From our Old Bike Archives – Issue 1 – first published in 2006.
Our more mature readers will be familiar with the exploits of Edgar Jessop, bon vivant, philanderer and the dashing leader of the globe trotting works Spagforth team in the Golden Era of the sport. As part of a Down Under Tour that spent an inordinate amount of time in Kalgoorlie, Jessop took in the inaugural, and only Tarana TT in 1924. Linking the towns of Lithgow, Tarana and Rydal just west of the Blue Mountains, the arduous and unforgiving 40-kilometre lap tested man and machine to the limit.
Hardly the epitome of physical fitness at the best of times, Jessop developed a taste for the Lithgow XXX Lager, a local brew of some 15% alcohol by volume, during his time in the district, and by race day had added several pounds to already corpulent frame. Still, his 500cc Spagforth Stoat had the legs on the opposition during qualifying and practice sessions, and Jessop found no need to apply restraint on the evening prior to the gruelling 530- kilometre race. Instead, Edgar and his chief mechanic, Harold Scrotum, spent the evening in a champagne-filled spa bath accompanied by a couple of local starlets, dining on caviar, oysters and rare aged sirloin of beef.
Despite feeling rather fragile after his bacchanalian bout, Jessop fronted for the TT with scarcely an hour’s sleep and soon disposed of early leader Eugene Molestrangler on a methane-fuelled OHC Grundle. Setting a scorching pace, Edgar’s virtuosity behind the handlebars inflamed the passions of a shapely lady spectator at a particularly difficult stretch of the circuit then known as Bonkinton’s Bend, located 4 kilometres east of the Tarana Pub. Each lap as Edgar sailed through, she lowered her drawers to expose her ample posterior to the champion.
Finally, the anticipation of the next exposure told, and Jessop’s fly buttons let go with a resounding twang as he approached the tightening right hander at breakneck speed. Misjudging his braking point, Edgar decked the Stoat, which cartwheeled over an embankment, demolishing a pie stand and a mobile bordello in the process. Although the rider was unhurt apart from a swelling in the groin, the works Spagforth was wrecked, and by the time the team mechanics arrived from Lithgow to recover the machine, much of it had been souvenired by vandals. The accident, and Jessop’s rare defeat, made headline news, and the infamous bend was soon renamed in his memory. Today, the Tarana-Lithgow Road is a favourite weekend haunt for motorcyclists of all ages who, despite warning signs and the absence of bared buttocks, regularly plunge into the same scenery as Edgar did all those years ago.
