Hizzy: The Autobiography of Steve Hislop

As a kid, I went to Hobkirk primary school. I remember being absolutely shit-scared, waiting for the bus on my first day of school because I was a very shy child and hadn’t mixed much with other kids since most of the time I just played with my little brother. Shyness is something I have mostly grown out of now but it was definitely a problem for me in the early days of my career.

I can’t remember much about primary school except that I always seemed to be sticking up for Garry in fights, particularly with a kid called Magoo who was always picking on him. My other outstanding memory of primary school was of Mr Thompson, the head teacher, who had a wooden leg, though I never found out why. Instead of giving us the belt when we were bad, he pulled our hair repeatedly! I clearly remember him telling me off and yanking the tuft of hair at the front of my head in time with his rantings. No wonder I’ve got no bloody hair left!

My secondary school was Jedburgh Grammar, but I was never interested in going there because I was a real out-door type, thanks to my dad’s uncles, Jim and John Wallace, having a farm. Almost every weekend I would cycle down to that farm and have the time of my life. I fed the sheep and the cows, picked the turnips and generally mucked in with the chores, then after that it was back to the house for a big farm breakfast and in the afternoons John and I would go shooting.

At that point, all I wanted to be when I grew up was a gamekeeper. I was like a little old man with my deerstalker hat with the ‘Deputy Dawg’ flap-down ear covers and a bloody big shotgun cocked over my arm. I used to feed up all the birds and ducks and make little hideouts round the ponds then come the shooting season I blew the hell out of everything that could fly – and some things that couldn’t.

I know that sounds cruel now but that was the norm in the country, especially back then, and boys will be boys after all. Having said that, I was a bit of a nasty little fucker when it came to things like that. I shot baby crows that had left the nest with my .22 rifle and kept the shotgun for the bigger birds and the nests themselves. I’m not particularly proud of it now but as I said before, it felt normal at the time.

On Sunday evenings I would cycle home again as late as I could get away with and dreaded going back to school the next day. I had pushbikes from a very early age but they were always hand-me-downs and were far too big for me. I never had any stabilizers either so I had lots of crashes because I was too small to reach the ground. My folks would hold on to me to get me going then seconds after they let me go there would be a big crashing noise, a yelp and a puff of dust as I hit the deck again. But I loved two-wheelers from the start, even when they were too big for me.

The first time I ever got a new bike was when my nana bought Garry and I brand new Raleigh Choppers for Christmas but they were just as dangerous as the too-big hand-me-downs. Choppers may have looked cool but they certainly weren’t designed for riding – they were bloody lethal. Garry once smashed his face to hell one night when he crashed cycling down a hill and he squealed in pain all the way home – the poor little bugger. We used to get into high-speed wobbles because the front wheels were so small and the high bars provided so much leverage that they made the effect worse.

Even back then we pretended we were riding motorbikes and like most kids at the time, we gripped playing cards onto the fork legs with clothes pegs so they ran through the spokes and made a noise like a motorbike. But showing an early aptitude for setting up machinery, I eventually found that cut-up bottles of washing-up liquid lasted longer than playing cards and made a better noise too!

Before we even had pushbikes, my mum says that Garry and I would sit in the house and pretend to be bike racers. We would be at opposite ends of the sofa over the armrests in a racing crouch, our little legs dangling over the side, and cushions under our chests acting as petrol tanks.

Apparently we fought over which racer we were pretending to be too and it was always Jimmie Guthrie or Geordie Buchan. Jimmie Guthrie was Hawick’s most famous son and one of the greatest names in pre-war motorcycle racing. He was born in 1897 and went on to win six Isle of Man TTs and was European champion three times when that title was the equivalent of today’s world championships. His admirers included none other than a certain Adolf Hitler who on one occasion even presented him with a trophy!

Jimmie was killed in a 500cc race at the Sachsenring in Germany in 1937 at 40 years of age and there’s still a statue of him in Hawick, as well as the famous Guthrie’s memorial on the TT course. Like I said before, Garry and I would argue over who was going to be Jimmy Guthrie and who was going to be Geordie Buchan, who was the Scottish champion at the time and also a friend of my dad. So in a sense, my first ever race was on a sofa and I think it finished in a dead heat with Garry!

