Remembering 'Smithy'
John Smith was a character, the cheeky chap in shorts.
John told me his earliest bike memory was when he was four years old. His father - Herbert Harry Edward Smith, a timber worker from Dwellingup won the hotly contested 1932 Collie Donnybrook race. John was holding his mother’s apron watching his father cross the line.
“They had to hose him down to find out who he was because he was covered in mud”
John got into cycle racing wen he was 16, only after his father made him buy his own bike - he paid 2/6 for it. He soon started out at South Bunbury Cycling Club.
John trained at night with a battery torch, it lit up the road enough to see the kangaroos as they hopped across his path. The roads were pea gravel with little traffic and he trained every day. He called himself a bit of a “cart horse”, or a domestique for much of his later years but in his late teens and early 20s he was a sure thing.
In 1948 the Collie Donnybrook race had only three miles (5km) of bitumen, the other 65 miles (104km) of was gravel. John was leading, but he punctured one mile from the finish line and his father lost a £1008 bet. A quiet ride home that night.
1949 was unlucky too; “The group had just rode off the bitumen and it turned to gravel.” The group bunched and slowed. A chap called Teddy Lewis went into a pothole. John went over the top and broke his collarbone. Ouch. “I got up and rode one handed to Donnybrook and back”
John’s job on the railways was tough too. He started out as a coal shoveller and finished up a train driver. “I took a job on that coal stage actually to get fit for quite a few months. Me and another chap we used to shovel 70 ton of coal, every day, and after a day shovelling a coal I used to go for 100 mile rides”
John kept a treasured telegram. It is dated 18 August 1951, the day before the 1951 Midland 100 Race - a few months after his 23rd birthday. It is addressed to Johnny Smith care of Eddie Barron, Flash Cycles, Midland Junction. The telegram reads “Be cunning good luck, Dad”. He won the race, £100 and a handsome trophy.
Johnny was cunning and cheeky, but always making friends.
As a veteran John rode across Australia and competed strongly in the West Coast Vets and Griffin Tour. He won the WA Apples & Pears Veteran Tour 1986, 55-59 age category.
John dropped into handicapping after volunteering one night when the lap scorer was off sick. As the handicapper and starter at WA races for over 20 years John took “constructive criticism” from every second rider about the handicap he’d given them. He knew bike racing. He had lived it.
John said “Back in the 1950s I used to ride off scratch on my own. Its funny nowadays they don’t like riding on their own, or even with less than ten in a bunch. They don’t like gravel either. Oh, they’re soft!”
Toby Hodgson
