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.
‘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.
We were sitting on the banking just after the eleventh milestone munching on our pieces (Scottish for sandwiches!), enjoying the fresh air and watching the traffic go by before the big Senior Classic race got underway. Like everyone else around the course, we had our little transistor tuned into Manx Radio to listen to the race commentary, so that we knew who was who and what was going on. The men of the moment were Joey Dunlop and Norman Brown who are both tragically no longer with us. Norman was killed while racing in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone