The person behind the racer

Les and I met on the first day that we attended Goodwood Technical School (South Australia) in January 1934. This school was as close as you could get to a technical college in those days and it was hoped that a trade apprenticeship would follow by the time that you reached the age of fourteen which was the normal minimum school leaving age of those times. In addition to mathematics and all the other subjects we were familiar with from our seven years in primary school, we were also taught sheetmetal and woodwork – two sessions of approximately two hours a week each.

Science was another new subject for us and it was in these classes that Les and I reveled. Within hours of meeting at our first class, Les and I knew virtually all of each other's interests and lives up until that point. We had roughly parallel interests, dominated by the fact that we had both acquired large Meccano sets, mostly as a result of our own initiative. We had both spent a lot of our spare time running errands for our local shop keepers with the proceeds mostly invested in new parts for the Meccano sets, although at this point in time both our interests had turned to radio and crystal sets. So it was that we had plenty to talk about.

Our teacher had a well tried system whereby students who were prepared to pay attention in class and study well, found themselves in the back seats of the forty odd student class, while the less productive students found themselves in the central body of the classroom. The front row of desks was taken by the unfortunate few who proved to be slow learners plus a few hardened trouble makers – a couple of these I can still vividly recall! Les and I found that the work set for us was a breeze and while talk in class was punishable by a good whack from the cane, we sat together at a desk in a far back corner of the room, quietly drawing crystal set circuits or designing world beating internal combustion engines and steam turbines!

Within a week I had visited Les's home on Goodwood Road at King's Park on the way home from school. I had a rail pass but would quite often cycle to school, mostly as the result of missing the train, but sometimes with the express idea of spending time with Les after school. Afterwards I would ride the extra four miles or so in the same direction to my home at Sturt which was a small market gardening community out in the sticks of those far off days.

These were the last years of the depression era and most people earned little more than a bare living. I never knew until later that Les's father had been running a local bus line with a partner and, as was common, debts had piled up and the business ceased to exist. It appeared that Les's father took it very badly and just disappeared! So it was left to Les to grow up and become the head of the family with his mother and two younger sisters.

Mrs Diener was a wonderful person, she had already spent probably eight years or more struggling to feed and clothe her young family when I met her but she made me welcome to their home as she would have an extra son! The family were regular Sunday churchgoers but not overly religious. My family on the other hand attended church only on special occasions such as the service for the dedication of a new (secondhand) church pipe organ. Les and I shared a love of good music, especially organ music, and highlights of our time together was to attend the movies in Adelaide and enjoy the sounds of the huge Wurlitzer organ that was a feature of the entertainment before the films and during intermission. We also enjoyed brass bands, a large part of my family life, but as Les's forbears had originated in Germany, it is possible that he inherited this love of music. At one point later in his life he made an attempt to contact his relatives in the Black Forest area of Germany without success.

Les soon became a part-time member of my family as well. We shared each other's possessions and self earned pocket money that we were lucky enough to have in our pockets. We were both working now and I started a record collection and built an electric turntable – quite a luxury in those days that few could afford. I built it with the bare purchased essentials and it was portable so we could carry it about on the petrol tanks of our Cammy Velocettes, together with a selection of precious records including some of the new long playing 33 1/3 discs. From time to time Les would buy a record that took his fancy and would add it to our collection which alternated between our two homes.

At school Les had been a first class student and within days of commencing our first term our teacher had christened him 'Brains' Diener. At the end of the first term we shared top place in the class and so it remained until the end of our school years together. The day came when Les turned 14 and a family friend immediately found him employment where he quickly progressed to a position in an engineering machine shop. He later became a valued employee in the toolroom of Kelvinator Australia Limited on Anzac Highway Keswick in South Australia .

One of the school events that neither Les nor I appreciated was the dedication to sport! For us this was a terrible waste of good time. As there were only two sports available to us in those days – football and cricket in season – we soon learned to organise things so that when the teams were selected before the sports period, we would both hang back and even attempt to hide! This system worked in different ways to ensure that if cricket was the game we would end up on the same side, or if it was football we came out on opposing sides. With football, we would then both volunteer to stand each other in some remote corner of the playing field where with only a trace of a struggle, we would take it in turns to take possession of the ball if it came in our direction! In the case of cricket, a similar ploy would find us on the same side, sitting on the bench waiting our turn to bat (which never lasted long!) or fielding in the outfield where we were close enough to carry on a conversation without too much difficulty.

