by Guy Martin
Sometimes I’ll sit for half an hour waiting for my turn in the queue, because there’ll be two tractors doing my job, mine and one other. When one is full, it goes back to the factory to unload, and then I’ll drive alongside the harvester. I have Radio 4 on. I like John Humphrys in the morning. I like how he has politicians stuttering. I like the stupid stuff on Woman’s Hour. Then I change the radio over to Planet Rock. I have a book with me, or Race Engine Technologies magazine. I’ve been carrying my black book, a little notebook I’m always writing stuff in to help me remember good ideas and things to do. I started with it when I was building the Wall of Death bike.
I’ll sit in the queue while they get the headlands done, the perimeter of the field, because it’s bloody hard to run the harvester around the edge of the field and keep the tractor at the side of it, without squashing the taties, so they take their time doing that, then we’re straight into it. I love it. It’s another experience.
I nearly got stuck a couple of times, because when you’re loaded up you’ve got up to 15 tons of potatoes on a big flatbed trailer, so pulling up a hill with that behind you is hard work. When you’re moving about in a field and get slightly off-camber you think you’re going to have the thing over, but it’s always been all right. No one died.
There are times when I’ll jump in the back of the trailer and pick through the muck for taties to help out. I’m there to work. If it’s raining and the tractors can’t get traction in the fields, they’ll take the crew back to the factory and have them repairing the tatie boxes, because a fair bit of damage is done to them. The crew are over here and they’re working. Fair play.
I can be out on a 12-hour shift, so I get back to the factory at about seven, then I’ll fill the tractor with diesel, get all my stuff out of the cab and cycle home thinking how lucky I am.
Then, in November 2017, just after Dot was born, a local haulage company gave me a call saying that their two truck fitters were both off sick. They knew I was between jobs, so they asked if I’d give them a hand, see how it goes. I’d have enough stuff to do at home, but I like going to work, so I said yes.
They were understaffed because one of the fitters had steam-cleaned through his foot. I don’t know how he did that, but it made a mess. His name is Mark Hooker, someone I’ve known for years, and the brother of my mate, Alf. Alf has to have one of the best names I’ve ever heard. Alf Hooker. Think about it … Mark had his boots on, but somehow this boiling hot jet from the steam cleaner had badly burned his foot. He carried on at work, but then his foot started swelling up in strange places, as if the water had got into it. From how it was described to me, it sounded a bit like a gunshot wound. It makes a little hole on the way in, but it’s the mess it makes in the body and on its way back out again.
The other unfit fitter had had three lots of three weeks off and they don’t know what’s up with him. They showed me CCTV footage of him working on a wagon. He was on the top step, climbing into the cab, when he passed out and fell back and landed straight on his head. He didn’t try to save himself or break his fall, it was just lights out. It must be a drop of summat like ten foot, from the height of his head on the top step to the ground. He’s wasn’t coming back for a bit.
The fleet operates for a cement company, so a lot of the work is on tankers that carry cement powder, ash powder, lime powder. They have 38 Scania trucks with 42 tanker trailers that need looking after too. I learned that the tankers have a blower system to pump the powder out. It channels into the bottom of a funnel. You need a massive blower on the truck to power it. The ones this fleet have are rated 1,500cfm, that means it can pump 1,500 cubic feet of air per minute. I have a fair size compressor in my shed at home, for powering pneumatic tools, and that’s rated at 20cfm. The trailer’s blower system runs off the truck engine, so I was having an interesting time learning all this.
The job got busy, so I was doing regular 70-hour weeks when there was no filming on. I wouldn’t be getting home till ten some nights and I was up again at four. I love the pressure of it, making sure the job’s done right and quickly.
I have sponsorship deals that pay decent money and the TV job pays well, and I’ve got so many projects at home that I’ll tell you about soon that could keep me busy for the best part of six months. But none of this stops me wanting to get up at four or five in the morning to walk the dogs, have some porridge, get on my bike, ride to the truck yard, do 12 or more hours, then cycle home in the freezing cold and dark on shitty country lanes.
