Post by Administrator on Mar 7, 2009 15:40:26 GMT
Originally sent to oldtimespeedway via Steve Magro in December 2007 with the permission of John Chaplin.
A TRIBUTE TO THE LATE VIC DUGGAN
By JOHN CHAPLIN
(Founder of the 'Vintage Speedway Magazine' in 1992).
VIC DUGGAN, one of the sport's undisputed towering legends who dominated speedway's post-war golden age, the fantastic boom years of the late 1940s, has died aged 91.
His brilliance took the art of speedway, refined it, perfected it and then elevated it to new heights of excellence and achievement. His career on the world stage, a mere eight seasons, was by modern standards brief because it was interrupted by the war years, yet his influence on standards and technical development was incalculable.
He had been the victim of an earlier stroke and he died of natural causes following a seizure in a hospital in Queensland on March 24 this year. His death has only just become known, more than eight months on, because, in keeping with the reclusive way he had chosen to live for more than half a century since he left the sport, he instructed his family that he wanted 'no fuss', no funeral service and specifically that nothing be released to the Press.
It was entirely in keeping with the modesty I discovered in Vic when I became the last journalist to interview him at his Australian home in 2000. I found out he had died when my annual birthday card to him was returned to me and I began to make inquiries. Confirmation of his death came from his son John who released details to me and my colleague, Australian speedway historian Jim Shepherd.
When I turned up, unannounced, at his home in Queensland at a place quaintly named Tin Can Bay, we spent two hours talking about his speedway career. It had taken years of gaining his trust after I had been warned by his old rival, Wembley captain Bill Kitchen, that if I did go to see him and tried to talk about speedway, he would ask me to leave.
It was nothing like that. I must confess that in my youth I had been in awe of him. To be at last in his presence was a rare privilege, but I was, to say the least, cautious. Yet I was warmly welcomed and made to feel very much at home, and Vic sparkled as he recalled his career. He had previously resisted all attempts to reunite him with his speedway past, even declining a 'transport provided' invitation from Ivan Mauger to be guest of honour at an Australian veterans' annual dinner.
But John, his only son, did persuade him to agree to be inducted into the Hunter River sporting Hall of Fame in 2005 because, John said, he thought it would be good for Vic to get out and that it would be, almost certainly, his father's farewell public appearance.
\
The modern fan can have little or no concept of the impact that Duggan's phenomenal success had on the sport in the late 1940s. Brought up on the likes of Moore, Briggs, Fundin, Craven, Mauger, Nielsen, and Rickardsson - all multi-World Champions - the fact that Duggan never won the world crown means that his influence on the game and the era he graced is given scant recognition by speedway archivists. But it was enormous, in setting the highest standards and in technical advancement.
To indicate the awe in which Duggan was held at the height of his powers, I make no apology for repeating here words written about him by one of speedway's greatest journalists, Basil Storey, the early post-war editor of the highly respected Speedway Gazette.
Storey wrote: 'Once to every generation in every sphere of sport a giant crosses the stage and leaves a memory which no successor can erase from the minds of those who witnessed the performance. Speedway racing is no exception.'
This generation of the new millennium, with its Grands Prix and World Team Cups, will of course always revere those great names I have mentioned. But, Storey commented that, just as the phantom figures of Vic Huxley, Lloyd 'Sprouts' Elder and Bluey Wilkinson, had come roaring down the speedway years for the pioneer generation, the vast crowds of post-war fans carry a torch for Vic Duggan in the same way that their elders continue to sing the praises of their past heroes.
'Vic Duggan takes his place among the immortals of the cinders game,' Storey continued. 'He has fired the public's imagination as has no other rider. It would be impossible for him to rise to greater heights. No man in the history of the sport has more completely fulfilled a promise.'
