From our Old Bike Archives – Issue 86.
Story: Peter Laverty • Photos: Keith Ward, Barry Smith, Rob Lewis, Dick Darby.
The face of Australian motorcycle racing would look considerably different if not for Jack Walters, who was born in Bendigo on 31st March, 1917. Immediately pre-WWII and until the late ‘fifties, Jack was a competitor himself, but it is his role as a sponsor in which he indelibly left his mark.
His own brush with motorcycles began at the tender age of 12, when he purchased a belt-drive single-speed Triumph for one pound. He rode it to school where the horrified headmaster gave him the cane and sent him home with a stern letter to his parents. Expelled from school, Jack simply spent his time tearing around the local football oval and its spectator banks. Jack was just 15 when he entered his first race meeting, at what became known as the Weatherboard Circuit at Learmouth, near Ballarat. His mount was an Empire Star BSA which was quickly replaced with a brand new Norton ES2. On the new machine he quickly hit his straps, winning at the annual event in 1937, 1938 and 1939 – the last year of the races there and the year when German works DKW rider Ewald Kluge competed.
By the time the war finished, Jack was already harbouring desires to return to racing, which he did on a Norton Model 7 twin, one of the first to reach Australia, but it was hopelessly outclassed. He was now working in the large hotel owned by his parents Arthur and Sylvia in Bendigo, so he decided more competitive equipment was needed, and purchased a B Series Lambretta racer directly from the factory in Italy. Again, he found the machine outclassed by the home-brewed BSA Bantams and sought the assistance of noted tuner and rider Bert Flood to sort it out. Although Flood scored several successes on the little scooter, it still didn’t suit Jack who went looking for something more to his tastes. 1953 saw the first of his many trips to the Isle of Man where he met Robert Geeson, who had built a very neat double overhead camshaft twin which was ridden successfully by John Surtees. Jack expressed interest in buying one of the bikes (two were built) should one become available.
In the meantime, he turned his attention to a machine that was available, albeit for a considerable price. At the TT, he met the legendary Les Graham, the inaugural 500cc World Champion of 1949, who by that stage was riding for the MV Agusta factory. Early in the 1953 TT week, Les won his first, and only TT – the 125cc Ultra Lightweight – on a works 125 MV. That bike wasn’t for sale, but Les was also acting as an agent for the factory to promote and sell the limited run of production 125cc racers, and Jack ordered one, pocketing a receipt from Graham with arrangements to collect the machine soon after. Unfortunately Graham had less than a week left to live. On the 500cc 4-cylinder MV, Les crashed at the foot of Bray Hill in the Senior TT and died instantly. The devastated MV team decamped immediately and headed back to Italy, taking the remnants of the 500 – and details of Jack’s 125 – with them. With only his receipt as proof of purchase, it took six months to get his hands on the bike. When he did, he raced it himself for a short time before putting Roger Barker, originally from Mudgee NSW but by now living in Victoria, in the saddle. It was the first of five MV Agustas Jack was to purchase from the factory, that number including a special 175cc version which Jack sold to John Surtees without it ever being raced in Australia.
In late 1954, while on holiday in England, Jack called on Bob Geeson, who by that stage was working on a revised specification model. After a lengthy discussion, Jack convinced Geeson to sell him the ex-Surtees bike, which was shipped back to Australia. Jack jumped into the saddle himself, racing the REG at Fishermen’s Bend and elsewhere before allowing other riders a chance on it. These included Ken Rumble, Bernie Proughton and Max Brumhead, who had bought the first of Jack’s 125 MV Agustas.
After buying a 350 Norton from Jack Ahearn, Jack decided to sponsor Roger Barker on it. After a few successful meetings at home, Barker was successful in securing a nomination as a member of the Australian team for the Isle of Man, and took Jack’s Norton with him. A pair of new Manx Nortons was ordered from the factory in Birmingham, which Barker used for his debut season in Europe. Tragically, later in the year, Roger collapsed from heat exhaustion while riding in a 500cc race in Germany and died.
Walters continued to add to his fleet, buying a Norton from Ron Miles and providing it for future World Champion Tom Phillis. He also managed to purchase a rare and hugely expensive 125cc Ducati from Fron Purslow, the Ducati agent in England, which he initially raced himself. The DOHC 5-speed Ducati cost a staggering £750 – or almost double the price of a Manx Norton – to land in Australia, but Jack gave the bike a winning debut at the Port Wakefield track near Adelaide in May 1959. But Jack’s weight had reached 90kg by this stage and with his 42nd birthday behind him, he retired from riding following the October 1959 meeting at Fishermen’s Bend and thereafter entered Tom Phillis and later Ken Rumble on the little Italian machine. The association with star-all rounder Rumble – who excelled at scrambles and dirt track (Short Circuit) racing as well as road racing – was to prove very fruitful, and Jack kept up the supply of top machinery. As well as the staple Nortons, Jack managed to obtain one of the new CR93 Hondas.