Rugby is the big sport in the Scottish Borders and although I played it at school, I was never a big fan. In fact, I never liked football or tennis either and as for cricket – what the fuck is that all about? I’ll never understand the fascination with that game. It’s just grown men playing bloody rounders if you ask me. I was more into hunting and shooting things. My old Uncle John also taught me the art of fly fishing and I loved that too. I don’t do it any more but I suppose I’ll have to relearn it now to teach my own kids, Connor and Aaron.

However, I hope they never have to go through the experience I once had when I went sea fishing with my dad and Garry. Dad owned a little boat that we used to tow to the coast for a spot of line-and-rod fishing. On one occasion we took it to the Isle of Whithorn in Galloway and were anchored over some rocks on the Solway Firth doing a spot of rod fishing. It was a lovely hot, calm day so we didn’t have any life jackets on and everything was just perfect, the sun on our backs and the water lapping gently at the hull of the boat. But all of a sudden the peace was shattered by my dad screaming, ‘Get your bloody life jackets on boys, NOW! And get your rods in. QUICKLY.’ I turned to see what the hell could be causing all this panic and was startled to spot a huge dorsal fin heading directly for the boat. Bloody hell, I shat myself; it was a huge basking shark, more than twice the size of the boat (which was 16 feet long) and it was coming straight for us!

Although I didn’t know it then, basking sharks are harmless plankton feeders but they look just like great white sharks and are much, much bigger, growing to well over 30 feet. That’s pretty damned big when you’re a scrawny little four-foot kid. This all happened just two years before the movie Jaws came out and I’m pretty glad I hadn’t seen that film beforehand because I’d probably have been even more terrified and I was scared enough as it was. The shark went under the boat and I remember seeing its head emerging on the other side before its tail had even gone under – that’s how big it was. It just continued swimming away and that’s the last we saw of it, but it was a pretty scary experience – even though it was good to brag about later.

Garry and I were very close and I suppose we had to be really because there were very few other kids to play with. Obviously, we fought a bit as all boys do but we were the best of pals most of the time. We built tree houses and hammocks, messed about in the woods and by the rivers and had a real boys’ own childhood. We did used to pal around with a guy called David Cook, or ‘Cookie’ as we called him, who went on to become a 250cc Scottish bike racing champion, but he was about the only other kid we were close to.

Way before we ever got motorbikes, Cookie, Garry and I used to hone our racing skills in 45-litre oil drums. Two of us would squeeze into a drum and the third person would push it down a massive hill. It was brilliant fun to be in the drum but just as much of a laugh watching the other two getting beaten up as they bounced and rattled their way downhill, bones clattering all the way. Eventually we came up with a new addition to the game – a tractor tyre! This thing was bigger than all three of us but we managed to wheel it up the hill then I’d spend ages trying to squeeze my way inside it as if I was an inner tube. Once I was in, the lads would give me a mighty shove and off I went, bouncing and bouncing for what seemed like ages as the heavy tyre picked up speed on its way down the hill. That bit was all right – it was the slowing down followed by the inevitable crash that caused the many injuries. I’d get thrown out at the end as the momentum died out and I was usually really dizzy and disorientated from being spun round like a hamster in a wheel, so invariably I fell on my backside as soon as I tried to stand up.

One time I actually fell out of the tyre while it was still bouncing down the hill at speed and I crashed face first into a grassy knoll and bust my nose. It was bleeding and swollen and in a hell of a mess. I don’t know if it was actually broken, but to this day I’ve still got a kink in my nose and it was all because of that bloody tractor tyre.

As kids, our other passion was for bogeys, or fun karts, as people call them now. You know the type, a wooden base with four pram wheels and a rope for steering. We got really good at building them and even made one with a cab once. There was a steep downhill corner in the field next to our house which was good for learning to slide the bogeys on but we decided a bit of mud would help make it even slippier. I don’t know why we didn’t just soak it with water but instead we had the bright idea of pissing on that corner for all we were worth to make it muddy so we could get better slides! If we didn’t need to pee, we’d simply drink bottles and bottles of juice until we did – the more piss the better as far as we were concerned. We would eventually get the corner so wet that we had out of control slides and Garry once had a huge crash and ended up lying in that huge puddle of piss with several broken fingers.