Someone who most modern fans can relate to, Coventry's supremo, the late Charles Ochiltree, was even moved to remark in an appreciation that appeared in the 1948 Stenner's Speedway Annual: 'Unhesitatingly, the best thing that happened in British speedway in 1947 was Vic Duggan. Shock followed shock, records stacked up overnight . . . '
Ochiltree observed that the crowds flocked to see him. And the crowds of that early post-war boom time were, by the standards of today, unimaginable: the average every week was around 25,000 at Wimbledon, 25,000 at New Cross, 30,000 at Harringay, 40,000 at Belle Vue, 45,000 at West Ham and 75,000 at Wembley.
'Duggan arrived with a world-beater label,' wrote Storey. 'He has worn that world-beater label throughout an English season with a grace that does him credit. The phenomenal brilliance of Duggan is no reflection on his rivals. He has simply provided something with which they have been unable to cope.'
That something was a season of virtual invincibility. It had not always been so.
Victor John Duggan was born in the very cradle of speedway, West Maitland, New South Wales, in 1915. But with the family, he and his younger brother Ray grew up in Sydney, Vic holding a variety of jobs before taking to the track. His son John says: 'Motorcycle racing is what young men did in those days. Not many people had cars, but most young men had motorcycles. They were prepared to take risks, and Dad was prepared to take risks to provide for the family.'
Vic first rode at the Sydney Royale in 1936 after watching as a fan from the terraces. He liked the sport and had seen a speedway bike for sale in a garage window. The price was \'a330, a lot of money in those days, so before buying it he went and called on Frank Arthur in the speedway office at the Royale and asked if there was any chance of a ride in the following Saturday's meeting.
Vic recalled: 'I'd never ridden a speedway bike. I had no idea - I just used to watch them riding round trailing their leg.' Arthur asked him: 'You've got a bike, have you?' And Vic replied: 'Oh, yes, I've got all the stuff. Don't worry about that.' So he went back and bought the bike.
'But I couldn't do what they were doing,' he said. 'I'd been riding the big Indian bikes and they had large sweeping handlebars. So I started sitting upright with the big bars and putting my foot forward.' It was the beginning of the distinctive Duggan style.
'From then on,' said Vic, 'I got the hang of it. thingy Case saw me. He was captain of Hackney at the time, and he said: "Why don't you come to England?" '
But the star man at Hackney in 1937 was American Cordy Milne, and Vic felt that the workshop mechanics gave the Milne bikes priority over his, so he started doing his engines himself. From then on progress was rapid, at Bristol in 1938 and then at Wimbledon in 1939, when he really hit the big time with outstanding performances in the Tests against England and qualifying for the World Final which was never held because of the outbreak of war.
Vic, a skilled welder, constructed a revolutionary lightweight speedway frame from tubing used on Mosquito fighter-bombers during the war. Allied to his amazing natural ability, it was to carry him to heights of success never before reached by anyone in the cinders game.
When league racing resumed in Britain in 1946, Vic's old club Wimbledon sent a cable inviting him to rejoin the Dons. But there was no response when he asked for air transport to be provided both ways for him and his machine so that he could be certain of returning to Sydney for the start of the 1946-47 season.
The following year, 1947, when Harringay reopened, there were no financial restraints. The north London arena was a huge entertainment complex regularly staging ice hockey, greyhound racing, musical shows and boxing tournaments. 'They had plenty of cash,'said Vic, 'and flew us all over - just us and the bikes.'
'Just us' were Vic, Ray, Frank Dolan and Cliff Parkinson. Parkinson went to West Ham, the others to Harringay. Such had been Vic's form in Australia that he arrived in England ranked number one in the world, and it was a season in which he became something of a superman.
His scoring was phenomenal. Out of 348 starts, he had 297 firsts, 39 seconds, three thirds, one last place and he failed to finish eight times. His average was 11.46 out of a possible maximum of 12. League matches then were over 14 heats, with teams of eight men, two of whom were reserves. Heat leaders had four rides - there were no tactical substitute rides, no rider replacement system and no bonus points were recorded. It is estimated that he earned in a 20 week season £34,000 - equal in today's values to £396,000.
