Special feature: It won’t last until Christmas!
By Sean Lawless on 2nd Dec 15
It wont last until Christmas! - Prophetic words from the all-seeing media moguls at Motorcycle News.
It was May 1977, Trials and Motocross News had just launched and it's fair to say that the opposition – the mighty MCN – was worried. And with good cause too.
Of course, MCN got it badly wrong and now – over 38 years later – TMX is celebrating its 2000th issue.
For nearly four decades TMX has brought its readers reports, news and opinion from off-road sport around the globe. But not only has itinformed and entertained, it's also helped shape the sport. By giving off-road riders from all disciplines a rallying point – a newsprint hub – it's provided the industry with a solid foundation to build from and in the process created a cohesive community.
The man who started it all and for 19-years occupied the Editor's chair was Bill Lawless or, as I know him, ‘Dad'.
Bill, who celebrates his 80th birthday next month, is a lifelong motorbike nut who was working as chief features writer on the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette when he responded to an advert in a journalist trade magazine.
"I saw an ad in the UK Press Gazette,” he said. "It was a bit cryptic but I wrote off, got an interview and one very snowy day I went over from Saltburn where we were living. It was exactly 100 miles – I remember because I commuted for a time. I left on a Z1000 Kawasaki, fell off it and managed to get back home and got the XT500 out.
"Bob Clough was the managing director of Morecambe Press and one of his lads, Mike, was an AMCA scrambler. I remember turning up in a filthy old wax cotton Barbour suit having just ridden through snow and ice – they thought I'd done it for effect but I hadn't. I think the car was off the road at the time.”
Morecambe Press published a local newspaper – The Visitor – but Bob had bigger ambitions. At that time Motorcycle News enjoyed a publishing monopoly and treated off-road sport with disdain. After going to races with his son, Bob had the vision to see an incredible opportunity.
"Bob saw a future for a niche publication. He gave me the job on the spot and I went back home and did a dummy edition. I did a feature on one of my friend Dave Muxlow's mates who used to round up pigs on his bike.”
That pre-production issue also contained a Robert Bentham test of the '77 KX250, Eric Kitchen's shots from the Cleveland Trial and a workshop feature on servicing Montesa forks.
"It was a newspaper and it needed an editor with newspaper experience. I used to do everything. Write it, lay it out, organise it. It was a huge effort for such a small outfit. That first week me and Cloughy loaded the wagon.”
As well as Bill the launch team comprised photographer Dave Dewhurst and Pete Kelly, former editor of ‘The Motor Cycle'.
"Dave was a bloody good photographer and a good rider as well. He knew a lot about the sport and had a lot of contacts. We got Pete Kelly for a time – he was a great journalist – but he didn't stay long.”
The launch issue on May 20 was badly timed...
"That was an early mistake. We should have started it a fortnight earlier and used the Scottish Six Days as a launch. We slipped up there. I remember Motorcycle News staff were going round saying ‘it won't last until Christmas' and that was in May. They got that wrong!
"To tell the truth we were as green as grass in those days but the paper swiftly caught on, thanks mainly to the efforts of club enthusiasts who started to see their names in a national newspaper for the first time.”
After a few weeks Mannix Devlin, who'd been lodging with the Lawless family in Saltburn, came on board and over the years Bill recruited a string of journalists including Mike Rapley, Mike Greenough, John Dickinson and Pete Plummer.
"TMX was built on the premise that the people who worked for it all rode, just like our readers. ‘We ride it and we write it'. At one stage we had ten riding staff men, most on company bikes. Great days indeed... ”
JD, who would inherit Bill's Editor's chair, was an Expert-rated Northern Centre trials rider and Mike Greenough was a top North West Centre runner. But it was Rappers who was the class act, winning national sidecar trials with Mannix in the chair before switching codes and going on to win the British Clubman enduro title.
"Rappers was a bloody good rider and keen, he still rides. Of course, he and Mannix actually won British championship sidecar trials. He was one of a fleet of bloody good correspondents who fell over themselves to work for us instead of MCN.
