Hizzy: The Autobiography of Steve Hislop

I knew Jim Oliver had a mechanic’s job coming up so my dad had a word with him and I got the job without even an interview because Jim had seen how good I was at working on bikes. So that was it – I became an apprentice motorcycle mechanic at TB Oliver’s in Denholm and that was the last real job I ever had. I did everything from fixing and servicing bikes to repairing cars, lawnmowers and tractors. I was an apprentice for four years before becoming a fully qualified mechanic and I worked there for another four years before quitting to become a professional racer.

It was when I was working at Jim’s garage that I really started to hear a lot about Jimmie Guthrie. Naturally, every kid in the Hawick area had heard of the town’s most famous son but at the garage he was revered. Old men were always dropping in for a chat and talking about him. I loved listening to all those stories from the old fellows. I was more of a listener than a talker (how things have changed!) back then because I was very shy but I learned an awful lot about life just from listening to those guys shooting the breeze.

I have since met Jimmie’s widow, Isabel, and his son, Jimmie Guthrie Junior. Young Jimmy’s one ambition was to win a race on the TT Mountain circuit on which his father had won six times and he actually achieved that in the late ’60s when he won the Manx Grand Prix. After that, he quit racing and moved to South Africa but he came back to Hawick in 1987 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his dad’s death. I had just won my first TT a couple of months prior to his visit and I met him at a reception. He was really friendly with me because I’d won a race and because he had known my father. Little did either of us know then that I’d go on to win even more TTs than the great man himself and at speeds that Jimmie could never even have dreamed of.

The first proper steps I took towards achieving a TT victory came in the spring of 1979 when my dad asked if I wanted to have a stab at road racing. Too bloody right I did! He bought me an old Bultaco rolling chassis and we slotted the CR125cc Honda engine from my motocross bike into it. Well, believe me when I say you have never seen such a fucking lash-up in all your life. We had bits of plywood and all sorts of other crap acting as brackets until we got the chain lined up and then we got the local blacksmith to machine some better parts out of metal. They made the bike look marginally better but it was still a hell of a mess to look at. There were no shiny new race bikes for me when I started out.

But I must make a bit of a confession here before I go any further. I have always told the press that I started racing in 1983 but my first road race was actually in 1979. I didn’t do a lot of racing between ’79 and ’83 (for reasons which will become clear), so I didn’t want the media to think I’d been racing seriously for all those years and hadn’t gotten anywhere. It’s a bit like the way many racers these days lie about their age because they think it will improve their chances of getting a decent ride. You know who you are.

But anyway, my first race was actually at Croft near Darlington in North Yorkshire in 1979 and my outstanding memory of that meeting was a moment in practice in a combined 125/250cc session. I was riding my little 125 with my orange novice bib on and going down the main straight as fast as I could, thinking nobody could get past me. There was about two feet on the outside of the circuit between the grass and myself as I lined up for the next left-hand corner. As I shut the throttle and sat up to brake for the corner the local 250cc champion came past me on the outside between me and the grass and hooked up another gear! He wasn’t even thinking about braking then and yet I was thinking, ‘Fuckin’ hell, these boys are a bit fast.’ I still enjoyed it though and ended up finishing twenty-first in a field of around 30.

In my second race of the afternoon I was lying about twelfth following a big group of riders off the starting grid and into the first corner. They were all sitting behind each other like a row of ducklings and I wondered why they were doing that. I thought, ‘Fuck this, I’m going to ride round them all and take the corner.’ Bad move! So in only my second race, I had my first crash. I actually got past four or five of the riders but then some bloke lost the front end, slid off, and took me out with him. Served me right for trying to be a smart arse I suppose!

When I wasn’t tinkering with my race bike back home, I’d ride my Yamaha RD125 road bike to my papa’s in Jedburgh, dump it there and meet up with my mates in town for a few under-age drinks. We weren’t old enough to buy drink then so we’d give our money to some older boys and ask them to get some beer for us. Then we’d sink it in the River Jed to cool it before drinking it straight down and heading off to the Town Hall dance. There was usually a live band on at the Town Hall in those days and I invariably pulled a girl I knew from school and tickled her tonsils for a bit or even got to have a bit of a fumble if I was really lucky. If she got unlucky, I’d puke on her good dress before stumbling back to my papa’s, quite often finding him lying in the gutter on the way home!