Duggan won the London Riders Championship and took away the Golden Helmet from Jack Parker who had made it virtually his own property. His challenger for the title was Bill Kitchen, and both of them were hauled before a Control Board inquiry to explain how it was that Kitchen had won the first leg at Vic's home track, Harringay, Vic had won the second leg at Bill's home track, Wembley, and the contest had gone to a decider at Belle Vue which Vic won 2-0. The sensational inference was that the pair were suspected of fixing the result.
The inquiry concluded that it could not hold either of the 'riders concerned guilty of conduct prejudicial to the sport'. However, there was a telling additional note, which said: 'If any case of this kind comes up in the future and the evidence is such as to satisfy the court that there has been any "fixing" of a race, most drastic action will be taken . . . '
Immediately after the decider Vic resigned the title and made it known that he would decline any future nomination. When I asked him: 'What really happened? Can you tell me?' He replied: 'No.' And would say not another word.
Vic reached the final of the British Riders Championship, which temporarily replaced the World Championship, without dropping a point in his four qualifiers, but he had an uncharacteristic fall at the Wembley final and Parker took the title. The following season, with the competition renamed the Speedway Riders Championship, he made no mistake and won it, the trophy being presented to him by Prince Philip, the only time a royal personage so close to the monarch has ever attended a speedway meeting.
But Vic seemed to be fated when it came to the World Championship, which was reintroduced in 1949. He was favourite to win what seemed to be his title by right, but a mid-season crash at New Cross damaged a shoulder and put him out of the qualifiers.
Duggan's remarkable success was in no small measure due to the super lightweight frame he made out of aircraft tubing, his obsessive attention to mechanical excellence and personal fitness. His revolutionary set-up made the heavier bikes that were a carryover from the pre-war years obsolete and took the technology of speedway machinery to a new plane.
He forecast that it would take two years for everyone else to catch up with him, and he was about right. Then, in January 1950, Ray was killed along with Norman Clay, another brilliant young Australian on the brink of world stardom, in a racing crash at the Sydney Sports Ground. It was the sport's only double fatality.
His brother's death had a profound effect on Vic, and the rest of the family. John Duggan revealed: 'Dad had three others riding for him and Ray was one.' This arrangement had been common practice since the early days. A star rider would sponsor a stable of others, usually provide machinery and take a percentage of their prize money. John said: 'Dad's sister Josie blamed him for Ray's death. She said he shouldn't have sent him out that night and it caused a rift. They didn't speak for years.'
Vic returned to England for the 1950 season, reaching that year's World Final but scored a mere four points, and that was it. He quit to eventually become a virtual recluse in Tin Can Bay.
Now the giant has crossed the stage and taken his final curtain call. The chequered flag has fallen on a talent the likes of which speedway racing will never see again. For Duggan was far more than a mere giant, and it is fitting that he now takes his place among the immortals of the cinders game.
When I interviewed Vic I asked him about his attitude to his magnificent speedway career. He admitted that, as far as he was concerned, it was not really about the glory of sporting endeavour at all, and it was not just a job, it was merely a way to make money. 'I couldn't make it any other way,' he said. And there had been no hoarding of trophies and memorabilia. 'I won plenty of things.' he said. I had a tea chest full of cups and things. I got rid of them - even the one the Prince gave me.'
John told me: 'He was always a good father. I wouldn't have wanted anyone else. He was always cautious with money and what he made from speedway he left sitting in the bank and of course it was affected by inflation. Towards the end we had long discussions about religion. We are a Catholic family and Dad had become disillusioned with the concept of religion. He died peacefully in his sleep, there was no pain and some months ago we held a family gathering in his memory.'
In the end, the dedicated high speed achiever with the surgically efficient, precise and fiercely focused racing brain that was Vic Duggan was laid low by Alzheimers Disease. John said: 'He died a happy man. But he told me he wished that he could have gone sooner.'