Do I need a psychiatrist? Friends think I do. Sharon certainly does. She thinks I’m mental. I don’t know what it is. I’m addicted to it. By the time Saturday afternoon comes I’m knackered, good for nowt.
It can’t be about the money, because I could earn loads more doing stuff for sponsors. You wouldn’t believe the amount of paying jobs Spellman turns down that I’ve been offered. Money for doing not much, but I’m not interested. It has to be right. I’m not showing off, but if I asked Spellman to get me as many sponsors and as many paying nod, smile, agree days as he could I’d be rolling in money. But I don’t. It’s not part of some bigger business plan. I just don’t want to do those things. I don’t turn everything down; I’ll do stuff with a company like Morris Lubricants, because they make good stuff that I use all the time, and they’re an interesting company.
What I’ve realised is my priorities are not in sync with most other people’s. Andy Spellman does a bloody good job, a job you wouldn’t want, take it from me, organising this, that and the other for me and the businesses and contracts, woolly hats, the TV stuff, cleaning products, sponsors and more besides. He’ll spell things out and prioritise them by how much he thinks I’ll be into them and what is realistic with the time I’ve got. ‘Well, this is what it is … this is what I think … could lead to that … pays you that but you’ve got to do this …’ Then it’s down to me to decide what I want to do. Quite often I won’t give the idea more than a few minutes’ thought but the seed is there and I’ll maybe think about it another time, without committing there and then. If I’ve said I’m preparing a truck for an MOT, and put it in my diary, it doesn’t matter what else it clashes with, I’m doing the truck. I’m solid with that whatever.
I say that I don’t give a damn what people think of me, but obviously I do, because it would break my heart if people thought I was some media type. The most important thing is my opinion of myself. I don’t ever want to look at myself and think, you dickhead. I’ve done things in the past and looked back at them and wondered, What were you thinking? I suppose that’s what being young is about, doing things that make your older self shake his head. Really I’m judging myself by my own standards. And when it comes to those I’m quite set in my ways.
I do make things very difficult for myself. I’m the opposite of water. I never take, or even go looking for, the path of least resistance. I’m wearing everything out, my brain, my body, personal relationships … Why? I don’t have an answer. Other than I want to break myself. Then what? I believe the body is a fantastic thing and it will repair itself and I’ll go again.
It wasn’t long ago that I was seeing a psychologist. In the run-up to the 2017 TT, after joining Honda, I contacted Prof. Steve Peters to see if he could tell me anything that might help me in racing. I’ve mentioned him in other books. He wrote The Chimp Paradox, a book a load of top athletes, especially Olympic gold-winning cyclists, recommended. I found it fascinating and it opened my eyes to the theory of the chimp, and how my chimp, Brian, was affecting my life, how I dealt with situations and how I could keep the chimp quiet. Many, if not most, people have an inner chimp that sticks their oar in. According to Peters there are three parts of the brain: chimp, human and computer. The chimp part gets the blood first, so it has the head start on making decisions and it isn’t the most rational. It reacts, as the name suggests, in a territorial, animalistic way. I know my chimp was sometimes out of control, but because I had become aware of this I could, most of the ti
me, count to three to let the rest of the brain assess the situation and get a grip on things.
There’s a lot more to it than that, so I got in contact with Steve Peters, told him I was going back to race at the TT, and asked if he thought he could help me prepare.
