Scramble ace ‘Badger’ Goss dies aged 80
by Roger Guttridge
Tributes have been pouring onto social media following the death on January 6 of Blackmore Vale motocross legend Bryan ‘Badger’ Goss. He was 80.
Bryan was born at Yetminster on September 11, 1940 – during the Battle of Britain, hence his middle name, Winston, after wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
.. [see Bryan ‘Badger’ Goss’ full obituary in the January issue of the Blackmore Vale magazine here]
By all accounts Bob was a simple fellow, known unkindly to the locals as the Village Idiot.
But a story I learned some years ago tells me he was not that much of an idiot after all.
Bob was standing outside Iwerne Minster village school one day when a car pulled up.
This was in the early 1930s, where there weren’t too many cars around.
The driver of this one wound down his window and asked for directions to Pimperne.
Bob did his best to describe the route but after this third faltering attempt, the motorist’s irritation began to show.
‘My God, boy, you don’t know much, do you?’ he barked.
‘No, sir. But I baint’ lost,’ young Bob replied – a retort that ensured his place in village folklore.
I heard the tale back in 2010, when natives Jim Beck and Tom Crabbe took me on an historical tour of Iwerne Minster, which I reported in one of my regular columns in the original Blackmore Vale Magazine.
The school later became Clayemore School’s art and design department.
At the top of nearby Shute Lane, Jim and Tom showed me one of three surviving village pumps. I say ‘surviving’ because at one time there were four.
At this pump in the early 20th century, Iwerne’s last ‘Lord of the Manor’, James Ismay, used to display the daily papers for villagers to read.
‘Many people couldn’t afford newspapers but they could read the news at the pump,’ Jim told me.
Later the papers were displayed in a purpose-built shelter close by, which in its day was called the War Office (it opened during the First World War).
It is now known as the News Office and serves as the village notice-board.
It looks rather like a bus shelter but I suspect you’d be waiting a long time for a bus in this village street.
A carving on the gable of Hermes, the Winged messenger, hints at the shelter’s original purpose.
James Ismay bought Iwerne Minster in 1908 and created a ‘model village’ atmosphere with hand-painted shop signs, various agricultural experiments and specially designed uniforms for the children.
He was a stickler for uniformity.
All the houses at roller-blinds supplied by the estate and villagers were not allowed to strip ivy off their walls.
The village boys wore blue jumpers with a red band while the girls had Little Red Riding Hood cloaks.
The previous squire, the second Lord Wolverton, also rang the changes, embarking on a building programme typified by the red brick half-timbered houses that are characteristic of Iwerne today.
Dating from the same era is Clayesmore School, designed for Lord Wolverton in 1878 by Alfred Waterhouse and described by leading architectural commentators Newman and Pevsner as ‘the most ambitious high Victorian mansion’ in Dorset.
Iwerne’s transformation was still going on when Sir Frederick Treves was writing his topographical classic Highways and Byways of Dorset in the early 1900s.
He was not overly impressed, but then it took a lot to impress the royal surgeon, who was never short of an opinion.
‘It [Iwerne] must at one time have been very picturesque, but it is in the process of being metamorphosed into red brick,’ wrote Sir Fred.
‘The low thatched cottages are gradually vanishing, to be replaced by bold houses of gaudy brick and tiles.’
In Treves’ view, just about the only thing going for these houses was that they were ‘hygienic’ – unlike the old cottages, which tended to be damp, poorly ventilated, with little natural light and limited sanitation.
‘The red brick house can claim to be “hygienic”, but by some ill fortune most things that are hygienic – whether they be clothing, food or buildings – are unpleasant and unsightly,’ Treves asserted.
‘Even the hygienic person, with his fusty undergarments, his dismal diet and his axioms about drains and traps, is not attractive.
‘It is unreasonable to require that the inhabitants of villages should occupy unwholesome dwellings merely to please the aesthetic tastes of the passer-by.
‘The exquisite old thatched cottage, with its tiny windows of diamond panes, must go, for the man of drains has spoken, and with it will vanish the most characteristic feature of rural England.’
Before the man of drains was the man of slops, but I doubt that Treves ever met Gulliver Wareham.
He was Iwerne’s very own toilet man but Mr Hygienic he was not.
Every Friday and Saturday, Wareham toured the village emptying slop pails into his pail cart.
Once a day he would wipe his hands down his shirt before eating his lunch.
He lived into his 90s.
Roger Guttridge
Ibberton Church is one of three in England that are dedicated to St Eustace, the others being at Tavistock in Devon and Hoo in Suffolk.