"I also recruited Alex Hodgkinson. Dave Smith had got a coach trip to a scramble abroad and I remember him saying to me that there was a bloke who knew everything about scrambling. And that was Hodge.”
Alex is, of course, TMX's GP correspondent and has covered the world motocross championship for us since the late 1970s.
By now you should have grasped the fact that there wasn't a lot of love lost between TMX and MCN and this rivalry actually contributed to the formation of a company called Off-Road Motorcycle Promotions Ltd that organised the first ‘Dirt Bike Show' in Bristol in 1978.
"There was a show in London and we were going round and everyone was putting TMX stickers on their exhibits and MCN was going round trying to tear them off. It was that daft. MCN wouldn't accept our entry into their sponsored show so we got together with some bright people, who saw the potential of a show purely for off-road fans.
"Off-Road Motorcycle Promotions Ltd was a consortium of importers mainly and TMX was a member through Bob Clough. He was delighted because he was bored to tears sat there in his office and he really threw himself into it.”
TMX's success contributed to a boom time for British off-road sport.
"For the first time ever it expanded off-road sport's horizons. It gave the boys somewhere to advertise, which was very important. We used to run a comparison with MCN's small ads but we gave it up – they might have had four bikes but we had pages of them. And the Regs Available listings gave clubs somewhere to advertise their events. It expanded the whole thing.”
The launch also happily coincided with the start of factory interest in the growing youth market.
"The big four were just beginning to sit up and take notice of the schoolboy scene. They saw the potential. Up until then there were a lot of specials. Brian Leask, the old Yamaha importer, used to scramble a road racing 7R AJS with mods and knobblies and things.”
One notable early TMX fan was John Bonham, drummer for rock giants Led Zeppelin, whose son Jason was a talented schoolboy scrambler.
"One unforgettable occasion was sitting in the Kawasaki hospitality tent at a big weekend schoolboy meeting when John Bonham's heavies staggered in with what looked exactly like an aluminium coffin.
"I thought the ACU steward had popped his clogs because he looked a mite fragile earlier that afternoon. But no, it was full of booze but no glasses. So that became the only time I've ever drunk malt whisky out of a baked bean tin.”
The relationship between TMX and the riders we write about has always been mutually beneficial – we help publicise their efforts and their successes help sell papers – and it was as true in the '70s as it is today.
"Graham Noyce was good for TMX when he won the world title and so was Neil Hudson. And then along came Dave Thorpe who won three. They were true heroes and it was great for TMX to put them on the front page.”
Humour played a big part in the early days with the front page frequently used to – affectionately – poke fun at some of the sport's biggest stars.
"We used to get great fun out of some of the early front pages. There was one which showed Martin Lampkin going through a water section and I got our art department – that was John Robinson – to put a shark's fin in and a bubble caption to someone saying in the crowd ‘sharks go potty on Hammonds Sauce' because they sponsored him at the time.
"Then there was the one with the bloke swooping over the handlebars and we had a bubble caption coming out of his mouth saying ‘look, it's a Natterjack toad'!”
And, of course, there was the infamous Thrasher Gunge cartoon strip.
"I brought Thrasher Gunge with me. The original Thrasher Gunge I used to write for MPH, the Vincent Owners Club magazine. A lot of them were based on true stories – things I observed at events.
"One time a mate of mine spotted his son waving furiously at the top of a distant hill so he grabbed his tool box and sprinted across, convinced there was some terrible mechanical problem to attend to. When he got there – face like a beetroot, absolutely knackered and breathing out of his backside – his lad asked ‘is it true wearing helmets make you go bald?'. That was turned into a classic Thrasher strip.”
The early days, before the Health and Safety police took over, also brought a few heart-stopping moments...
"I remember once being badly frightened coming back from the Hurst Cup to the port at Larne on trials bikes without lights at about 4.30 in the morning. We'd left the van on the other side at Stranraer. At that time of the morning, in Northern Ireland during the troubles with no lights – it was a bit hairy! I was with Mannix so at least I had an interpreter.”