All in all I bet we had seven or eight meetings. He doesn’t know about motorcycle racing – it’s not his world – so he’d quiz me about the races and I’d describe scenarios that could happen, or have happened, in a TT race. He’d go away, have a think about it, and the next time we met he’d say, ‘Right, you need to do this in that situation. You need to have a prompt to put Brian back in his cage.’ He explained that I couldn’t just finish a lap and then refocus. Instead, before my mind has time to wander, there must be certain points of the track where I refocus. It doesn’t matter what’s happened; that’s already happened, you’re going forward, concentrate on what’s going to happen, not what has happened. He was telling me to break it down into short, sharp sections. It’s all about controlling the chimp, not allowing him to start questioning the job, to stop him asking, ‘What are we fucking about with here?’ Put the chimp in his box, to stop him from squealing. I learned that I’ve got fairly good control over the chimp, but I lose concentration and he was helping me with that.
Sometimes my life’s a mess, because I’ve taken too much on, and I won’t take days off from the trucks unless I really have to. That causes more grief, then I’ll end up piling more on top. If I’m aiming for an end point, a goal, that is a dot on the horizon. I’ll get there, but never by a direct line. It will happen; it’s all the shit I have to deal with to get there.
Unfortunately it didn’t matter how well I practised what Steve Peters taught me; it wouldn’t make a shit’s worth of difference on that bike, but it did help in other areas of my life. I look at my Ford pickup project, the one I want to build and race at Pikes Peak sometime in the future, and think, Right, I can get the gearbox on the engine and try that in … Then I realise, Hang on a minute, we’ve got two race bikes to build for the Neave twins (more on them later), the tractor needs servicing, the classic bike needs building … Which leads back to the question, Why am I working so much?
It might have been interesting to hear why Steve Peters thought I was so addicted to work, but, really, it’s only worth finding out the reasons if I’m looking to get to the root of the problem so I can change. And, being blunt, I’m not. I’m happy how I am. The people around me aren’t happy, and that’s not a good situation, but I really can’t see me changing much.
CHAPTER 8
‘Ducking down to make sure I didn’t bang my head on something that wasn’t there’
LOADS OF IDEAS for new TV programmes get suggested, but not all of them fire me up. One, made in 2017, that had all the right stuff going for it was building a replica of a First World War tank to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first successful use of tanks in battle. It had history, engineering, it was a massive undertaking and it had a very strong connection to Lincoln. I’m Lincolnshire, born and bred, but I was born in Grimsby, not Lincoln. It would have meant the same to me if the tank had been built in Gloucester or Sheffield or wherever. The important thing was to remind people what their city had created and to commemorate those who’d invented it, built it and fought in it.
The plan was to build a tank from scratch, then drive it through Lincoln city centre on Remembrance Day on that 100th anniversary.
Early on, we’d met with some of Lincoln council and explained what we wanted to do and why. We showed them how big the finished tank would be and we even had a length of rope that four of us, including two of the council staff, held into a rectangular shape that made the footprint of the tank, and walked up Lincoln’s main shopping street to show how it would fit.
There isn’t much left of the factory where those first tanks were built – it’s now the Tritton Retail Park – but there’s a statue commemorating the factory and its workers, and this Remembrance Day tank parade would be a respectful reminder of what the city and its workers achieved so long ago.
The tank was designed to try and break the stalemate of the First World War’s trench warfare. Both the French and the Russians had designed great big contraptions, but neither had got past the prototype stage.
At that point in the war, Winston Churchill was the First Lord of the Admiralty, the political head of the Royal Navy, but he was also listening to the officers on the front line who were calling for an armoured vehicle. He formed the Landships Committee in February 1915 to come up with a plan for who should manufacture the vehicle the army so badly needed. The word was put out to companies with the relevant know-how (or so they hoped) to develop a fighting machine that, up until then, no one had thought of. In June the same year William Foster and Co. of Lincoln were given the contract to develop what would be called a tank. Fosters made agricultural machinery and road-going steam engines and they were the only company in Britain producing vehicles with tracks of the kind tanks would use. It was no bad thing that the winning company were based in Lincoln. For one thing, it was out of the way, so it was easier to keep secret.
One of Fosters’ top men, William Tritton, and Major Walter Wilson came up with the design of the world’s first tank and, in September 1915, Number 1 Lincoln Machine was shown to the powers that be. That first design was nicknamed Little Willie, the name the British tabloids gave to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German leader.