That number was in danger of being reduced to two as the Ibberton building teetered on the brink of collapse.
My ‘old’ picture shows the church almost roofless and with its walls shored up by timber props.
Many sources – including my own book A Blackmore Vale Camera – date the picture to 1889.
But an unpublished diary that came to light about 12 years ago suggests the collapse occurred three or four years later.
In her entry for December 8, 1892, diarist Julietta Forrester records a visit from a distressed Rector of Ibberton with Belchalwell, the Rev Augustus Rix.
‘He was in great trouble – the roof of the chancel and chapel at Ibberton had fallen in and the nave [is] expected to follow,’ writes Julietta, wife of James Forrester, Lord Portman’s agent for the Bryanston Estate.
Six days later she paid a return visit.
‘I called first at Belchalwell Church, where the chancel roof was off and men were busy restoring that end of the church,’ she says.
‘At Ibberton I noticed the roofless chancel and side chapel of that church. The walls were very much out of perpendicular and the ceiling of the nave full of ominous-looking cracks.’
Restoration work at Ibberton did not start until 1902 and took seven years to complete at a cost of £1,500. The church reopened in 1909.
In the meantime services were held in a specially built corrugated iron building that later became the village hall.
Standing well above the foothills of Bulbarrow, Ibberton Church today offers a view that few Dorset churches can match.
Stalbridge back in the 60s and 70s was a bustling village. Roughly half the size it is now, the main street was full of shops and we had some great characters. Probably top of the list was Reverend Frederick Saunders (shortened to ‘Derek’) – an eccentric, likeable, scatter-brain of a vicar resembling Alistair Sim, who’s enduring legacy of forgetfulness and haplessness still keeps village elders entertained.
Typically, once a month he trooped us primary school kids, delighted with the diversion from lessons, up to the church, only to find he’d again forgotten the enormous brass key – so we kids would again amuse ourselves among the gravestones while he dashed down to the enormous Rectory just behind the wall by the Stalbridge market cross (officially ‘the finest market cross in Dorset,’ says Hilary Townsend, author and broadcaster), now The Old Rectory Care Home.
And come the time for his sermon, he’d start to look a bit panicky and search his pockets, a benign smile in place, until it dawned on him that his notes were, again, back at the Rectory, so he’d extemporise in an entertaining way, pretending to refresh his memory by looking at non-existent notes on the lecturn. We all knew he’d forgotten them. He always did.
The Rectory is where I first tasted ginger wine. I was nine and it was at Christmas carols, held in a cavernous room that was definitely a few degrees centigrade below the freezing outside air. The ‘heating’ came from a minute paraffin stove that absolutely stank.
Rev Saunders drove around in a battered old slide-door dormobile the colour of butterscotch Angel Delight. It was battered and scraped because he was forever driving or reversing into buildings, telegraph posts, walls and the few parked cars there were in a Britain barely out of post-war austerity – rationing didn’t end when we finally clobbered Johnny Hun – it continued for another nine years, ending at midnight 1954. Some youngsters moan about ‘austerity Britain’ after the financial crisis of 2008 – should have been around for the real austerity and what followed.
London’s Imperial War Museum, at the very top floor, has a wonderful, nostalgic replica of a 1940s home – stark, barely furnished. I was overwhelmed by it. That was the house I grew up in.
The Rev Saunders caused much mirth when, on a typical occasion, he drove into the petrol station (still there, and brilliantly run by very friendly staff), went and paid for five quids worth of petrol, then drove away without putting any gas in the tank, then phoned the garage for assistance ten minutes later when his car spluttered to a halt for want of fuel.
On a later occasion, which thrilled the village, he survived accidentally driving off the road up at Thornhill but he was impressed at how his car was efficiently towed out of the field, through a hedge and showed the greatest cooperation with the local policeman, PC Spencer Meacham, who’s son, also Spencer, was a mate of mine. Yes, we had a village constable who lived opposite The Green in an official ‘police house’ with official police light and notice board. How very Dixon of Dock Green.
Another character was the head of St Mary’s school Geoff Mallet, who lived in Snowdon House in Gold Street, probably one of the loveliest and architecturally distinguished streets in all Dorset. Worth a slow, appreciative walk up and down.
We school kids liked our headmaster. I had the added advantage of seeing Geoff in a social context as my mother, Audrey Palmer, was an infant teacher at the school and she and my father were friends with Geoff and his rather brisk PE teacher wife, Molly.