But the good times certainly out-weighed the bad ones.
"The launch of the first monoshock Yamaha trials bike in Amsterdam was memorable – Nigel Birkett rode it over a shed! All the Japanese were startled! It was an ace bit of riding.
"One of the funniest things I ever saw involves you, unfortunately. I'm stood at a Cumbrian trial – I don't know which one it was – with the ACU steward. We'd been talking about the pros and cons of schoolboy trials and suddenly there was this combined roar and round the corner – sliding wildly on flat tyres running trials pressures – were you, Julian Ingham and about five others, all kids, all going like buggery. The ACU steward nearly had a clutcher!”
A gifted writer and not-so-gifted rider, possibly Bill's biggest asset during his days on TMX was his ability to communicate. Whether through the pages of the paper or on a one-to-one basis, he called it as he saw it and never failed to get his point across. Always honest and fair, frequently championing the underdog and usually delivered with a twist of humour, it was a quality that earned the trust and loyalty of readers and made him friends everywhere he went.
"I can't possibly mention all the folk I came to know and like. Lots of them are dead now. ‘Every hearse a personal triumph,' we used to cruelly joke about the late, great Ralph Venables, who wrote dozens of obituaries about people he knew.
"But it's no joke now because the celestial snipers are picking off many of my contemporaries and it probably won't be long before they get me in their sights.”
Bill's final issue before retiring was the Christmas double in 1996, his 1023rd as editor.
Almost 19 years and 977 issues later his legacy lives on...
A bit about Bill
Lawless by name...
Soldier, sailor, boxer, boozer – in his youth Bill was an enthusiastic and committed hell-raiser.
Born in 1936 in Hyde, Great Manchester, Bill was hooked on motorbikes from an early age thanks to a sympathetic teacher at the boarding school he was sent to, who let him tear up the yard on his Cycle Master.
Nothing more than a bicycle with a small engine bolted on the back, it was a tame introduction to an obsession that has shaped his life.
"My mother bought me my first motorbike, which was an old sprung hub Triumph 500cc Speed Twin,” he recalled. "I fell off it on day two and she said it was too big for me so she bought me a new DMW, which had a 197 Villiers engine. Then I went into the army. I had to go in anyway so I signed on for three years instead of doing national service for two.”
Based in Germany, he fought at heavyweight for his regiment and rose to the heady heights of sergeant before being demoted to corporal after a late night altercation in a local bierkeller when he should have been on duty.
The army also allowed him to indulge in his love of motorcycling
"I was a despatch rider for a time on a bloody great 500cc side valve BSA M20. There was time when I had to overtake a convoy, lead it to a main road and then hold traffic up while I let the convoy through. There were a lot of cobbled roads in Germany and they were icy that day.
"I was grimly accelerating – this thing was flat as a fart – and I lost it and fell off and a big QL Bedford ran over me. Literally. I can see it now, the prop shaft and all the wheels juddering. I lay there and it cleared me. I thought my last day had come.”
After leaving the army Bill embarked on a short career as a mechanic before joining the Kent and Sussex Courier in Tunbridge Wells as a trainee journalist, commuting from his home in Tenterden on a Vincent Black Shadow.
Following a stint on a newspaper in the East End of London, Bill and three mates attempted to drive to South Africa in a Ford Popular but ran out of money in Casablanca where he signed on the MV Skagern and became part of the Swedish merchant navy.
He edited Motorcycle Mechanics in the mid '60s, competed in road race and sprint events and then got a job as motoring correspondent on the Brighton Evening Argus, embarking on a short scrambling career on a 500cc AJS.
Despite getting married and calming down, the bikes continued to come thick and fast with more Vincents, Ducatis, a Laverda and a succession of Kawasakis, BMWs and pretty much every other marque in between.
Now approaching his 80th birthday and with his body cashing cheques written many years ago, Bill's finally been forced to stop riding but his passion for bikes – and writing – remains.
Yrjo Vesterinen was reigning world trials champion when he first encountered Bill Lawless before the 1978 Hurst Cup Trial in Northern Ireland.