Little Willie was flawed, but you had to start somewhere, and the next tank, Big Willie, was produced in February 1916. The official name was the Mark I. When it went into battle, in September 1916, it was clear the Mark I didn’t have enough armour, but it scared the shit out of the Germans, so Fosters knew they were going in the right direction. Mark II and III followed, but never made it beyond testing. They got it right with the Mark IV and the government made an order for 1,000 tanks.
Because so many men were fighting, and dying, the First World War was the first time we’d seen large numbers of women employed in engineering. They were getting trained up and working, doing everything that needed doing, from welding to riveting, sometimes seven days a week.
The tank was invented to cross the no-man’s-land between the front lines and break the deadlock between the German and British armies dug into trenches. Both were losing tens of thousands of men and not making any ground. The Mark IV first saw action at the Somme in 1916, then at Arras and Ypres the following year. Even though they’d been tested in England, they weren’t prepared for the conditions of the Belgian and French battlefields and they got stuck in the mud. The tanks weren’t the wonder weapon they were expected to be, not at first anyway. The army still had faith, though; they just had to find the right place to use them. That place turned out to be Cambrai in northern France.
I rode out to France to meet a local expert, Philippe Gorczynski, who had lived in the area all his life and now owns a hotel there. As a boy he used to go out in the fields and woods exploring and he’d find relics left over from the First World War – a bayonet, shells, all sorts of stuff – and he became fascinated with the battle.
We met at a war memorial for 7,048 officers and men who died at Cambrai. This wasn’t the total number: it was far higher, over 80,000. These names were those of the bodies they couldn’t find, the servicemen missing in action.
Philippe drove me out to where the British trenches ended and no-man’s-land began, and explained how the tanks were used. The British had shipped 375 tanks across the Channel and driven them, during the night and at very slow speeds to keep the noise down, into position. The idea was to use the tanks to break the enemy’s defensive position, the Hindenburg Line.
This defensive line was made up of thick rows of barbed wire, some above head height; then there was a gap, then more barbed wire and another gap. If anyone got to the barbed wire they would be shot at by German machine guns. If, somehow, they got past all that, they were into the Germans’ three lines of heavily defended trenche
s.
At six in the morning, in late November 1917, the British lined up 375 tanks, followed by 6 infantry divisions, a total of 90,000 men, and all the available cavalry, 30,000 horses. As Philippe explained this, I could hardly believe it. Thirty thousand horses! And it was kept totally secret. How do you do that?
When the order was given, the tanks advanced. It wasn’t just a wave of tanks; it was, as Philippe said, a tsunami, and, he went on to describe, 1,000 guns dropped a storm of steel on the Germans. Cambrai was chosen because it was land with good drainage, clay on top of chalk, and it wasn’t all chewed up from previous battles, so the tanks stood half a chance of moving across it.
Before long, the Germans were panicking, and in two hours the line was broken. The tanks had gained more ground in twelve hours than the British had done in three months at other battlefields.
Nothing like it had been seen before, but within 24 hours 179 tanks were out of action, most of them broken down, with 60 damaged by enemy fire. This was a new plan of action, a new way of warfare, and the rest of the British forces weren’t ready for it. The infantry and cavalry hadn’t advanced behind the tanks and a lot of the ground they’d gained was recaptured by a German counter-attack. What no one was disagreeing about, however, was the success of the concept of tank warfare. It had been proven and it would be used again. There’s no doubt the invention of the Mark IV shortened the war and saved many more lives because of that.
Philippe not only knew the area and the history of the Battle of Cambrai, he saved a major part of it. Years earlier an old woman, who was alive at the time of the battle, had told him that one of the tanks that had seen action in 1917 had been buried in the area and she knew where it was. It took six years to find it, but Philippe and his helpers dug it up and restored it as best they could.