We came to the point where we would quietly disappear over the embankment at the edge of the field and hightail it for Les's home nearby. Sport was conveniently always the last period of the school day. We somehow got away with this for a while but eventually were both hauled before the Head Teacher and faced a pretty stiff punishment. Somehow we managed to convince the Head that we were more interested in mechanical things and as our sports teacher had already reported us as both hopeless, we found ourselves with the choice of attending extra woodwork or sheetmetal classes during sport. We chose sheetmetal as we were on excellent terms with the teacher and after a time he allowed us to leave the classes and spend the time at Les's home, providing we showed him the results of our time spent together there. In retrospect I guess that we were lucky but on the other hand, I think that the sports teacher was well and truly fed up with our performance in the field of physical endeavour and was glad to be rid of us!

But back to our first meeting! I remember that on my first visit to Les's home, the first thing that he showed me after introducing his mother and two sisters, was a Meccano model of a passenger lift. It sat on a small table, went almost to the ceiling and was run by a 6 volt electric motor that he had salvaged from an old Ahoogah car horn and powered it by a transformer that he had adapted to run from the household power supply.

I remember Mrs Diener's concern at his playing with electricity so I was quick to assure her that I indulged in the same sort of thing in my home. She was terribly worried for her son's well being, but in truth, some of the things that Les and I got up to in his old shed later on probably worried her even more! It was about this time that I realised that while Les didn't suffer from an overbearing father as I did, his life did incur certain responsibilities that I was blissfully unaware of!

We had not known each other for long before our passion for radio had us building valve sets. Our limited resources would mean scrounging through the sheds of family and neighbours searching for old discarded battery powered radios. But even these were a problem as batteries were expensive and well beyond our means. Then there came a day at school when Les announced that he had made a battery eliminator that ran from the household power but it needed a bit of improving! I have to say that this was one of the few things that didn't turn out as well as expected and we could never get the thing to operate to the point where we could understand the distorted sound. At this point Les suddenly lost all interest in radio whereas I continued with the hobby into the 50s.

We did have another passion, the power of steam! This came to a peak during our first year together at Goodwood Tech where our sheetmetal teacher was always happy to help us with our ideas. We built numerous turbines from tinplate and solder which we ran in Les's shed after school. There, for an hour or so, we would fire up our primitive boilers that boasted no safety valves, and were made from old treacle tins with the lids soldered firmly into place. When the ends of the tins started to bulge we would turn on the old petrol taps that regulated the steam flow and our latest turbine would howl at high revs until one of the soldered in vanes detached from the tinplate rotor. Then the whole thing would self destruct with the appropriate noise! Poor Mrs Diener, she was certain that we would blow ourselves up, but Les always assured her that everything was under control, and we would test another of our creations until it was time for me to get on my bike and pedal off home.

I had at this time become interested in the distillation process and my home project was the building of a still! Our family was involved in winemaking and the distillation of spirits so Friday night after school would see Les saying goodbye to his mother and riding home with me with a parcel of clothing and nightwear on his back. We would spend the weekend at my home, building new radios and tending the still that I now had set up in the back yard. I remember my father sampling the first batch of raw spirits that we produced and ordering the immediate destruction of the still as it was illegal and very much against the law!

Around this time Les acquired a JAP V-twin. To us it was a huge powerful piece of machinery and we just had to get it running! I had also become apprenticed to the auto trade and managed to acquire an old Levis belt drive motorcycle which was thrashed around the paddock behind my home until we ran out of petrol. Les in the meantime had found an old discarded sleeper from the rail line near his home which he sawed in half on the spot and somehow managed to get it home. He dug a deep hole in the middle of the dirt floor of his workshop and upended the sleeper, leaving a couple of feet (600mm) above the floor level. To this he attached plates of steel that were shaped by a hacksaw and he had drilled holes with the stub of an old discarded steel drill bit and a wood brace. I well remember the time we spent just learning to sharpen this drill bit. Somewhere Les had found a broken hand grindstone and repaired it as only he could, but it took both of us to operate it with it temporarily bolted to the top of the upended sleeper which had now become the only solid thing in the broken down wooden shed that was Les's workshop.