It was a happy time for Garry and I, and it may have seemed idealistic at the time but in later years I realized the more negative effects my upbringing had on me. Because I was so isolated, I was very shy with other people. I still am today, to a certain extent, so I’m trying to encourage my kids to be confident and to mix freely with people so that they’re better equipped to deal with the big bad world than I was. Even now, I hate calling travel agents and bank managers or dealing with any ‘official’ phone calls like that, so if I can, I ask someone else to do it for me! I know that sounds pathetic, but it’s just the way I am.

There was another couple of kids, called Alistair and Norman Glendinning, with whom Garry and I sometimes played. They lived on a nearby farm called Doorpool. At the time, we were renting a cottage within the farm grounds which cost seven shillings a week (35 pence in today’s money), if my mum agreed to top up the water trough for the cows every day, which she did.

Once I remember having a big argument with Alistair Glendinning and I ended up throwing a garden rake at him. It split his face open and cut his head – he was in a right mess. I got a terrible bollocking for that but a few days later we were all playing happily together again. Kids don’t hold grudges, shame adults aren’t the same.

When I was nine years old, in 1973, my dad, as a former competitor, was invited to the Golden Jubilee of the Manx Grand Prix. When he got there he met up with Jim Oliver who owned Thomas B. Oliver’s garage in Denholm, just a few miles from where we lived. Jim was partly sponsoring a rider called Wullie Simson, who also lived near our home and my dad got to know him on that trip. It turned out that Wullie was a joiner like my dad but he’d quit his job when his boss wouldn’t give him time off to go to the Manx! My dad was getting a lot of work in so he offered Wullie a job, which was gladly accepted. Garry and I helped out at my dad’s workshop for pocket money and we liked Wullie straight away when he started there and we were always asking him about the racing.

Some two weeks after Wullie started his job at the workshop, my dad asked Garry and I if we’d like to go and watch some bike racing at Silloth, an airfield circuit just south of Carlisle. Too right we did! We were so excited at the prospect that we could hardly sleep. When Garry and I had been about five or six years old, we went with our nana and papa to stay in a caravan at Silloth. I remember hearing motorbikes howling away in the background and my grandma explained it was the bike racing over on the airfield. I ranted and begged her for so long to take us to see them that the poor woman ended up trudging with us for about six miles on the round trip to the airfield just so we could watch the bikes. There was a big delay in the racing because a rider was killed and my nana wanted to take Garry and I away from the track at that point, but I was having none of it. Apparently, I refused to leave the circuit until I’d seen the last bike in the last race go past. I obviously loved bike racing even way back then. That must have been in the late 1960s.

But I was 11 and old enough to really appreciate it properly by the time dad took me back to Silloth to watch another race and my most vivid memory of that meeting is of a guy in purple leathers, because everyone else was wearing black. Every lap he came out of the hairpin and pulled a big wheelie and I thought he was amazing. He was called Steve Machin and I’m now very friendly with his brother Jack though sadly later, Steve himself was killed on a race bike.

It was great to watch my dad’s mate Wullie Simson racing and he must have enjoyed our support because soon after that race, he turned up at our house in his van and pulled out a Honda ST50. It must have been an MOT failure or something because the engine was in pieces but my dad soon put it back together, got it fired up and that was it. From that moment on, Garry and I spent every spare moment riding that bike in the field surrounding the house. My motorcycling career had begun.

3 Off the Rails (#ulink_883c642a-f6ec-5ac5-ab8a-20cb33abe6a4)

‘All I seemed to do was get pissed and crash cars.’

Getting a little motorbike changed everything for Garry and I – it became the most important thing in our lives. We couldn’t even concentrate at school any more because all we wanted to do was get home and ride that bike.

Around the same time as we got the ST50 my dad finally got back into racing, now that he had provided a solid backing for his family. He bought a 350cc Aermacchi and started racing it in single-cylinder events, which today would be called classic races. He was pretty good and won a couple of races here and there but it was more like a hobby to him rather than his whole life. So with dad racing again and Garry and I riding too, bikes were suddenly everywhere and were the main topic of conversation in the Hislop household. Looking back, it’s really no surprise I turned out to be a racer.

There was corn growing in the fields around our house in the summer and at other times there were horses grazing there too so Garry and I had to make sure we rode round everything but that certainly never stopped us. Pretty soon, the little Honda was joined by a Suzuki A50 with a five-speed gearbox and a clutch (the Honda was a three-speed semi-automatic). It was a great bit of kit and it was allocated to Garry while I got the Honda, which I felt was fair enough, because it meant we could finally race each other.