I had a particular reason in being friendly with Mr Mallett. I found his daughters Catherine and Celia very agreeable. I’m not sure this was reciprocated. But then I was 12 years old and girls were a mystery to me.
My father, Jack, worked at what then was Plessey in Templecombe. He and his team designed the world’s first Sonarbuoy – a device for detecting Soviet submarines while they were lurking underwater off Britain’s shores ready for Armageddon. These were dangerous times and the Cold War was far from cold – the world was at the brink of nuclear war in 1962 when the US detected Soviet missiles being assembled just off the southern US coast in Cuba. Everyday, while the superpowers had their stand-off, and Khrushchev probably banged his shoe at the UN high table, again, a nuclear strike was widely expected and the phrase on everyone’s lips was ‘the four-minute warning’ – all the notice we’d have before extinction. I do wonder if this is scheduled in when people look dreamily back to the ‘good old days’.
During this time, in the States, a public information campaign told citizens what to do when the strike came. Its slogan was ‘Duck and Cover’ and this came with a catchy little jingle showing seemingly delighted and wholesome Americans easily avoiding nuclear annihilation by …sitting under the dining table. Yep, that would probably do it!
Dad’s job sounded fun. Technically challenging, he’d often go up to Scotland’s west coast, where an RAF Nimrod would drop the sonarbuoys to see if they would detect a Royal Navy submarine that’s ‘gone deep’. He and the other boffins would freeze to death on a bucketing Naval corvette wondering how long it would be before he could go back to the hotel for a hot bath and glass of something strong and peaty.
There was a lot of interest from senior US military and we often had American naval and army air force officers coming over for dinner at our house at 1 Barrow Hill in Stalbridge – which is now two residences. Looking back, I can see how shocked they were at how frugally the British lived. Their houses stateside were crammed with possessions, colour TVs (unthinkable luxury), stereo hi-fi (I didn’t even know what those were), wonderful furniture, central heating (‘what’s wrong with a coal fire’, I thought) and swimming pools (‘you’re having a laugh, now’)– a level of consumerism decades ahead of us. We didn’t even have a phone at the time or central heating. Dad would spend some time in the US and returned with shopping catalogues and goods that would have us wide-eyed with amazement. He was offered a job in the States, ‘take it, dad,’ I’d cry, hoping I’d eventually find out what a ‘stereo hi-fi’ was,’ and was looking forward to the ‘swimming pool’, but mum liked Stalbridge, so we stayed.
My parents were not impressed when a senior US officer stubbed his cigarette out on his dining plate, after mum, having spent a day teaching, fed her five kids and quickly drummed up a meal for a sudden guest. When I lived in the South East of England, an acquaintance of mine – a banker – had a wife, who didn’t work – and two kids. And a nanny. And an au-pair. And a cleaner. She found the children ‘exhausting’. I am still amused by that.
On American manners: years later when I worked in the States I was sitting in a family home and asked if I could go to the ‘refrigerator’ to get another beer. The family shared stares of disbelief at this level of politeness.
Geoff Mallett was a man of enthusiasms. He suddenly felt that the senior kids at the primary school should learn basic French. It was obvious that no teachers knew the language, so Geoff was horrified (I later found out) that he had to do it himself. That wasn’t the PLAN. He’d stare incomprehensibly at a text book in his desk drawer, which he clearly believed was unseen by us pupils, as he hammed his inaccurate way barely one-step ahead of his charges.
He also had a sudden passion for teaching Algebra. One of my mates, clearly ahead of Billy Connolly, said, ‘why should we learn algebra, Sir, I’m never going to go there.’ My mate was serious. He thought the French was enough.
There was one teacher I really liked, Mr Head. He was considerate, enthusiastic and obsessed with fishing and hunting. He was brought up by his grandfather who worked on the Sherborne Castle estate and gave him a love of the outdoor life.
Years later, when I bought a cottage in Dorset I found that John Head, long-retired, had been head teacher at Bishops Caundle school, so I went to see the head teacher who put us in touch. We arranged to meet at the White Hart close to the school. I was so excited. So, 42 years after I last saw the teacher I really respected, in walked John Head and his lovely wife Sally. I’d have recognized him. I couldn’t not call him ‘Sir’, despite him entreating me to call him John. I just had to call him ‘Sir’ or ‘Mr Head’. That’s how I thought of him for nearly half a century.
However, both John and Sally looked rather subdued.
A few months later Sally mailed me that John had died. Just before coming to meet us, and I mean their previous appointment, they had learnt that John had terminal cancer. What courage and kindness they had in still coming along and listening and smiling patiently to me reminiscing.