"My first memory of Trials and Motocross News was when I met your dad,” said Vesty. "I think it was on the ferry to Belfast and if it wasn't on the ferry then certainly it was in the bar at the hotel and I remember this man with a beard and a big smile on his face being very enthusiastic and he wanted to talk to me. I didn't know who he was but I did learn to know him very quickly.
"Trials and Motocross News became the publication that everybody wanted to see and read every week when it came out and see the pictures and the reports. It was like the bible because it reported everything around trials and motocross and enduro and not just on a national basis, on an international basis.”
It's hard to imagine now but in those pre-internet days the weekend's results were hard to come by.
"Until the paper came out you wouldn't know who'd won what. After a trial I used to have to go to a telephone kiosk and phone a friend of mine who was doing a press service for me and he would then phone the newspapers in Finland to tell what I had done. But I'd actually have to put the coins in the payphone – it was a costly operation and sometimes, right in the middle of the conversation, the phone would go dead and you'd have to start all over again.
"I was very keen on trying to promote myself in order to attract more sponsors and the way to do that was to get coverage wherever you could possibly get it.”
After retiring from top-flight trials and starting Apico, Vesty realised that the publication that gave him vital exposure as a rider was also an important tool to promote his new business.
"I advertised in Trials and Motocross News as soon as I started Apico. Advertising is a very important part of marketing and Trials and Motocross News was the best way to reach the audience I wanted to reach. You could target the same group weekly and that's why I called it a machine gun.
"You could repeat the message on a weekly basis. Obviously there is a price tag attached to that but it's a handy tool and it's important for marketing people to understand that.”
By Pete Plummer
I don't believe it! How can this be the 2000th issue of TMX as that means it's 38 years old and I'm still only 24. The wordage (all about our beloved off-road sport of course) must run into millions but then founding editor Bill Lawless always did have a way with words.
"Come up here and work full-time,” he said over the phone, offering me a full-time job after some 18-years of working as a freelance on the paper. "Become respectable kid and pay income tax like the rest of us!”
So, I wiped the spanners, signed my last MOT and moved my place of work from Churchill Motorcycles in rural Northamptonshire to a seaside town some 170 miles north. In the corridor that was to be my new office (and after Mannix had shown me where the coffee machine and toilet was) I asked Bill what he wanted me to do.
"Nothing changes because you're up here mate,” he said with a surprised look as he picked the breakfast crumbs from his beard. "Do what you've always done and write about motorbikes.”
It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of TMX to the sport and its galvanisation of the off-road trade and industry. Writing for MCN since 1971, I'd seen the growing obsession by the UK bike press with fast multi-cylinder road bikes and road racing. Off-road sport was most definitely on the back burner but when TMX came along all that suppressed energy and enthusiasm for dirt bikes burst out.
Bill's uncomplicated, non-political editorial policy to simply write about them gave riders, organisers, clubs, the trade and the manufacturers plus the ACU and the AMCA a much needed platform and opportunity – and you didn't have to be a world champion to get your name in the paper either.
Commercially, at the outset there was no guarantee that the ‘world's biggest off-road newspaper' would be a financial success as it (we) needed advertisers to survive but the ever-enthusiastic sporting dealers were supportive along with Kawasaki, the first manufacturer to jump on board. With total confidence for the future, the late, great Team Green Kawasaki boss Alec Wright bought the back page the first week, then every week for the next 25 years.
How we live our lives has impacted on our sport and illegal riding, the manufacturers' reluctance to reduce four-stroke noise and other issues are most honestly described as self-inflicted but TMX continues to provide the open forum to battle on and I am personally grateful for being given the opportunity all those years ago to play a small part.
Now, back in me shed all these years later (and with the wind still whistling through the knotholes Willie), I remain both positive and upbeat and hopeful that young riders can enjoy organised sport wobbling or even racing round a field near you.
FOR MORE HISTORICAL CONTENT, MAKE SURE YOU GRAB A COPY OF TMX'S 2000TH EDITION!