He drank a lot after my nana died and nine times out of 10, I’d find him lying by the side of the pavement drunk and have to pick him up and help him home, poor old sod. Then I’d jump on my bike and ride the back roads home. I had passed my test by that point but I’d have soon lost my licence if I’d been breathalysed on one of those trips though somehow I managed to avoid getting caught.

I could have had a 250cc bike if I’d wanted to but I prided myself on being able to thrash bigger bikes on my little 125. I used to smoke Suzuki X7250s and Yamaha RD250s with no problem. It was even more fun because I knew who everyone else was when I saw them on a bike and you can be sure they knew who I was. I loved kicking other riders’ arses like that.

I’m sure some of the old boys in the area tell tales nowadays about me tearing round the farm roads on bikes just like the tales I used to hear about Jimmy Guthrie. ‘Aye, that young Hislop eedjit – ah remember him hairin’ roond thay roads thinkin’ he was a TT racer whun he wuz jist a slip o’ a lad.’

But my carefree youth, playing at silly buggers came to an abrupt end on 27 September 1979 in the early hours of a Friday morning. Mum, dad, Garry and I had eaten our tea that night and dad then finished off some bookwork in his little office before we all went to bed. In the early hours of the morning I heard this terrible moaning and groaning coming from my parents’ room so I bolted through to see what the hell was going on. My mum was running out of the room in a real panic shouting, ‘It’s your dad, it’s your dad – there’s something wrong!’ I ran to the bed and turned my dad on his side thinking he might be choking on something. I put my fingers into his mouth and pulled his tongue out too so that he could breathe freely but then he just suddenly stopped groaning and went totally limp as I held him. He died right there in my arms. It was like a scene from a movie that you hope will never happen to you; holding your own father as he dies. As far as we knew, he had been in perfect health up to that point but he died of a massive heart attack right there and then at just 43 years old.

I’m still haunted by the thought that maybe I could have done more to save him and I often wish I’d known more about first aid but I suppose there was nothing else I could have done. Needless to say, we were all completely and utterly devastated by our loss. I was so close to my dad and he had done so much for me, not just with bikes but in every aspect of life. He had given up his beloved racing so he could pay for our upbringing and he had worked really hard to get us little extras. I’d probably never have gone into bike racing if it hadn’t been for my dad because he was the one who really encouraged Garry and I to ride and race.

In the end, I think dad just took on too much. He had his business to run, he played in a band, he took Garry and I racing, did his own racing and rode horses in many of the Border’s festivals. Even by a younger man’s standards that’s a busy schedule.

I was just 17, Garry was only 16 and we had lost our dad who was as much a friend to us as a father. It was a terrible thing to have to come to terms with at an age when we really needed him for guidance and it’s a blow I’ve never really recovered from. I’m sure I’d be a very different person now if my dad were still alive.

I took a few days off work and then went to the funeral a week later and that was it – all over. We were now a single parent family and knew that life was about to get a whole lot tougher. My mum said there was no way she could continue living in the house which our father had practically built from scratch as the memories were just too painful, so we sold up and moved to Denholm in early 1980. It was only while writing this book that she told me we actually needed to sell the house for money as well because there was some kind of ‘death tax’ that had to be paid.

Mum continued working at the mills in Hawick but money was tight for us all and I was forced to quit racing. There was no way I could carry on with a wage of just over £26 a week, especially as I had to help out with money round the house now that I had no father to bring money in. Garry was too old for schoolboy motocross by that point so he packed that in and it looked like the end of racing for our family. My little 125 Honda sat in the garage along with my dad’s 350cc Aermacchi and neither turned a wheel for a long time. It appeared the dream was over.

From that point on, the three of us just worked and survived in a kind of numbed quietness, and it was at this time that I started taking an interest in cars. I had to get my licence to test cars at work anyway but it proved to be easier said than done. I failed my first attempt for being far too confident and driving too fast; I was just being too cocky and thinking, ‘Right, I’ll show you how to drive.’ Then I failed the second time round for trying to go too slowly; I was labouring and stalling the thing everywhere. But on my third attempt, which only lasted for 15 minutes, I drove perfectly in snowy and icy conditions and passed so I went out and bought an old Mark 1 Ford Escort.

It wasn’t even a week before I put the bloody thing straight through a hedge by driving like a twat and that really was the start of my downward slide: in the months and years following my father’s death I went completely off the rails. I couldn’t come to terms with my loss and started drinking a lot; it just seemed the norm. On top of that, I seemed to be crashing cars every other week almost as if I had a death wish. I didn’t even stay at home much on weekends, I’d just go out with friends, get pissed and end up sleeping on a sofa or the floor. It was a case of doing whatever I could to numb the pain; I would go out and crash out. But I always made sure I went to work during the week and I always stayed with mum on week-nights. Even if I was going to pieces, I wanted to try to be strong for my mum because she never wavered in her support for both Garry and me.

