LAST OF THE RED-HOT SPEEDWAY MOMMAS

SHE wouldn't thank you for calling her a Red-Hot Momma. She is an extraordinarily gentle lady, with a quick wit and a bright twinkle in her eye still. But she knows a thing or two about the life and times of speedway racing, its pioneer stars, its characters, its ups and its downs.

Quite simply she will tell you that motorcycling is her life. That began 91 years ago (she'll be 92 in September) in the shadow of Battersea Gas Works in south London. She's true to the love of her life even now. Just recently she was tootling around Donington Park in crash hat and leathers - plain black, you don't find any fancy logos on Jessie's togs - giving a demonstration on her New Imperial for patrons of the Brooklands Society.

Jessie says: 'We lived in the shadow of the gas works at Battersea. My father was the manager there. There used to be a cinder track for a local school's sports in the big field near the gasholders. 'I was 11 when George got the Douglas. I watched him pull it to bits, and as he did so he taught me what every bit meant and what it did.

'When George took me out on the back of that Douglas, that did it. It was such a thrill for me, and after that he let me ride it round the cinder track in the field.' That was around a decade before speedway arrived in Britain.' But I don't
think I ever did any power slides, or anything llike that,' confesses Jessie.

'My parents really wanted me to learn the piano, but in the end they gave up and in 1925 bought me a Scott motorcycle. The weekend after I got it I drove my mother to Bognor on the back of it. 'Then George started riding the dirt-track when it came to Stamford Bridge in 1928. And the boys used to let me practice with them. They would lend me a dirt-track Douglas.

'About that time I read in an American magazine about a chap riding through glass, and thought: I can do that. You couldn't practice for that - the glass was too costly - but I just knew I could do it. 'To do it properly you have to be going very fast - I worked that out. The glass had to be 48oz, which is fairly thick. We discovered that as the front wheel hit the glass, every bit below the impact shattered into small pieces. But above my head the sheet split into two, like guillotine blades. I knew that if I wasn't going fast enough they would come down on the back of my neck.

'The top of my crash helmet had to be pointing downwards so that my head and my front wheel hit the glass at the same time.' Her crash helmet, a very old pudding basin type which she still has, is rubbed alarmingly ragged from the frequency of its impact during her many performances, all for charity.

Jessie was part of the infamous Wembley incident in 1930 which resulted in the banning of all women from racing in speedway tracks - or any other race tracks, for that matter - for the best part of 50 years.

Jessie says: 'I had practised at Wimbledon and Wembley. I used to get rides anywhere the boys would let me in, so I knew I could ride a track. I was never allowed in a proper meeting, but I knew I could have competed in one. 'I was very friendly with all the boys, riders like Bluey Wilkinson, Dick Case, Frank Arthur, Vic Huxley and the Frogley brothers - they let me race with them. And I got in with the managers of the clubs who would let me have a go round. People such as Arthur Elvin of Wembley. Not many people liked him, but I could get round him, probably because I was a girl.'

The 'boys', said Jessie, didn't appreciate one little bit the sport's most famous woman speedway rider, her contemporary Fay Taylour. 'They didn't like her,' says Jessie. 'She used to beat them occasionally, of course, but I think it was because of her mannerisms.'

It was at Wembley in Thursday, May15th, 1930, that Jessie was to get her big chance, to take part in a special race for women riders at the mighty Empire Stadium. Though the Glasgow Evening News carried a picture of Jessie and her opponents, Mrs Billie Smith and Sunny Somerset, and claimed it was the first time that such a contest had been staged, this was not so.

Matches between women had been staged at Wembley in 1929. Eva Askquith, Fay and Sunny Somerset had all raced there, with Eva having taken on Art Warren and Geoff Taylor - losing both times. But Fay had held The Cinders one-lap record, attempts at which had been a feature of the Wembley entertainment, with a time of 20.8 seconds, representing a speed of 37.18mph, bettering Ray Tauser's time of 21.0 seconds and 36.82mph.

Disaster awaited on the historic parade. The contest was billed in Speedway News as a Novel Match Race and, significantly, what happened does not appear to have been reported. Jessie says: 'I was leading the parade. The stadium was packed. I was in front of the other two and going quite fast. I didn't see what happened because they were all behind me, but I was told later that one of the boys cut across in front of Billie, who shut off and went over the handlebars, breaking a collar bone.

'They gave it out over the loudspeakers that the race would not take place, and at the end of the meeting they announced that the incident had been reported to the AC-U which had ruled that women were banned from ever again taking part in dirt-track racing in England.'

Fay Taylour, of course, persisted and became very good, racing successfully on two wheels and four. But how did she get her rides if, as Jessie insists, she was disliked so much by 'The Boy's'? According to Jessie she was not above using her womanly whiles - her sexuality? - to get bookings. 'She always used to be at all the parties - she was a favourite at all the tracks,' says Jessie. What sort of parties, exactly, were those, then? 'Well,' says Jessie, 'after a dirt-track meeting there was all sorts!. It was the Roaring Twenties, you know!'

But both Jessie, and Bill Douglas, of the famous motorcycle manufacturing family, deny that Fay used out-and-out sexual favours to get rides. 'She didn't mix with the riders,' says Jessie, 'they didn't like her. It was the bigwigs, the owners of the stadiums, and people like that, she used to mix with. They were the people with the money.'

Jessie finally quit performing her daredevil stunts - riding through plate glass, rings of fire and making pyramids at Stamford Bridge, Coventry and Belle Vue - when her son Roger was born in 1947. But she took up riding again as a hobby in 1961, and she has been going strong ever since. Her busband Bill says she is a nut case.