After the primary school, we older kids queued for the bus which took us to Sturminster Newton High School – a good, strict school with excellent academic standards. A few years later I went to Weymouth Grammar School which was astonishingly lax by comparison.
At Stur HS, we had to call female teachers ‘ma’am’ which felt grown-up and rather American, and I wasn’t the only one that I liked it. The maths teacher, a Scot, Mrs Warren, we knew as ‘Haggis’, was very strict and an excellent teacher, showing us how to do quadrilateral equations, which amazed my new teacher at the Grammar school. I was a year ahead of other 13 year-olds at the Grammar, I believe.
The French teacher Mrs Minnear was the mother of Kerry Minnear, then a relatively famous progressive rock musician in the band Gentle Giant. Knowing of some kids’ interest in the genre she generously invited a group to her home when Kerry was visiting. He was very kind and awed kids with stories of how albums (as they were then called) were made. He was pushed to open up about other aspects of a rock star’s life, but with his mum looking on pretended not to know what was being asked.
The geography teacher, Mr Newton, I believe he had had a particularly ghastly time as a prisoner of war, I’ve an inkling in Burma or Thailand, chain-smoked cigarettes during lessons. Oh, that dreamy past.
Our form teacher had been a rear-gunner in a Lancaster – he was lucky to survive. Roughly 55,000 young men in Bomber Command died, and the rear gunners were usually the first to go.
All in all, both my first schools were happy places for kids.
One rainy November evening in the late 60s, two young scamps from the primary school, knowing that a meeting was being held in Stalbridge church, crept through the gloomy damp entrance, and in true French resistance style, threw fireworks in before scampering away in a state of great rebellious excitement. One of them was Brian Trevis, who’s dad farmed down Station Road – the farm’s now a housing estate. I can’t tell you who the other imp was, but I caught a dreadful cold that night. Bloody good fun, though.
Box this
Rationing in WWII
The first job I had after university (after a summer in the Pocono mountains, Pennsylvania, teaching teenage girls to windsurf) was to head the education department in a Sussex military museum, Fort Newhaven, similar to the Nothe Fort in Weymouth.
I knew that boys would enthuse over the guns and tanks etc, but wanted females to be interested too. So, apart from getting a display of women’s fashions from 1914 to 1945, and female military uniforms (the girls particularly admired the WREN officers uniform, and do you know what, so did I) I got the art department to mock-up a typical adults’ weekly ration – which included a 57 gram blob of butter, four thin slices of ham and bacon, 227g of gristly minced beef, 57g of tea, 57g of cheese and, wait for it, one egg.
Get out the kitchen scales and see how many feasts you’d get from 57g of cheese!
The school children I took round this fascinating display could not believe what their grandparents had to put up with. And they’d return with parents and their parents, all paying the hefty entrance fee. What a marketing genius I could have been!
By the one and only Andrew Palmer BA (Hons) accredited windsurf instructor with the Royal Yachting Association (this is true) and the best guitar teacher in Mappowder (this probably is true) – who’s just done the Times cryptic in three minutes (definitely a big fat lie) and who yesterday made perfect Yorkshire puddings, although he did burn his poor wee arm getting them out of the oven. He also par-boiled thinly cut parsnips, drained them, coated them with honey, fresh thyme and a little salt and roasted them next to the beef (Rawlston’s farm) and whose wife said ‘they is the tops, blud. Respect’.
Andy Palmer
January usually sees conveyancers taking stock – with spring in prospect, new instructions start to trickle in after the hectic pre-Christmas period. But – like the world generally – this year is different.
I know I am returning to an already busy caseload which will stay that way until at least March. The south west property market was one of the most active in England & Wales throughout 2020, stimulated by the stamp duty holiday and by people rethinking lifestyles and living arrangements due to Covid and lockdowns. Agents, surveyors, local authorities, conveyancers, lenders and removal companies remain under huge pressure to get transactions completed in challenging and extraordinary circumstances.
With this in mind, here is my New Year’s conveyancer’s wish list:
Without the above, here are some ways that clients can help themselves:
If everyone plays their part and communication is good, we can achieve the best outcome for you at the earliest opportunity. Moving has always been a stressful business but never more so than now!