I bought an old Mini after the Escort and managed to crash that twice in the same night. The first time I spun it on icy roads and went through a fence backwards, then later on I put it into a ditch. Looking back on it, I don’t know how I survived that period. I could so easily have ended up dead in a car wreck or have ended up a drunken bum with no prospects in life at all.

No matter how many times I crashed, I didn’t slow down. After the Mini, it was onto a Ford Escort 1600 Sport and I ended up wrecking that twice as well. I had no sooner fixed it up from the first accident when I rolled the bastard thing again while trying to race somebody on slippery wet roads. Every farmer in the Borders must have had a hole in his hedge at one time or another caused by me smashing through it in a car.

Eventually I did get myself together enough to do a couple of bike race meetings but, to be honest, my memory of racing in those years is very hazy because I was more interested in drinking, driving cars and getting off with girls. In fact, if it weren’t for the result sheets that were compiled for me by a guy named Les Boultwood, I’d probably have forgotten all about those races. Those results show that I entered a few races in 1980 and 1981 with a best finish of second at East Fortune in 1980. However, I certainly couldn’t afford to race often and since I can hardly remember any of the events now it’s almost as if it never happened, which is generally why I’ve told people I started racing in 1983 because that’s when I began to take it seriously.

When I did race, it was more of a lark than anything else – just a chance to play on bikes and another way to fill in a weekend. Garry, however, was taking a big interest in road racing at this point and with a wage of around £60 a week from helping run dad’s joinery business, he could afford it. He started entering races on my little 125 Honda and I sometimes went along to help with the spannering. We didn’t have a van, just an old car with a trailer attached and even they were both borrowed from a mate.

Wullie Simson and Jim Oliver became almost substitute fathers to Garry and I after my dad died. They even ended up buying us 125cc bikes to race to stop us going off the rails so in a way, I think those guys salvaged my life from going to the dogs. I dread to think where I’d be now if it weren’t for them. My dad would have been so proud of all they did for his boys and I’ll never be able to thank them enough.

Garry seemed to cope with our dad’s death a bit better than I did. Maybe he just wasn’t as daft as I was, but he certainly never seemed to go over the top with the drinking and stuff as I did. Apart from losing a father, I think I lost a really good mentor when dad passed away. He knew his stuff about bikes, he knew lots of people connected with racing and was just a lot more worldly than I was in general. I’m sure my career would have worked out very differently had he still been around. Carl Fogarty’s a good example: his dad George used to race and he guided Carl through his early career in a way that really benefited him.

Despite my reservations, my mum married a guy called Jim Thompson in the winter of 1980–81 and they decided to pool their resources and buy a pub called The Horse and Hounds Inn at Bonchester Bridge, so we all moved in there. Mum never really had a problem with Garry and I racing or riding bikes; if my dad had been killed on one it would probably have been different but he died of natural causes so there was no reason to hate bikes. On the contrary, she felt the racing gave us something to focus on so we weren’t just getting drunk all the time and Garry actually started getting some decent results and even a couple of wins at Knockhill.

The two of us went for a holiday to the Manx Grand Prix in 1981 and Garry got so into the whole thing that he decided he was going to race there the following year. Then the month after we got back from the Manx, we had to deal with another tragedy when my friend Eric Glendinning was murdered in Hawick. He was standing outside the local chip shop eating chicken and chips when he was attacked and beaten to death by a group of yobs, one of whom was charged with murder and sent to jail. All for a fucking bag of chips! Hawick is a tiny little town and you’d never expect anything like that to happen in such a sleepy place but it just goes to show there’s evil everywhere.

As it turned out, 1982 was the year when my brother really began to prove himself as a rider. He bought a brand new Yamaha TZ125 and did quite a lot of races that year and had some very good results. But the big one came in September when he won the 350cc Newcomers’ race at the Manx GP on Jim Oliver’s TZ350 Yamaha – exactly one year after he’d vowed to give it a go when we were on holiday. It was an amazing win because he’d only done 14 laps of the course before the race started. These days, many riders do hundreds of laps in cars or on bikes before they actually race for the first time so they know the course intimately. Everyone commented on how smooth Garry looked and he lapped at over 102mph on that little four-year-old bike. He didn’t think he had any chance of even being on the leader board when he went there, never mind winning the race, so it was a fantastic achievement and I was really proud of him even though I couldn’t be there with him. I simply couldn’t afford to go, so I tuned into Manx Radio and listened to the commentary at home instead which was nerve-wracking stuff.