A TRIBUTE TO THE LATE VIC DUGGAN
By JOHN CHAPLIN
(Founder of the 'Vintage Speedway Magazine' in 1992).
VIC DUGGAN, one of the sport's undisputed towering legends who dominated speedway's post-war golden age, the fantastic boom years of the late 1940s, has died aged 91.
His brilliance took the art of speedway, refined it, perfected it and then elevated it to new heights of excellence and achievement. His career on the world stage, a mere eight seasons, was by modern standards brief because it was interrupted by the war years, yet his influence on standards and technical development was incalculable.
He had been the victim of an earlier stroke and he died of natural causes following a seizure in a hospital in Queensland on March 24 this year. His death has only just become known, more than eight months on, because, in keeping with the reclusive way he had chosen to live for more than half a century since he left the sport, he instructed his family that he wanted 'no fuss', no funeral service and specifically that nothing be released to the Press.
It was entirely in keeping with the modesty I discovered in Vic when I became the last journalist to interview him at his Australian home in 2000. I found out he had died when my annual birthday card to him was returned to me and I began to make inquiries. Confirmation of his death came from his son John who released details to me and my colleague, Australian speedway historian Jim Shepherd.
When I turned up, unannounced, at his home in Queensland at a place quaintly named Tin Can Bay, we spent two hours talking about his speedway career. It had taken years of gaining his trust after I had been warned by his old rival, Wembley captain Bill Kitchen, that if I did go to see him and tried to talk about speedway, he would ask me to leave.
It was nothing like that. I must confess that in my youth I had been in awe of him. To be at last in his presence was a rare privilege, but I was, to say the least, cautious. Yet I was warmly welcomed and made to feel very much at home, and Vic sparkled as he recalled his career. He had previously resisted all attempts to reunite him with his speedway past, even declining a 'transport provided' invitation from Ivan Mauger to be guest of honour at an Australian veterans' annual dinner.
But John, his only son, did persuade him to agree to be inducted into the Hunter River sporting Hall of Fame in 2005 because, John said, he thought it would be good for Vic to get out and that it would be, almost certainly, his father's farewell public appearance.
\
The modern fan can have little or no concept of the impact that Duggan's phenomenal success had on the sport in the late 1940s. Brought up on the likes of Moore, Briggs, Fundin, Craven, Mauger, Nielsen, and Rickardsson - all multi-World Champions - the fact that Duggan never won the world crown means that his influence on the game and the era he graced is given scant recognition by speedway archivists. But it was enormous, in setting the highest standards and in technical advancement.
To indicate the awe in which Duggan was held at the height of his powers, I make no apology for repeating here words written about him by one of speedway's greatest journalists, Basil Storey, the early post-war editor of the highly respected Speedway Gazette.
Storey wrote: 'Once to every generation in every sphere of sport a giant crosses the stage and leaves a memory which no successor can erase from the minds of those who witnessed the performance. Speedway racing is no exception.'
This generation of the new millennium, with its Grands Prix and World Team Cups, will of course always revere those great names I have mentioned. But, Storey commented that, just as the phantom figures of Vic Huxley, Lloyd 'Sprouts' Elder and Bluey Wilkinson, had come roaring down the speedway years for the pioneer generation, the vast crowds of post-war fans carry a torch for Vic Duggan in the same way that their elders continue to sing the praises of their past heroes.
'Vic Duggan takes his place among the immortals of the cinders game,' Storey continued. 'He has fired the public's imagination as has no other rider. It would be impossible for him to rise to greater heights. No man in the history of the sport has more completely fulfilled a promise.'