All this took hours of our spare time, but eventually the V-twin was firmly attached to the top end of the sleeper. Then came the day when in my absence, Les wrapped a length of motorcycle chain around the sprocket on the engine crankshaft, trickled a few drops of petrol into the intake manifold, a hard pull, and the engine fired!

Most of this was done by Les after work and in the evenings, so by the time that I arrived at his home the following Saturday, I found him in a great state of excitement because he had the motor firing but not yet running! After a bit of discussion we decided that in the absence of a carburettor we would drill a hole in the manifold with our well used carpenter's brace and drill bit, fix up one of our old treacle tin boilers as a petrol tank, then run a length of copper pipe, scrounged from the garage down the road, into the engine manifold and soon we had the engine running erratically with the petrol dripping into the intake. A little later we hit on the idea of hanging a piece of cloth through the hole in the manifold and dripping the petrol on to this wick. Soon we had the motor running quite well despite the lack of a throttling device but this was soon overcome by Les's ingenuity through the week!

We only saw each other at weekends during this period, there were no telephones in homes in those days, and we looked forward to as much time as possible that we could spend together. I had fallen a victim to the times, and could not continue my apprenticeship beyond a year and a half, but I found employment pumping petrol at a local garage. Les found good employment at Kelvinators and a little later I was able to get a job at the same place assembling refrigerators while Les was operating a lathe in the machine shop. We both had a driving licence but I was still confined to a push bike. Les was the one who now had this magnificent home built V-twin, that I have to say was only of the barest essentials. He was the only one who dared to ride it but it carried him to work and back each day.

There was no place in Les's life for girls! His whole life was taken up with his passion for mechanical devices and he was forever making up new parts for the bike and working on improvements. One of the things that he did was to remove one cylinder from the V-twin and rebalance the flywheels. The unused hole in the crankcase was blanked off with a metal plate. All this in the interests of better petrol economy! It was only a matter of time and the JAP gave way to other bikes.
One that I recall was an International Norton that was disposed of after Les was unfortunate enough to t-bone an open touring car. He recounted the few moments of the event that he recollected when he went over the handlebars and shot through the space between the front and rear passengers! He was amazed to remember seeing the startled looks of the rear seat passengers as he sailed past them, sliding down the road, and ending up at the curb, where he lost consciousness for some time.
Les's mother was particularly disturbed over this incident and his motorcycling was curtailed for a while. Les was the family breadwinner and his two young sisters were growing up, although I doubt if Les ever noticed this fact! But he did notice that I now had a steady girlfriend and her presence was beginning to impact on the time we spent together. It became usual for Les to approach me at work on Wednesday and say 'I guess you will be taking your girlfriend to the pictures tonight?'. This was usually the case and I would normally ask my father for the loan of his 250cc side valve Levis. Dad would invariably kick up such a fuss that the date was usually accomplished with my girl sitting on the bar of my pushbike. So Les began to lend me his newly acquired Cammy Velocette. He would ride my push bike home from work, swapping back over again on Thursday morning. My bike was a top of the line lightweight racing machine with singles tires and imported French derailer three-speed gears, something of a rarity in those days. There is no doubt that Les used to derive as much pleasure from riding this machine as I had from using the Cammy.

This situation was soon remedied when I bought my Cammy for the sum of 27 pounds 10 shillings which represented about 15-20 weeks of my wages in those days. I had saved some money and my racing push bike was sold along with a few other treasures I had accumulated. From here on, Les and I and the girlfriend were regulars at the Saturday night flicks and Sunday afternoon would see us off on long rides. Our favourite run was down to Victor Harbour and back on roads that were a far cry from those of the present day. Sometimes we would walk around Granite Island and sometimes we'd brave the run across to Strathalbyn and return via the coast. A lot of these roads were only dirt in those days.

Les and I often found the time on Saturdays for a burn up around the Torrens Gorge and all the narrow twisty roads through the Adelaide Hills, more often than not, finding our way back to Belair where we would part company. Les cutting across to Torrens Park and then down to his home on Goodwood Road, while for me it was only a short ride down Shepherd's Hill Road to my home at Sturt. These times passed only too quickly and it was 1939 and WW2.

We both attempted to join the fighting forces shortly afterwards but Les was firmly locked into wartime anti-aircraft production at Kelvinators, and his attempts to break away from munitions production was blocked at every turn. A bit later in the war, he actually joined the army at nearby Keswick Barracks but the recruiting officer upon checking his occupational clearance, found out the true circumstances, and his army acceptance papers were cancelled forthwith! In the meantime I had succeeded in joining the RAAF at my third attempt. My height was the problem until that criteria was suddenly dispensed with and so I found myself on a train bound for Melbourne that very same evening!