After the Manx, Garry met Ray Cowles, who was a madly keen racing sponsor, and Ray offered him a ride on his RG500 Suzuki at the Macau Grand Prix, which is an annual race held in China not far from Hong Kong. For a kid who had never been out of the country, it was an amazing opportunity and Garry was really excited about going; it would have been his first big step towards becoming a full-time professional rider but it was a trip he was destined never to make.

Because he wanted to stay sharp for Macau, Garry entered a club race at Silloth in October despite me saying he was daft because it was already winter and it was not the weather to go racing in. Besides, Silloth was a bumpy old shit-hole and I said as much but he was determined to go and that was that. He asked me if I wanted to go with him but I refused as I didn’t like the place and I had to respray my car because I’d rolled the fucker again. I just said, ‘I’ll see you when you get back tonight,’ and off he went. Those were the last words I ever spoke to him.

I went into Hawick and resprayed my car as planned, then drove back to mum’s pub at about 6pm. As I was driving down the hill into Bonchester, I could see the silhouette of a transit van heading the other way. As it passed me, I realized it was Jim Oliver’s van and thought, ‘Garry’s home early’, as I didn’t expect him to be back for another couple of hours. I didn’t think much more of it and walked into the pub as normal. But when I went into the kitchen my mum was sitting there crying her eyes out. I asked what was wrong and she told me that Garry had had a bad accident. That didn’t alarm me because racers were always having accidents; it was nothing unusual and at least it explained why the van was home so early. Garry had been taken to Carlisle Royal Infirmary and Wullie Simson had brought the van back.

Mum told me he had serious head injuries but I still thought he’d be okay so I didn’t worry in the slightest. Even as we were walking into the hospital the following day I was still being cocky and cracking jokes, getting ready to say to Garry, ‘You daft bugger, what happened to you?’ We spoke to a doctor who told us Garry was in the intensive care ward and warned us that he was very ill. I remembered doctors telling me I might never walk again just because I’d busted my knee up, so I always took what they said with a pinch of salt. It was only when we walked into intensive care that the severity of the situation hit me like a sledgehammer, smack in the bloody face at full force. When I saw Garry lying there I just thought, ‘Fucking hell, no. Oh fucking hell, no, no, no, no.’

My legs turned to jelly and my heart was in my mouth as I stared at him. He was completely wrapped from head to toe in silver foil in an attempt to raise his body temperature and there were pipes and tubes coming out of him everywhere. In fact there was so much machinery around him that it was hard to believe my lively little brother was in there, somewhere. But the one thing that really caught my attention was the huge artificial lung pumping up and down next to his bed – it was the only thing that was keeping him alive. That’s when the joking stopped. Poor Garry was just lying there as if he was sleeping and oblivious to it all which I sincerely hope he was. I would much rather think that his final memory was of leading a race as he had been, than of lying helpless in a hospital bed.

I had never seen the ‘death’ side of racing before so I suppose I wasn’t fully aware of just how dangerous the sport could be. I was now getting the toughest lesson about the harsh reality of it. Surely mum and me weren’t going to lose Garry too, so soon after dad? Surely life couldn’t be that cruel? As a family, we’d never done anything to harm anyone so why were we being so cruelly ripped apart like this? It just didn’t seem fair.

We sat with Garry for a while and then we were asked to go and see the specialist in his office. I knew it had to be bad news. He told us they had tried everything to get a response from Garry but there was just nothing there. He then informed us that Garry was actually clinically dead and it was only the artificial lung that was keeping him going. Words cannot describe what it feels like to be told that about someone you love – about your own brother. ‘Actually Steven, you’re brother is already dead.’

Think of all your worst nightmares, put them all together and you’re still not close to how that feels. And this was one nightmare I wasn’t going to wake up from.

The specialist then asked if we would give per mission to donate any of Garry’s organs and at that point I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I don’t even remember what happened after that, because I was so numbed by the experience my brain just went into shutdown mode and I became little more than a zombie. It was only when I spoke to my mum while working on this book that she told me what actually happened. Apparently, mum and Jim were staying in Carlisle that night so they drove me to Langholm where Eileen Douglas, a close family friend, picked me up and took me back to the pub where I stayed all night on my own. But I still can’t remember any of that journey or that night no matter how hard I try.

