Volume 5, Issue 2: Fall 2009
The Road Worst Traveled
Book Review
An Anthology of Early British Motorcycling
Literature
Edited by Tim Fransen
Essex-Dakar Books, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-9562467-0-7
Tom Goodmann
Editor Tim Fransen brings
together three early twentieth-century narratives of motorcycle travel
literature in a hefty volume that aptly plumbs the depths of what was once
called British pluck. Captain W. H. L. Watson’s Adventures of a Despatch Rider, Lady Warren’s Through Algeria & Tunisia on a Motor-Bicycle, and C.
K. Shepherd’s Across America by
Motor-Bicycle take us across three geographical areas in one brief era,
1915 to 1922, modernism’s annus mirabilis,
and the End of All That. The
wrap-around cover photo features C. K. Shepherd’s 1919 Henderson; a few maps
and photographs accompany the texts throughout. (Interactive color maps are available at http://essex-dakar.org/2009_mtl/.) The texts have been sourced from the
Internet Archive and as such bear the charm of their original respective
typographies, including a few errors, and signal the temporal differences
between then and now.
The proceeds from this
volume support Riders for Health, a
not-for-profit organization providing transportation for health workers in
Africa (www.riders.org), sponsored both by MotoGP and by the Federation Internationale de Motocyclisme
(FIM). Along with the Editor’s
Notes, there is a brief notice for the International
Journal of Motorcycling Studies, and a Foreword by Steven E. Alford and
Suzanne Ferriss, the editors of this journal, who frame these three narratives
with keen reference to motorcycle cultural milestones from early women riders
to the Long Way Down lads, and to
broader theories of travel and travel writing.
Watson’s diary-like
account of his service as a dispatch rider in the early months of the First
World War offers the tedium and terror of wartime witness: periods of waiting,
boredom and leave-time excursions, leading to incidents of utter confusion and
a few brushes with danger. Along
with his companions in motorcycle dispatch, and with the telephone and
telegraph, when such communications were possible, Watson was part of the
nervous system of the Entente forces; as such, he and his fellow dispatch
riders were attached to a signal corps. His account contains little about the
machine he rode, excepting episodes of mechanical failure; in a note he
recommends the Blackburne as “the finest and most even-running of all
motor-cycles,” preferring it to the Douglas and, presumably, the Triumph. Sidecars were eventually attached to
most dispatch vehicles; Watson’s bike clearly served him well on roads that
were often blocked with troops and armament, slippery with rain and greasy mud,
often made of bone-rattling pavé, and occasionally within the sites of enemy
guns.
Written as a series of
letters between August 1914 and May 1915, what the entries lack in terms of
narrative arc they more than compensate for in details of endless movement to
temporary quarters, meals better and worse, military setbacks, broken
communications, and pleas for support from a wider British public. Lamenting in an introductory letter the
death of his friend in this “monstrous war,” Watson adds, “Yet I am still
meeting people who think that war is a fine bracing thing for the nation, a
sort of national week-end at Brighton.” He took part in military actions including Mons, the Marne, and Ypres;
he survived to read about the horrors of Verdun and of the Somme that lay
ahead.
Through Watson’s eyes we
witness both the disintegration and the remarkable resiliency of life in town,
village, and countryside (including his very good fortune in finding food and
drink), and we are given his impressions, not always wholly kind, of many ordinary
people caught in the middle of war. Among momentary impressions, he relates the inability of himself and his
comrades to understand members of the Lahore Division: “we could not even
vaguely guess what they were thinking.”
Watson is nonetheless self-conscious
about his relations to professional soldiers, aware of the sudden privileges
afforded him: “Think for a moment of what happened at the beginning of August
[1914]. More than a dozen ’Varsity
men were thrown like Daniels into a den of mercenaries. We were awkwardly privileged
persons—full corporals with a few days’ service. Motorcycling gave superlative
opportunities of freedom. Our
duties were `flashy,’ and brought us into familiar contact with officers of
rank . . . In short, we who were soldiers of no standing possessed the
privileges that a professional soldier could win only after many years’ hard
work.” It is interesting to
speculate why the military leadership thought Oxbridge men particularly suited
for the motorcycle corps; the decision certainly signals an elite status to the
assignment.
Of the various vehicles
considered for a trip just after the war across Algeria and
Tunisia—“public car, char-à-banc, or . . . private car”—Lady Warren
and her companion, the otherwise unidentified “P.,” reject all because they
make the travelers dependent on “the transatlantic company who have flooded the
route with tourists.” It is
travel, not tourism, which Lady W. and P. have in mind. Yet when “the idea of the motor-bike
and side-car was first mooted,” she writes, “my spirit shrank within
me—me, who had only once or twice, with blenched face and turned-up toes
and bated breath, been threaded through traffic and whizzed around corners at
what felt like the peril of my life, in a side-car!” Still, when P. promises her only “little runs here and there
from Algiers and other towns,” she is aboard. A four horsepower belt-driven
renovated 1918 Triumph with a Dunhill sidecar was their vehicle for what turned
out to be a journey of just over 1700 miles—though not all of them with
the sidecar, as you may read. Their average speed was 19 mph. And of the early travelers in the volume, P. and Lady Warren enjoyed the
best roads by far.