Sometime later Les somehow managed to get time off from work and by some wangling get a return seat on the train to Melbourne. Civilian travel was very restricted in those days but I had two days leave at the end of my first aircraft engineering course and we spent a very enjoyable weekend showing Les the sights of the Melbourne area,. Neither of us had travelled interstate prior to the war.
Les made a point of looking after my girlfriend during my continued absence. There were very few telephones in those days and petrol restrictions were becoming very tight, so he would sometimes take the train to her home and escort her to the local picture theatre if she was in the mood to go. She liked to dance and to the best of my knowledge, Les never learned to dance, so he probably made a few fruitless trips.

As far as I knew, Les never had any use for women in his life, so it came as quite a surprise to have him tell me only a couple of years before his passing, that he had seriously dated a girl later in the war years who lived only four doors from my home on Sturt Road. She used to wander in and out of our home when we were younger and to be honest, I was surprised to know that Les had even noticed her! Even my family never knew of his romance. He said that he used to visit my family at the same time, but I am still amazed that my father at least never noticed the sound of his motorcycle starting up such a short distance away. Les was quick to mention that he was always very careful not to alert the locals and he was obviously very successful.

Les and I communicated by letter throughout the war years, never missing a letter every couple of weeks or so and it was a great day when the war was over! At this time I was stationed at Tocumwal NSW, and with the easing of wartime regulations, I was able to obtain unserviceable aircraft engine pistons that would normally have been melted down and reused. Transport by erstwhile training aircraft was easily available, in my case Liberator bombers, and as I enjoyed a senior post in a now redundant training scheme, I could fill a kitbag with goodies, fly over to Adelaide, spend a few days, and then return to base. In this way Les suddenly had high quality material that he was getting cast into MOV piston blanks and reinforced drive side crankcases for his post-war race-tuning of the 1935 MOV that he'd bought early in the war as a more petrol efficient machine to replace his Cammy.
Throughout the war he always had access to my Cammy which remained registered and was subject to a normal civilian petrol allowance. It was equipped with a boat type sidecar that was subject to a slightly bigger allowance but it was easily detachable and seldom used. As a munitions worker, mostly on night shift, Les was also entitled to an extra petrol allowance and so there were times when I came home on leave that we could go for a short ride out through the hills.

Then the war was over. Les had left Kelvinators and started a motorcycle business on Unley Road with a fellow enthusiast, Frank Tuck. The establishment was known as Clifton Motors, but more usually, Tuck & Diener, and it was here that I joined Les once more a few weeks after my discharge from the RAAF in March 1946. My job was running the reboring machine and general motorcycle repair work, including the rebuilding and painting of the odd prewar bikes that we were lucky enough to acquire.

This was the time of the first post war TT races and we journeyed over to Ballarat for the Victoria Park events on New Years Day and again at Easter when Les rode the MOV which at that early stage was already a force to be reckoned with. Unfortunately tragedy struck and Frank Tuck lost his life when his small car overturned at Nhill. Luckily his family survived with minor injuries but the loss of Frank's presence and financial problems connected with his affairs meant that the Unley Road business was eventually closed in early 1947. But not before Les and Audrey married and I ran the shop during their short honeymoon.

We also had a sub agency from Lou Borgelt, the South Australian Velocette distributor, and I recall the day we were allotted one MOV Velocette for sale! At the same time we had somehow become a minor agent for Triumph motorcycles but as far as I recall, we only ever had one 350cc 3T which was quickly sold along with the MOV.

After the affairs of Clifton Motors had been settled, Les transferred the equipment to our old wooden workshop of years before at his mother's home and set up business as a one-man shop. He was in great demand for specialised racing parts and was fully active in the racing scene. On one occasion Fergus Anderson was racing in Adelaide. He had a little step-through Guzzi that was used as a hack and he rode into Les's rough little workshop one morning in the company of Rex Tillbrook and was amazed at Les's facilities which were pretty basic! All the more so because on the racetrack, Fergus with his full factory team, never saw where Les went!