Jenny Cottrell
Solicitor
Not only does the Campaign to Protect Rural England concern itself about countryside and the communities who live there but is also involved in helping to preserve the quality of the night sky over Dorset and other parts of our country
With the current lockdown, people are largely confined to their own home and will no doubt be spending rather too much time gazing at their TV, computer or smartphone. An alternative, if the skies happen to be clear one evening, is to wrap up warm, step outside into the garden and have a good look at what can be seen in the sky. Now that the Christmas lights are safely stowed away for another year, you should have a good opportunity to observe a dark night sky, weather permitting. A pair of binoculars or small telescope and guidebook will help you identify anything of a celestial nature.
Every night there is usually a planet visible, recognisable in being bright and not twinkling like a star. Since planets wander across the sky, they sometimes appear close together as happened with the Grand Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that took place in mid-December. Good views were to be had from Stourton Caundle and other parts of the Blackmore Vale on Sunday 20th shortly before the planets reached their closest on the 21st. Earlier, the crescent moon also shared the spectacle in a triple conjunction as shown in the image below taken by Michael Mattiazzo, an astronomer friend.
Other times when the moon is absent, a myriad of stars can be seen and what you might easily mistake for a cloud is in fact the faint glow of the Milky Way, our galaxy of stars seen edge-on stretching across the sky. Do wear sensible clothes and boots to stay warm, find a convenient easy chair. Remain outside for at least 10-15 minutes so your eyes become properly ‘dark adapted’. I can guarantee that you will also witness the occasional ‘star’ moving silently across the blackness: one of many ‘man-made’ satellites launched into space and orbiting the earth. You might also catch a view of a shooting star or meteor.
So let’s all be mindful of the natural spectacle visible from our doorstep every clear night. And if you have to have a security light, make sure it’s of the motion-sensitive variety that switches the light on only when necessary. To preserve our view of the heavens will require future housing developments to have ‘full-cut-off’ street lighting so no light is directed into the sky. A curfew time may also be adopted after which streetlights are automatically switched off to save energy and to avoid light pollution thereby protecting the natural environment.
Dr Richard Miles
Dark Skies Adviser Dorset CPRE
OnBuy.com, described as the world’s fastest-growing marketplace, has become a Premier Business Partner with Dorset Chamber.
OnBuy says the decision marks its commitment to the county ahead of a worldwide scale-up.
As well as cementing its roots in the region, the move also demonstrates support for the regional business community, alongside its commitment to local recruitment.
OnBuy has also announced it is to invest £10m in Dorset.
The business has held talks with BCP Council about finding a new HQ as it continues to add to its 60+ staff.
The expanding eCommerce company, founded in 2016, has seen dramatic growth in the past year.
Sales grew 870 percent from November 2019 to November 2020 and have shot from a rate of £24m to over £170m in one year.
The marketplace’s sales are forecast to hit £2bn before the end of 2023.
OnBuy says it’s on a mission to revolutionise the eCommerce sector by providing a fair, transparent and ethical marketplace, benefiting both buyers and sellers.
Cas Paton, CEO and winner of Just Entrepreneurs’ Founder of the Year Award 2020, said: “OnBuy has gone from strength to strength in the last four years and after a record-breaking 2020, we’re going to grow even faster in 2021.
“We’ve set our sights on achieving unicorn status and we’re going to achieve that from our HQ right here in Dorset.
“Reaching unicorn status is about establishing the credibility of our vision worldwide, and I’m looking forward to taking our ethical eCommerce ecosystem to the world stage.
“We’ll be doubling our Dorset-based team within the next two years.
“The county has huge potential.
“I want to put Dorset on the world stage for tech.
“Forget Silicon Valley, it’s all about Silicon Beach now and OnBuy will be Dorset’s first unicorn tech company.
“I’m glad to be working with Dorset Chamber to help realise these ambitions for the area and am looking forward to connecting with more Dorset businesses through the network.”
OnBuy is embarking on a worldwide scale-up into over 140 countries by the end of 2023, starting with 42 initial sites early this year.
To support its growth, OnBuy is continually recruiting within the region for a variety of roles.
Ian Girling, Chief Executive, Dorset Chamber, said: “We are delighted to welcome OnBuy on board as a Premier Business Partner and active recruiter within our community.
“OnBuy is one of the most exciting, fastest-growing businesses in the county and we’re pleased to be able to support the company in realising its ambitions.
“Businesses like OnBuy help to keep Dorset on the map for business and entrepreneurialism so that we can continue to attract great talent and encourage more ambitious founders, like Cas, to start their businesses in the county.
“We are looking forward to working with OnBuy as they continue on their upward trajectory.”
Along with OnBuy’s unprecedented growth, its seller base has increased by ten per cent every month over the last three consecutive months, with more than 600 new sellers joining in November alone.