About this time, my nana took ill and the doctors soon discovered she was riddled with cancer. She lasted another year-and-a-half but died in October 1975. I was very close to my nana and missed her terribly but I was to lose even more close family members before too long. To take my mind off my sadness I just rode round and round those fields, day in day out, rain, sun or shine. It was my only release. When I was on that little bike I didn’t think about anything else. I just wanted to learn how to go faster, how to control my slides better, how to ride more smoothly. I was totally self-contained; all I needed was my bike and my brother. Mum would call us in for tea and we’d scrub up a bit, wolf down our food and head straight back out into the field to ride again. Those were such happy times for me.

Cookie – who was the third ‘amigo’ in our little gang – got hold of his dad’s old Triumph Tiger Cub round about this time and started riding with us. The whole village used to complain about the noise we made from morning to night but we didn’t care. We had mock races for hours on end and at the end of the day, we all looked like we’d fallen down somebody’s chimney. All you could see were our little white eyes peering out of dirty, dusty faces like something from The Black and White Minstrel Show. We got filthy beyond belief but we didn’t fall off much and if we did we fixed the bikes ourselves.

When we got bored with the field we pushed the bikes into the village where there was a spare bit of common land and rode round there until we’d messed the whole place up. In fact, we sometimes rode the bikes down the road, which was totally illegal but my dad never got to hear about that!

When we weren’t racing each other, we’d try to imitate Evel Knievel whom we’d seen on TV. We made ramps out of old doors or whatever we found in my dad’s joiner’s yard. One day, I propped a panelled door up on two straw bales to act as a ramp. But when I hit it with the bike my front wheel went straight through the door and dug into the bales and I was sent flying over the handlebars in true Knievel style. Didn’t clear any buses though.

Although Garry and I had bikes, there was never any spare money in the family. The bikes were just wrecks that we rebuilt so they didn’t really cost anything. Even from an early age we worked at the joiner’s yard for our pocket money, but having no money to get the bikes fixed up by a garage was a good thing because it taught me so much about basic mechanics.

By the time I was 14 and Garry was 13, I got a SL125 Honda trail bike and he got a cracking little trials bike because we couldn’t find another trail bike locally. It was a British-built Wassel with a 125cc Sachs engine, a seven-speed gearbox and it was all covered in chrome. We weren’t into trials riding (negotiating obstacles like rocks, tree trunks and old barrels) because it was too slow, so we just raced those two bikes everywhere over the moors and through the forestry roads.

I never told my dad about those forestry roads because they were farther away than we would have been allowed and we shouldn’t have had bikes on them anyway. Flat-out speed was always our thing rather than motocrossing over jumps so we nailed our little bikes over those bumpy forest roads at about 70mph which felt as fast then as the Isle of Man TT did in later years, even though that was more like 190mph.

My dad must have realized Garry and I would want to go road racing eventually because in the winter of that year, he asked us if we wanted to try schoolboy motocross. It was a shrewd move because he knew it would give us crucial racing experience away from the dangers of road racing. Falling off on grass is a bit safer than on tarmac, although you can still do some serious damage. But the idea was that by the time we were old enough to go road racing we would know all about wheel-to-wheel contact and sliding bikes around so we’d be better prepared for it. We sold both our bikes and dad bought me a new Honda CR125 while Garry got a Yamaha YZ100. He was to race in the intermediate group while I was old enough to be in the seniors.

We got all the riding gear sorted out and by March 1977 we were off in the van to Tow Law in County Durham for our first ever race. The course was on the slope of a boggy hill and there was sleet falling pretty hard. I was absolutely shitting myself with nerves and kept asking my dad, ‘What do I do, dad? What do I do?’ He sorted everything out, got us signed on, briefed us for practice and I ended up really enjoying the practice session and was looking forward to the race.

As soon as the starting tape went up, I dropped the clutch, pinned the throttle and arrived at the first corner at the head of the pack! I thought, ‘Shit, what do I do now? Go faster? Slow down?’ I didn’t have a clue but I did what I could and I think I finished my first race in about fourth place, which wasn’t too bad.

