines, points out that “Locks… do freeze… but to get down to those temperatures would mean undriveable road conditions for a motorcycle.”
Oh, and she had to be the daughter of a vicar, didn’t she?
Motorcycles in The Holy Bible. How many times have we heard or read the quotations? “The roar of Moses’ Triumph was heard in the hills.” Or sometimes it’s another Old Testament personality who’s riding the Bonnie/Thunderbird/Tiger - “The roar of Joshua’s Triumph was heard throughout the land.”
Well, yes. Look for these quotes using Google and they’re all over the place. Look for them in the Bible and they’re more difficult to find.
I know there are many different versions of the Holy Book, but I’ve yet to find either of the above quotes with a Biblical reference attached (e.g., “Jeremiah 29:11“). And I’ve been diligent in my search of both Old and New Testaments; so much so that my daughter asked me if I was planning to become a Jehovah’s Witness, which would be difficult as I never saw Jehovah’s Accident.
Some of these quotations linking the Bible with modern life should be taken with a pinch of salt. Even the provable ones can appear only in lesser-known versions of The Book. Joseph (of “the coat of many colours” fame) is revealed to be a late-starting tennis player in the New Living Translation edition alone. (“He was thirty years old when he began serving in the court of Pharaoh…” - Genesis 41:46.)
As Bible verses go, I’d recommend the aforementioned Jeremiah 29:11 when times are hard.
Similar to the frozen ignition lock story, but true. One very cold evening I took the Sportster a couple of miles to fill up. It wouldn't start afterwards. After ten minutes of faffing about I realized that the transponder fob had a battery, and as it was on the keyring with the ignition key, the cold air had flattened it. By the time I'd walked to the nearest supermarket to get a replacement, the fob in my pocket had warmed up enough to start working again so I didn't need the new battery after all. I kept the fob in my pocket after that. Of course if you keep the fob with your house keys in a rucksack and leave it in the garage when you set off, you can get to your destination but it won't start for the ride back.
![The Great Motorcycle Test Examiner Myth. - Forums [Biker Match]](/images/backgrounds/strips/8mobileLQ.jpg)
![The Great Motorcycle Test Examiner Myth. - Forums [Biker Match]](/images/backgrounds/strips/8desktopLQ.jpg)
