A remarkable photograph published in The Motor Cycle on September 13, 1928, captures S Lees riding his Sunbeam over Ballig Bridge during the Junior Amateur TT. This archive feature revisits the race, the riders and the story behind one of the event’s most memorable images.
This great picture was published in The Motor Cycle of September 13, 1928, with the caption, including original capitals and punctuation: “YOICKS! Obviously a horseman, S Lees rides his Sunbeam as he would his hunter, at Ballig Bridge in last week’s ‘Junior’ Amateur race.”
The competition for victory in the Junior Amateur TT, where the winner took The Motor Cycle trophy, was “One of the greatest races ever run over the TT course” according to the sponsoring publication. It was the first time a standalone race had been held for 350cc (so Junior) class machines; ever since the event’s inception in 1923 there had been a class for the 350cc motorcycles – from the start with the trophy provided by The Motor Cycle – but they ran concurrently with the Senior 500cc race.
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There were 28 entries for the September Junior, which included Percy ‘Tim’ Hunt, winner of the 1927 Senior race on the flat-tank pushrod Norton bought for him by his factory-owning father James. Known as Tim because of the popular comic Tiger Tim, speaking to The Classic MotorCycle in 1983 the then 75-year-old remembered of the 1928 Amateur Junior race: “We got [his dad was still buying the bikes] a little pushrod Levis. I remember that Walter Moore, then in charge of racing at Nortons, was very critical about that. He said I should have had one of their bikes and that he could kick his hat faster than the Levis could go. It must have been a shock for him when I led the race.”
Lead Tiger Tim did, albeit he was in a ding-dong battle with Harry Meageen, just 19, on his JAP-powered Rex-Acme, although it was Hunt – still, then, called ‘Percy’ in the press of the day – who’d led from the start until the last lap, though Meageen “gradually increased his average speed” and it was reckoned Hunt “might have won by a few seconds… [but] he might just as easily have lost.” In the article mentioned earlier, Hunt recalled: “I was just going to shut off for the Creg when the exhaust valve broke. Foolishly I didn’t push in. I never thought of it. If I had they told me I’d still have finished third.”
Alas, Hunt missed his place on the podium – but there was joy in the Senior race, when he won on a Norton CS1, again provided by his dad. Such was Hunt’s speed in the race, he broke the outright TT lap record, and it was no surprise he joined the works Norton set-up for the 1929 season. He was to enjoy considerable success, including a 1931 Junior/Senior TT double, before a crash in Sweden in 1933 ended his career.
The 1928 Junior Amateur TT podium was instead filled by Sonny Hanson and D M Chrystal on their Velocettes, the latter just beating Dick Birch on a Sunbeam, the same as the one featured in our picture; that is to say a Model 80, the smaller version of the famous 500cc Model 90, which had won the 1928 Senior TT. In the Amateur Junior race, D Jackson was fifth on a Dot, with the later-disqualified Bertie Bacon completing the top six on a Chater-Lea. Interestingly, despite what Moore said to Hunt about he “should have a Norton,” there wasn’t a single 350cc Norton in the finishers or indeed the entry list of the Junior Amateur race. There had been five in the year’s earlier Junior TT proper, but all had retired; perhaps that influenced Hunt’s thinking? The 28-strong grid was made up of a real mixed bag, with Sunbeams and Velocettes the best represented, with five apiece.
Our man Lees gets an amusing mention in The Motor Cycle’s report: “S Lees (Sunbeam) wore the ordinary raincoat and leggings that go with upturned handlebars and family sidecars; in fact, so unlike a ‘racer’ did he look that an official had begun to ‘shoo’ him off the course for a wandering spectator, before he realised his mistake.”
Hopefully Lees kept dry in his get-up, although he was “slowed by an air lock in the fuel system” on the first lap and his second was really slow too – almost an hour – though he rallied and his fourth circuit of 41 and a half minutes was about the pace of the seventh-place man, albeit Lees was classified 11th from 13 finishers, though that improved to ninth in the revised result.
The location of the photograph was a hump-backed bridge in the hamlet of Ballig, situated between the eighth and ninth milestone roadside markers between Ballacraine and Glen Helen. Ballig Bridge was part of the St John’s course used for the TT between 1907 and 1910 and then formed part of the familiar course used ever since. However, the hump-backed bridge itself was removed in 1935, while the road (the A18) was widened and straightened too.
The original article appeared in The Classic Motorcycle Magazine.