Someone who most modern fans can relate to, Coventry's supremo, the late Charles Ochiltree, was even moved to remark in an appreciation that appeared in the 1948 Stenner's Speedway Annual: 'Unhesitatingly, the best thing that happened in British speedway in 1947 was Vic Duggan. Shock followed shock, records stacked up overnight . . . '
Ochiltree observed that the crowds flocked to see him. And the crowds of that early post-war boom time were, by the standards of today, unimaginable: the average every week was around 25,000 at Wimbledon, 25,000 at New Cross, 30,000 at Harringay, 40,000 at Belle Vue, 45,000 at West Ham and 75,000 at Wembley.
'Duggan arrived with a world-beater label,' wrote Storey. 'He has worn that world-beater label throughout an English season with a grace that does him credit. The phenomenal brilliance of Duggan is no reflection on his rivals. He has simply provided something with which they have been unable to cope.'
That something was a season of virtual invincibility. It had not always been so.
Victor John Duggan was born in the very cradle of speedway, West Maitland, New South Wales, in 1915. But with the family, he and his younger brother Ray grew up in Sydney, Vic holding a variety of jobs before taking to the track. His son John says: 'Motorcycle racing is what young men did in those days. Not many people had cars, but most young men had motorcycles. They were prepared to take risks, and Dad was prepared to take risks to provide for the family.'
Vic first rode at the Sydney Royale in 1936 after watching as a fan from the terraces. He liked the sport and had seen a speedway bike for sale in a garage window. The price was \'a330, a lot of money in those days, so before buying it he went and called on Frank Arthur in the speedway office at the Royale and asked if there was any chance of a ride in the following Saturday's meeting.
Vic recalled: 'I'd never ridden a speedway bike. I had no idea - I just used to watch them riding round trailing their leg.' Arthur asked him: 'You've got a bike, have you?' And Vic replied: 'Oh, yes, I've got all the stuff. Don't worry about that.' So he went back and bought the bike.
'But I couldn't do what they were doing,' he said. 'I'd been riding the big Indian bikes and they had large sweeping handlebars. So I started sitting upright with the big bars and putting my foot forward.' It was the beginning of the distinctive Duggan style.
'From then on,' said Vic, 'I got the hang of it. thingy Case saw me. He was captain of Hackney at the time, and he said: "Why don't you come to England?" '
But the star man at Hackney in 1937 was American Cordy Milne, and Vic felt that the workshop mechanics gave the Milne bikes priority over his, so he started doing his engines himself. From then on progress was rapid, at Bristol in 1938 and then at Wimbledon in 1939, when he really hit the big time with outstanding performances in the Tests against England and qualifying for the World Final which was never held because of the outbreak of war.
Vic, a skilled welder, constructed a revolutionary lightweight speedway frame from tubing used on Mosquito fighter-bombers during the war. Allied to his amazing natural ability, it was to carry him to heights of success never before reached by anyone in the cinders game.
When league racing resumed in Britain in 1946, Vic's old club Wimbledon sent a cable inviting him to rejoin the Dons. But there was no response when he asked for air transport to be provided both ways for him and his machine so that he could be certain of returning to Sydney for the start of the 1946-47 season.
The following year, 1947, when Harringay reopened, there were no financial restraints. The north London arena was a huge entertainment complex regularly staging ice hockey, greyhound racing, musical shows and boxing tournaments. 'They had plenty of cash,'said Vic, 'and flew us all over - just us and the bikes.'
'Just us' were Vic, Ray, Frank Dolan and Cliff Parkinson. Parkinson went to West Ham, the others to Harringay. Such had been Vic's form in Australia that he arrived in England ranked number one in the world, and it was a season in which he became something of a superman.
His scoring was phenomenal. Out of 348 starts, he had 297 firsts, 39 seconds, three thirds, one last place and he failed to finish eight times. His average was 11.46 out of a possible maximum of 12. League matches then were over 14 heats, with teams of eight men, two of whom were reserves. Heat leaders had four rides - there were no tactical substitute rides, no rider replacement system and no bonus points were recorded. It is estimated that he earned in a 20 week season £34,000 - equal in today's values to £396,000.