Lady Warren may be the
best prose stylist of the three as well, writing with a great deal of verve and
humor, often at her own expense. Downplaying the value and adventurousness of her account for more
seasoned veterans of North Africa, she narrates with a blend of condescension and
the experienced traveler’s sense of acceptance. Given the locus of the journey, her narrative is among
the three most filled with commentary on matters ethnic, cultural, and
historical. It is clear as well
that the route they planned to travel changed with the circumstances of
weather, time, and bureaucracy, all of which both seemed to negotiate
handily. At one point, trying to
reach Tunis via a frontier post, Lady Warren relates: “We were very
tactful. About thirty francs’
worth of tact and we were free.” Following a wreck that sends the sidecar flying over the top of the
bike, she inquires of P: “‘Are you dead?’ I said in a feeble voice; and when he
said, ‘No, are you?’ I realized that we really had escaped.” The next day, sore from the accident,
and contemplating the purchase of just the right hat before entering hotels,
she offers: “It is the moral support lent by the assurance that one’s taste in
hats is of the super quality. One
knows this by looking at the atrocities with which other people proclaim their
satisfaction . . . .” The woman’s
sense of fashion was not to be ruffled by a sidecar wreck.
C. K. Shepherd’s Across America by Motor-Cycle nicely
bookends Watson’s wartime dispatch diary. Of the three volumes, Shepherd’s is written most emphatically from the
handlebars. Instigated by “that
haunting feeling of unrest, which as a result of three or four years of active
service was so common amongst the youth of England at that time,” Shepherd’s
“trot round America” (contemporary terms that are typically deflationary and
diminutive) is narrated with a good measure of dash-and-pluck style. On several occasions, besides scheduled
services, he is clearly handy at getting his broken machine back on the road,
fishing parts from the “natural gravel” (i.e. dirt) road surface, and
reassembling the machine. Nor does being thrown from his motorcycle nearly one
hundred and fifty times in the course of his journey, along with the numerous
breakdowns, dampen his enthusiasm for motorcycle travel. And he reports,
remarkably, that aside from repairing punctures, he rode into San Francisco on
the same set of tires on which he left New York.
His often arch appraisals
of the variety of American characters he meets are as entertaining as his
bemused transcripts of lingua Americana,
and lists of place-names and populations in which he seems to take absurd
delight. All the same, he remarks
more than once on the friendliness with which he is usually greeted across the
country, a manner to which strangers, he says, are unused in his native
England. There is also good humor
in his acerbic appraisal of American roads in 1919: “I have seen places in
Broadway where the tram-lines wander six or seven inches above the surface of
the road and where the pot-hole would accommodate comfortably quite a family of
dead dogs within their depths. So
much for the cities. The roads
that traverse the country are with few exceptions nothing better than our
fifth-rate country roads on which no self-respecting Englishman would
ride.” Noting the machine’s uses
restricted to trade and delivery, Shepherd sees the motorcyclist as “an
altogether despised individual in America,” adding that in his entire journey
of nearly five thousand miles he saw only four other motorcyclists.
Tim Fransen has done a
great service to cultural studies in general and to travel and motorcycle
studies in particular in compiling this excellent volume, which invites
repeated readings; it will be very useful in any number of university
courses. Each of these narratives
is distinctive in focus and style, while all are equally interesting as social
texts, as the narrators blithely offer their evaluations of every sort of
people that they meet. Still,
allowing that any additional explanatory notes (Watson’s text includes some of
his own) are nearly impossible in the circumstances of reprint publication, it
would be useful to have even the briefest biographical information about each
of our “motagonists,” as well as indices to aid research. That said, these
three memoirs of motorcycle messaging and travel enrich the historical record
of the machine in an attractive and substantial volume, a weighty vade mecum on or off the road.
Reading theses pages, we
slabmeisters and rockhoppers may take note: we ride machines offering
reliability and comfort a world away from what these travelers gamely
rode. And to read these accounts
is to be reminded that our own restlessness is nothing new. From a world that seems far away, these
accounts engage us with an era when wartime communications and post-war travel
(as distinct from tourism, as the volume’s introduction suggests) particularly
by “motor bicycle” offered more unavoidable adventure than many a modern GS may
ever see.
The anthology can be
purchased at http://www.essex-dakar.org/
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