What I do know is that my mum and Jim went back to the hospital the next day and at 11am on Tuesday 19 October 1982, the doctors decided there was no choice but to switch the machine off. Again, until writing this book, I had always thought my mum made that decision but she now assures me that it was actually the doctors. But mum did give permission for them to use Garry’s kidneys and corneas; two – people got life out of his kidneys and someone else got sight out of his eyes.

I wasn’t at the hospital when they switched the machine off so I didn’t know my brother was gone until my mum got home at 1.45pm (I have the exact time noted in my diary from that year) and told me, although I had been expecting the worst. Ironically, I was watching a documentary about the TT races on television at the time, still madly keen on bikes. It was hard to believe but I was going to have to learn to accept that I didn’t have a brother anymore. Or a father.

4 Tales from the Riverbank (#ulink_ebfd8ff3-5f1f-57fa-9db1-a6807c0ac71f)

‘I poached salmon and sold them to pubs to help pay for my racing.’

Many people have asked me why I didn’t turn my back on bike racing when my brother was killed and it’s still a difficult question to answer.

I think I just had an inbuilt desire to achieve something in my life and racing bikes seemed the only way I could do that. I certainly never blamed racing for Garry’s death as it was his choice to race and I never hated the sport because of what it had taken away from me. Bikes have always been part of my life and I continued to ride them after Garry died just as I always had done.

When I went to the inquest I learned that my brother had been leading the 350cc race and had broken the lap record before he crashed. There was a hairpin corner on the track and it was flooded from heavy rain in the morning so the organizers reshaped the corner using road cones. When it dried, the track surface became silty and dusty in the same way as a puddle dries when it’s stopped raining. Garry must have just clipped that silty surface next to the road cones and was high-sided off the bike – racing speak for being thrown over the top of the machine. Instead of landing relatively harmlessly as he would have done nine times out of 10 in such an accident, he landed on the back of his head and the back of his helmet caved in causing Garry to fracture the base of his skull. Ironically, that was the last race ever to be held at Silloth.

Garry is buried in Southdean cemetery, near Chesters village, right next to my dad: they died just three years apart. My dad was 43 and my brother just 19. Each headstone has a little motorbike engraved on it and Garry’s stone has an inscription reading, ‘He died for the sport he loved.’ Apparently it was me who asked mum if she would have those words engraved on it although I can’t really remember asking her.

Just before he died, Garry was being tipped as one of Scotland’s most promising riders and I’m sure he would have achieved similar results to me had he lived long enough. He was keen to turn professional in 1983 but, sadly, we’ll never know just how good he could have been. As I said, I don’t blame racing for what happened but I have often questioned the existence of a god since I lost my brother and father. What kind of god would take them away from me?

To cheer myself up a bit, I decided to go to the Isle of Man in June for a three-day break to watch the TT races but little did I know then that trip would change my entire life.

My first ever trip to the Isle of Man had been to the Manx Grand Prix in 1965 when I was just three years old and my dad took me over to support Jimmy Guthrie Junior. I went again to the Manx in 1975 but my first trip to the actual TT was in 1976, which was the last year the races counted as a round of the world championship. I watched my very first race from the Les Graham memorial near Bungalow Bridge. I could hear the bikes coming towards me from miles away because they were so loud back then; they were pure race bikes with pea-shooter exhaust pipes, not just glorified production machines like they race today. John Williams on the Texaco Heron Suzuki was the first rider I remember seeing and he was quite simply the fastest fucking thing I had ever seen in my entire life. He just blew my mind. Unbelievable! He did a 112mph lap that day which was the first sub-20-minute lap ever of the TT as far as I remember. But because he went so fast, he ended up running out of fuel and had to push his bike for a mile at the end to finish the race!

I was pretty much hooked on the TT from that moment on and went back there again in 1979 when I was 17 with Wullie Simson and another friend called Dave Croy. I helped Wullie and Dave in the pits, working for a rider called Kenny Harrison so it was my first real hands-on experience of the event. As it turned out, Wullie and Dave were the guys who helped me for years when I started racing, right up until I got involved with Honda. They were both a great help to my career.

Anyway, as I said, after Garry was killed I didn’t race very often and I certainly had no intentions of ever becoming a professional racer. I had also never really thought about racing on the Isle of Man myself. However, that all changed when I went to the 1983 TT races, this time with Wullie and a man called George Hardie who later was to become my mum’s partner and still is as I write this.