Duggan won the London Riders Championship and took away the Golden Helmet from Jack Parker who had made it virtually his own property. His challenger for the title was Bill Kitchen, and both of them were hauled before a Control Board inquiry to explain how it was that Kitchen had won the first leg at Vic's home track, Harringay, Vic had won the second leg at Bill's home track, Wembley, and the contest had gone to a decider at Belle Vue which Vic won 2-0. The sensational inference was that the pair were suspected of fixing the result.
The inquiry concluded that it could not hold either of the 'riders concerned guilty of conduct prejudicial to the sport'. However, there was a telling additional note, which said: 'If any case of this kind comes up in the future and the evidence is such as to satisfy the court that there has been any "fixing" of a race, most drastic action will be taken . . . '
Immediately after the decider Vic resigned the title and made it known that he would decline any future nomination. When I asked him: 'What really happened? Can you tell me?' He replied: 'No.' And would say not another word.
Vic reached the final of the British Riders Championship, which temporarily replaced the World Championship, without dropping a point in his four qualifiers, but he had an uncharacteristic fall at the Wembley final and Parker took the title. The following season, with the competition renamed the Speedway Riders Championship, he made no mistake and won it, the trophy being presented to him by Prince Philip, the only time a royal personage so close to the monarch has ever attended a speedway meeting.
But Vic seemed to be fated when it came to the World Championship, which was reintroduced in 1949. He was favourite to win what seemed to be his title by right, but a mid-season crash at New Cross damaged a shoulder and put him out of the qualifiers.
Duggan's remarkable success was in no small measure due to the super lightweight frame he made out of aircraft tubing, his obsessive attention to mechanical excellence and personal fitness. His revolutionary set-up made the heavier bikes that were a carryover from the pre-war years obsolete and took the technology of speedway machinery to a new plane.
He forecast that it would take two years for everyone else to catch up with him, and he was about right. Then, in January 1950, Ray was killed along with Norman Clay, another brilliant young Australian on the brink of world stardom, in a racing crash at the Sydney Sports Ground. It was the sport's only double fatality.
His brother's death had a profound effect on Vic, and the rest of the family. John Duggan revealed: 'Dad had three others riding for him and Ray was one.' This arrangement had been common practice since the early days. A star rider would sponsor a stable of others, usually provide machinery and take a percentage of their prize money. John said: 'Dad's sister Josie blamed him for Ray's death. She said he shouldn't have sent him out that night and it caused a rift. They didn't speak for years.'
Vic returned to England for the 1950 season, reaching that year's World Final but scored a mere four points, and that was it. He quit to eventually become a virtual recluse in Tin Can Bay.
Now the giant has crossed the stage and taken his final curtain call. The chequered flag has fallen on a talent the likes of which speedway racing will never see again. For Duggan was far more than a mere giant, and it is fitting that he now takes his place among the immortals of the cinders game.
When I interviewed Vic I asked him about his attitude to his magnificent speedway career. He admitted that, as far as he was concerned, it was not really about the glory of sporting endeavour at all, and it was not just a job, it was merely a way to make money. 'I couldn't make it any other way,' he said. And there had been no hoarding of trophies and memorabilia. 'I won plenty of things.' he said. I had a tea chest full of cups and things. I got rid of them - even the one the Prince gave me.'
John told me: 'He was always a good father. I wouldn't have wanted anyone else. He was always cautious with money and what he made from speedway he left sitting in the bank and of course it was affected by inflation. Towards the end we had long discussions about religion. We are a Catholic family and Dad had become disillusioned with the concept of religion. He died peacefully in his sleep, there was no pain and some months ago we held a family gathering in his memory.'
In the end, the dedicated high speed achiever with the surgically efficient, precise and fiercely focused racing brain that was Vic Duggan was laid low by Alzheimers Disease. John said: 'He died a happy man. But he told me he wished that he could have gone sooner.'