But it wasn’t just solos that interested Walters. When sidecar ace Bob Mitchell returned from Europe, he raced briefly before hanging up his helmet. Then Walters tempted Mitchell out of retirement, essentially to give Lindsay Urquhart a run for his money, aboard a Manx Norton outfit. Mitchell chased Urquhart for a few races but when the Norton broke a conrod he decided to call it quits for good.
Lindsay Urquhart recalls his long-term relationship with Walters. “Jack was a good guy to work with; a hard businessman, but the sort of bloke who’d go out to dinner with you after a meeting and go through things like gearing and so on. He had an arrangement with Jack Ahearn whereby he would buy Ahearn new Nortons for the European season and Jack would bring them back home at the end of the year and Walters would then get me to work on them for Ken Rumble to ride. This lasted until they had a major argument about a 350 that Ahearn had brought home and which turned out to be rubbish, so that was the end of that arrangement.
“At the end of 1961 I sold my Norton outfit to Harry Lowe because I needed the money to build a house. Jack asked me if I was still interested in riding and when I said ‘yes’ he gave me a Norton. It was actually the bike that Bob Mitchell had ridden when he came back to racing and had been blown up, and it was in Albury with Doug Fugger. So I got it and rebuilt it and things went pretty well. I could keep 50% of the prize money but I had to look after the bike and provide parts. That was Jack’s arrangement with all his riders. When I started building the small wheel outfits Jack went his own way, and had John Maher riding for him until they had a falling out. But in 1968/69 when the Honda 750 four was released, Jack was very involved in getting the first one into the country for me to build into an outfit, and that went really well.”
The Walters stable continued to grow into the ‘sixties – at one stage he said he had nine Manx Nortons, but by this time the Yamahas were coming onto the scene. After a couple of years with Maher as rider, Walters formed an alliance with Melbourne tuner Ron Angel to prepare Yamahas for Ken Blake to ride. It became a highly successful arrangement – a combination of Angel’s tuning and Blake’s skill in the saddle, and included two stints at Daytona with TZ750s. After the second of these Jack’s 750 Yamaha ‘went missing’ for six months and he ceased his racing operations until this was sorted out. In the meantime, the new RG500 Suzuki came on the scene and Jack had to have one – Blake famously defeating Giacomo Agostini at Laverton in 1976. Around this time Walters also sponsored British rider Martin Sharpe on Yamahas for the TT and European events.
Soon after, Ron Angel introduced Walters to his latest protégé – a young man from Albury by the name of Graeme Geddes. The highly talented but shy Geddes was a revelation on the Angel/Walters machines, to the point that Ron, Graeme and mechanic Lionel Angel (no relation) ventured to Europe to contest the World Championships. By 1979 Walters had 14 TZ Yamahas, and the following year added one of the new TZ500s for Geddes. Also in 1979 he purchased a $10,000 125 MBA twin for Barry Smith to contest the 125 World title, as well as providing Barry with the TZ250 Yamaha that had been ridden in Europe the previous season by Greg Johnson. Additionally, Jack offered some support for Barry’s plan to race his self-built Yamaha in the new TT Formula 3 class at the Isle of Man, and Barry duly repaid the confidence by winning the race – in fact he won it (and the FIM-bestowed World TTF3 World title) for three consecutive years.
There were further sponsorships into the ‘eighties, including for Rene Bongers and sidecar star Gavin Porteous, but gradually Walters began to wind down the pace of his life, which included annual visits to the TT and European races, and sold out of his hotel and motels in Bendigo. It wasn’t a case of retirement though – with a partner he began a powder coating factory in Melbourne until it was time to finally put his feet up.
Back home in Bendigo he was active in the Rotary and Probis Clubs, a patron of the Bendigo Sportsman’ Association, and a major benefactor to charities and hospitals. Jack Walters died from a stroke in Bendigo on November 14th 1998, aged 81. As Barry Smith said in his book ‘Whispering Smith’, “There was no pattern to his mood, but in saying that, overall he was a very jovial person. If you told him the truth, he would respect you, but if you lied to him and he found out, that would be the end of his friendship.” Bob Rosenthal, who competed against many of Walters’ sponsored riders and remembers him as a ‘nice, genuine guy’, once asked him, “Why do you do this?” to which he replied, “I really enjoy watching good road racing. If I’ve got to own half the bikes in the field for this to happen, then so be it.”
Jack Walters was one of the last of the ‘gentleman entrants’ who formed the backbone of racing for decades, spending their own money and not chasing outside sponsorship. “I’ve never thought of using sponsorship for advertising, not that it would be really applicable to a couple of motels in Bendigo”, he once said. One thing’s for certain; without Jack Walters’ enthusiasm, generosity and commitment, the careers of many of the riders who went on to stardom may very well have never eventuated.
