It was the summer of 1971, or maybe ‘72, the newly reformed Potteries Phoenix MCC was running it’s first treasure hunt, we were all young and with no old hands to guide us, we thought a 90 mile treasure hunt ought to be feasible on a Sunday afternoon! Fuzz had set the treasure hunt, as he wouldn’t be taking part as he was recovering from serious injuries after writing off his Commando. My old AJS was indisposed with head gasket problems (again) and so I was to ride the Panther and child/adult sidecar belonging to Rastus, a workmate, who was banned from driving (again). Another participant in this inaugural treasure hunt was a certain Dave Hancock who was riding his Bantam. Dave, or Hank as he was known (and always will be to some of us!) was a college mate of Rastus’.
I had never ridden a combo but it couldn’t be that difficult could it? I mean, it stood up on its own and couldn’t fall over and I’d read the theory in The Motor Cycle, as had everyone. I rode it home from the pub on the Saturday night, I don’t remember much about that, so it must have been ok!
Sunday, I went to collect Rastus and we made our way to Fuzz’s cottage from where we were all starting. I was introduced to Hank briefly but there were lots of others that I didn’t know either and I’m hopeless with names. There was a fair turnout as I remember and we all left the cottage at intervals for the ninety mile jaunt. When you consider the bikes we were riding and the severity of the clues it isn’t surprising that some people never returned and we never saw them again!
I struggled with the Panther, it was the accelerating round left handers that was the problem, it didn’t even accelerate downhill in a straight line! It wasn’t helped by the refusal of Rastus to get in the sidecar, he insisted on sitting on the pillion and the sidecar remained empty and thus often airborne. Somehow we managed to get a few clues, although we didn’t actually finish we just returned to Fuzz’s when it got late and we got tired of dragging the bike out of hedges and ditches. We were partaking of refreshment and reliving our near death experiences when Hank decided that he would like to add to his motorcycling CV and ride the Big Cat. (I ought to be able to get something about feline grace in there but it eludes me at present, perhaps I’ll come back to it!) So, Hank sets off from the cottage, down the incline, round the left hander over the bridge (‘take it easy into left handers and accelerate hard out’) and away up the hill, well done. Moments later we heard him coming back down the hill, then it all went quiet but we could see the trees moving!
Everyone, including Fuzz with his one good leg, dashed and hobbled off down the road to see if the bike was ok, well Hank would heal unless Rastus got to him first. When he’d shut off and braked for the right hand bend Hank had careered off the right-hand side of the road as the sidecar had tried to overtake the bike. The sidecar body was destroyed, the chassis was twisted and the forks and front wheel were badly bent but we managed to get it back to the cottage to assess the damage. What about Hank? Well he was ok, I think, on his feet and making excuses, he was walking wounded as we had managed to keep Rastus away from him.
Well that finished the day’s treasure hunt, except that Hank had to give me a lift home on his Bantam, no mean feat that as you will realise if you have seen the two of us together. Mind you we were slimmer then, we couldn’t have weighed more than 16 stones each!
Hank agreed to buy a replacement pair of forks for the Panther and we rebuilt it with an RAC box sidecar, and left all the damaged bits outside Fuzz’s house. The outfit lived to fight another day and became a regular in future exciting treasure hunts. We once lost a footrest in the side of an Austin down a narrow lane, and Potto had to abandon his Constellation outfit when it got tangled up in an electric fence in a ditch and he couldn’t touch it to remove it. Treasure hunts? It sounds like a war zone!
In retrospect I don’t think the forks that Hank bought us were very good quality as the front wheel fell off on Blackrock Beach when all the threads stripped.
Eventually Rastus got his licence back and took charge of the Panther and his own destiny, by then I’d got myself an old Triumph which was about 100 times more reliable than the Ajay, so we were all happy. Any way, that was how I met Hank!