Vulcan Rally

Doncaster Speedway Track 1972. I've strained my memory on this one and and I cannot, for the life of me, remember who organised the event. I remember stopping to help a couple of lads from the Newton le Willows area who had broken down on their combo. I was, after all, on my old A10 outfit.

someone started to sing the alphabet song.

 

The one lad was a right comic, he was wearing white racing leathers and he used to do an impression of Harry Corbett "Hey look everybody, here comes Sooty, and Sooty's got spunk on his nose. What have you been doing Sooty?" So after that he was nicknamed Sooty. We travelled the rest of the way together. The camping was on the mown grass area in the middle of the track and for a venue we were let loose on the town.

The first pub we entered had quite a large public bar and somewhere around 40-50 rallyists walked in shortly after opening time to the shock of the barmaid - or should I say oldmaid - who was stood there on her own. Eventually we all got served and sat down talking amongst our selves, a bit of laughing and joking going on. Then someone put a couple of records on the jukebox. The volume must have been set from an earlier session and perhaps the choice of artist was not to the barmaid's taste. She promptly turned it down to a tad over a whisper, which caused some howls of protest and a demand for a refund which was ignored. Well when the first couple of pints had lubricated our vocal cords someone started to sing the alphabet song. We never got to E..... hey ho said Rolly! The old dragon threw a fit, and threw us all out. Ok so we were not the Welsh male voice chior but we were holding the tune pretty well and we knew all the words.

We wandered the town for the rest of the evening and eventually returned to the tents. I awoke quite early and started to boil a pan of water for coffee on a primus stove that I had found in the garage at home. It was not going too well so I started to pump it up and next thing I knew I had blown the bottom out of it and was covered from ankle to chest in paraffin.

Another miss-spent weekend.

- Les Hobbs


Two badges for one rally: a mystery to be solved

It is in fact the passionate collector of commemorative badges of British motorcycling events who addresses today to those who could possibly help me to clear up a mystery. I am thinking more specifically of former members of the club that organised the Vulcan rally in the early 1970s.

From the only pictures of the badges of this meeting that I have in my archives, and to my knowledge, it seems that this meeting only took place in two years: in 1972 and 1973.

The dilemma I wish to clarify concerns the 1972 badge. It appears that two different badges were produced for that year's event. The logo and lettering of the badge is identical for both but the colours of the enamel are totally different as shown in the pictures below.

It is extremely rare to be confronted with such a case. In fact I have no other similar examples in my badge collection; hence my interest in trying to find out more.

The most logical hypothesis I can come up with is that there were not enough badges for all the participants who showed up to register. Hence the need for the organising club (whose name is not specified on the badge) to place an additional order with the manufacturer in order to be able to send them later by post to the rallyists who were unable to take possession of them on the day of the rally.

It seems unlikely to me that the organising club wanted different colours for the second production. But who knows? One can also imagine that the manufacturer made a mistake in the email colours of the order.

The mystery remains. The 70's are not so far away. There are certainly still members of the organisers of this meeting still alive to give us here on LPMCC an explanation as to this double badge for one and only meeting.

- Jean-Francois Helias