OnBuy has also recently been named eCommerce Company of the Year in the 2020 UK Tech Business Awards.
By: Andrew Diprose Dorset Biz News
With the river at last calming down several hardy souls braved the cold weather and held a match on the Steart length of the river, down from the Bull car park, on Sunday.
Lots of small roach and perch were caught and Ian Paulley, pegged half way along the first field, had a good winning weight of small fish weighing in at 8lbs 6ozs. Ian alternated between pole and running-line rigs to tempt lots of fish on red maggot and pinkie baits; a very good weight on the day.
In second place Mick Haskell, pegged on the downstream end peg, used bread punch and red maggot hookbaits to weigh in 5lbs 7ozs. Mick used a stick float running line rig throughout and started the match with a few small chub in the first half-hour. After this good start the action tailed off and he spent the rest of the (5-hour) match catching tiny roach using single maggot on a size 20 hook.
Kev Bennett made up the frame with a third-placed bag of small roach and perch caught on maggot or small worm hookbait. Thats’s it for now folks. Hopefully the weather (and THE virus) will not be too unkind before the river season ends on March14th.
Bryan was born at Yetminster on September 11, 1940 – during the Battle of Britain, hence his middle name, Winston, after wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
It was also at Yetminster that he acquired his ‘Badger’ nickname. His lifelong love affair with motorbikes began early, and before he got his own, he used to ‘badger’ fellow villagers for a go on theirs.
The habit led to one of his friends calling him ‘Badger’ and the name stuck.
His first bike was a 197cc Ambassador, which cost the teenager £40. Badger entered his first motorcycle scramble soon after his 16th birthday.
Perhaps inspired by grasstrack star Lew Coffin, another Yetminster resident, he also tried his hand at that discipline but crashed heavily at Exeter and broke his leg so badly that he was out of racing for a year.
‘I vowed to stick to scrambling from then on,’ he later recalled.
In 1959 Badger Goss became a works rider for Cotton and promptly beat some of the region’s best competitors to register five race wins during a memorable afternoon at Ham Hill, near Yeovil.
After Cotton failed to capitalise on his success, in the early 1960s he let Greeves, a leading works team from Essex, know that he would like to race for them.
‘It was everyone’s ambition to race for Greeves at that time,’ he said.
The move kick-started the heyday of Badger Goss’s illustrious career. The 1960s were also the era of scramble meetings at Bulbarrow, which helped Badger to become a sporting hero in his own backyard. A generation of Blackmore Vale folk can still remember the sight of Badger and his rivals, such as brothers Don and Derek Rickman, flying over the jumps on the spectacular hillside course.
In the mid-1960s, Badger switched his allegiance again, this time to Husqvarna, a Swedish company, who would provide him with some of his greatest triumphs.
These included victories in the 1966 Trophée des Nations at Brands Hatch, the BBC TV Grandstand Trophy and the British 500cc championship, which he won in 1970, just before his 30th birthday.
As well as an eye for speed, Badger also had a head for business, and in 1964 launched his own shop at Yeovil, Brian Goss Motorcycles.
After winning the British title with Husqvana, he raised eyebrows the following year by switching again to the German manufacturer Maico. The move not only brought him more success but won him Maico’s UK import franchise.
‘Their bikes were not only fast but fantastically reliable,’ said Badger. ‘For three years on the trot we sold over 1,000 a year, which for a small concern like ours was like winning the pools.’
The Goss business continues to this day as a leading stockist of motocross helmets, kit and other accessories, run by the founder’s son and daughter, Jeff and Debbie, and Jeff’s wife, Sophie.
Badger met his wife, Jenny, on a blind date arranged by a friend – and he proposed on the Tilbury ferry while taking the cattle truck that he drove for a living back to Thundersley! The first night of their honeymoon was spent in the slightly more romantic setting of a Paris hotel.
The second night was supposed to be spent in a hotel in Lyon, where Bryan was riding in an international event. But they couldn’t find the hotel, and ended up sharing an old van with Badger’s bikes and his mate Don Hitchcock, who slept in the bunk below.
Badger went on to win the 250cc race in Lyon with Don Rickman winning the 500 event.
Jenny Goss died in 2012.
Motocross writer Ian Berry describes Badger as not only a ‘tenacious competitor on the track’ but a ‘great character’ off it. The rider once told Berry: ‘All I ever really wanted was to be everybody’s mate.’
He achieved that with interest.
By Roger Guttridge
© Bluebean Publishing Ltd