It wasn't long after this that Les and Audrey moved to Ballarat and the workshop of George Morrison. This put him closer to the major racing venues of Victoria and of course Bathurst and Mildura. One way and another due to our personal commitments we lost touch with each other for a while. I had divorced and Les never quite came to terms with this happening in my life but I can accept that he had good reason. Les had been part of the threesome that we once were for many years.
So it was that I moved to Kangaroo Island and a new life at about the same time that Les and Audrey returned to Adelaide where he joined the Symco engineering shop and his old South Australian racing associates. Here he once more became the centre of specialised racing parts manufacture, probably the best known being the Symco connecting rod. I had the odd contact with him during this period as we both had young families growing up.

It was then that Les had a serious racing accident and quit the motorcycle scene completely for about thirteen years. By 1960 I had moved to Melbourne for family reasons and joined my old quarrying firm once more in the position that I had held some ten years previously in Adelaide.
Les became involved in the development of the SportCo high powered 22 calibre rifle, the company eventually being bought out by the American concern OMARK who were specialising in forms of impact tools and stud welding. Les took to this well and finished his working career as a specialist in these techniques in Australia and the South East Asian region, travelling to Hong Kong, the Phillipines, Bangladesh and other remote areas. Strangely enough I was to follow him, moving throughout the same region as a heavy engineering trouble shooter under contract to Readymix Australia and Jaques Engineers of Victoria (Australia) and associated companies.

The only other employment that Les was involved in over the years, as far as I know, was in the mid 50s and far out of his line, when he was recruited by another old racing acquaintance, Charley Walker. Charley had made his way into the automotive trade and had decided to set up a specialised steering and brake service shop at North Adelaide. All the equipment was new and of the latest design and it was Les's job to set it all up and get it running. I visited the new shop prior to its opening and by this time everything was ready to go with Les obviously doomed to sit in an office in a major administrative capacity having got everything nicely sorted. He was obviously a fish out of water away from his familiar engineering shop environment and after a short time he returned to the engineering scene once more.

Around this period, Les was the victim of a bizarre shooting incident at his own home when he was shot in the base of his spine by a crazed young lad using a high powered rifle who immediately gave himself up to the police. Les hovered near death for some weeks but eventually made a complete recovery. This was seen as something of a small miracle and, although I knew nothing of it at the time as I was living in Melbourne, he told me in later years that he was resigned to dying. The whole experience changed his life in some way. He was really sure that God's intervention had given him another chance at life.

About this time his interest in radio was rekindled and he became totally engrossed in the hobby and continued to be active in the ham radio scene for the rest of his life. He was always at me to study for my ham licence and set up a station in my Melbourne home, never fully understanding that my life was still centred around motorcycling. I had a family of five active teenage children and our spare time was spent either on motorcycles, water skiing in season, or on our annual holiday back on Kangaroo Island.

Then I became involved in the rebuilding of Eldee. Les flatly refused to have any part in it saying that his days of interest in motorcycling was over! But it was through this project that we eventually became very close again, writing letters to each other several times a month, till he was eventually seduced by motorcycles once more. We began to see each other again whenever the opportunity arose.

Les and Audrey visited us at Briagolong for holidays and I became part of the story of Eldee 2 when I managed to find an early featherbed frame and Roadholder forks in a heap of parts from Malaysia. Les carried these parts home on the return train journey. Later on another visit, I made an oil tank to his measurements and helped out on some other minor items. It was on one of these visits that Les mentioned that his father had died. This surprised me as there had never been any mention of his lost father since we had first met, and he had told me that he had little recollection of this person who had left the family when his youngest sister was only a baby. So it came as quite a revelation to me, as it had to him, when suddenly a solicitor's letter arrived to the effect that his father had lived all these years in Darwin as a prominent citizen, on committees and involved in welfare work, but had apparently never remarried. In any case, as far as Les knew, there had never been a divorce! It transpired that his estate had been left to charitable causes but he had kept newspaper cuttings telling of Les's racing achievements and was obviously very proud of his son. It is rather hard to understand how he came to cut himself off completely from his family for all those years, although I do remember Les saying that his father may have contacted his mother at one point over the years, but nothing came of it.

Les's mother died suddenly of an obscure (at that time) sudden seizure and I suspect that it may have been the very same problem that took Les's life. Whatever it was, it was very sudden. One cannot help but feel that riding a sparkling, newly restored Gilera up through the Adelaide Hills that day, was a fitting way for such a great person to leave this life.
Farewell old Friend.