I can’t remember how Garry got on that day but I know we both enjoyed it. When we got home we had to wash the bikes and get them ready for the next meeting. After that, we weren’t allowed to ride them at home as often since they were meant for racing and we had to help fund our efforts as much as possible by working for my dad.

Towards the end of my first year of motocross racing, when I was 15, I got my first road bike – a Suzuki AP50. It was only meant to be a project bike to work on because I was too young to ride on the roads but I had other ideas. I got it for £90 instead of the £360 original price because it was salvage and I remember sending away for all the parts I needed from breakers so I could fix it up. It felt really fast at the time and I used to sneak it out of the garage when mum and dad were out and raced all over the roads with Cookie on his Yamaha FS1E.

My dad was out quite a lot because he played the accordion in a band so I always sneaked out on my bike when he was gigging. Incidentally, I was forced (and I mean forced) to play the accordion for seven years myself and even now I can still knock out a tune or two if I have to. But I realized by the time I went to secondary school that it was an old-fashioned instrument so I taught myself to play guitar, which I still strum now and again, mostly playing folk music.

Anyway, Cookie and I were very evenly matched on our new bikes and we were both complete nutters on them. To be classed as a moped in those days bikes had to have pedals like a normal pushbike. They acted as foot-rests when you weren’t using them as pedals but they could be changed over by way of a little lever. I used to lean my bike over so far that I always scraped the pedals off in a shower of sparks and I’d constantly have to replace them. When they were intact though, we used to have pedalling races down the main street in the village for a laugh.

It’s ironic that my first big crash didn’t come about because I was riding like a nutter but because of someone else’s carelessness. It happened in 1978 when a car driver pulled out in front of me and did me some serious damage. My mum and dad were at a wedding and Garry and I had been told to stay at home and watch television. No way! Garry wanted to go to Jedburgh to meet some mates and I wanted to ride my bike so we set off two-up on the bike and Garry didn’t even have a helmet on which was the norm when he rode pillion.

Just outside Jedburgh, I dropped him off to walk into town so the police wouldn’t see him on the bike without a helmet. I then was cruising through the centre of town at about 25mph when I saw a car sitting at a junction indicating right. I obviously had the right of way but just as I was riding past the car, it pulled out in front of me. Same old story. I broke my arm as I hit the car, then flew through the air and landed on a workman’s metal post and sliced my leg on it, shattering my kneecap in the process. To top it all, I was knocked unconscious for the first of many times in my life.

Garry freaked out because he saw the whole thing as he was hanging out in the square with his mates. The ambulance took me away and the police called Jim Oliver’s garage to come and take the bike away. Who should turn up to collect the bike but my dad’s mate, Wullie Simson. He had been helping out at the garage that day and got the call from the police. Wullie recognized the bike so he took Garry back to Denholm and my mum and dad were informed. They gave me such a bollocking when they arrived at the hospital!

That was the first time I ever broke a bone and I was kept in hospital for a couple of weeks. The doctor told me I would never ride a bike again (I’ve since heard that one a few times) and even said I’d be lucky to walk properly again which shows he was talking out of a hole in his arse. I decided to quit motocross racing because it was a little more strenuous on the legs but as soon as I got home from hospital I started fixing up my road bike again. I wasn’t going to let one poxy crash put me off.

I left school around that time too with four O levels, which are similar to English GCSEs, and decided I wanted to be an engineer. My dad said the best apprenticeships were with the armed forces so I applied to join the navy as a trainee marine engineer and actually passed all the tests and the medical. But as I was waiting to hear if I’d been accepted, I realized the chances of being able to ride a bike when I was stuck on a bloody boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean were pretty slim so I went off the idea immediately.

I attended a couple of job interviews locally but failed them both then I finally got a Youth Opportunity Scheme job with a local engineering firm for £19.50 a week. It was a company that made archery equipment such as sights and weights and that sort of stuff and I thought, ‘Fuckin’ great – that’ll do me,’ but I was soon to be disillusioned. I was given a drill with a box of metal pieces on one side and an empty box on the other. My job was to drill a hole in each piece and throw it into the ‘out’ box. It was all day, every day, for the best part of a year. It drove me absolutely crazy. Sometimes my bosses would vary the job so I was put on a lathe and had to cut lengths off steel bars for a change. Needless to say, that wasn’t much better so I stuck at it for about seven months then just had to leave.