AT THE age of 22 he had reached the very top of his profession. He typified the unquenchable spirit of adventurous youth. No film star had such a devoted following.

He had won every speedway championship there was to be won. At one point in his meteoric career he held all the National League track records. He was, at the time, probably the best speedway rider in the world.

As if he had not been blessed with gifts enough, he was also devastatingly handsome, superbly spectacular and magnificently consistent. He was said to possess the perfect combination of skill,
judgment and daring.

New Cross Team 1934 Back: Harry Shepherd, Roy Dook, Stan Greatrex, George Newton. Front: Joe Francis, Tom Farndon, F E Mockford, Ron Johnson, Nobby Key

You soon run out of superlatives when you try to do justice to an introduction to Tom Farndon.

So let me borrow a few rare drops of character originally squeezed from the pen of an erstwhile speedway historian named Cyril May, whose usual talent lay more in the parading of serried ranks of dry statistics rather than any ability for illuminating the inner personalities of your heroes and mine -- the great stars of the dirt tracks.

Tom Farndon, wrote Cyril, was 'utterly fearless, and essentially an individualist intent on winning every race. He possessed amazing vitality and stamina that enabled him to race 20 to 30 times a week, month after month, without losing form'.

. . . Thanks, Cyril. I can take it from here.

The destiny of Tom Farndon (England, Crystal Palace and New Cross) was surely to become the greatest speedway rider England would ever produce. And it is as certain as anything can be in this crazy
speedway business that he would have brought the individual World Championship title to England a full 13 years sooner than did the magnificent Tommy Price of Wembley.

But on the night of what should have been another of his regular finest hours, tragedy of the utmost magnitude -- and certainly of monstrous perfidy -- struck him down.

Master and Pupil - Tom Farndon (left) and Jack Parker at the 1932 Wembley Test against Australia

He was then 24 years old, and though his achievements, up until fate turned its cruel ferocity upon him, had bordered on the monumental, his future potential appeared limitless. Tragically he was never to realise the full promise of his unique abilities.

Tom Farndon really liked horses, and he originally thought he might like to be a jockey. Riding motorcycles started out as just 'a bit of a lark'.

But he could not have had a finer speedway apprenticeship . . . riding with the Parker brothers, Jack and Norman, in his home town team, Coventry. It was a very short apprenticeship. He and the Parkers parted company when Coventry closed in 1931, the brothers going to Southampton and Tom to the Fred Mockford-Cecil Smith metropolitan promotion at the truly spectacular Crystal Palace.

From then on his star rose like a comet. His wild and precocious speedway talent refined itself into what we now know as superstardom.

But to his big sister, Hylda, he was her baby brother. Hylda is now 91, two years older than Tom would have been had he lived, and enjoys life in some style in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. It was there, looking down as the spring blossoms began to carpet her local park with colour, and surrounded by her scrapbooks, photograph albums, newspaper cuttings and her memories, she talked to me about 'Our Tom'.

'He was lovely,' she said. 'He was dead keen on horses and used to go to the local blacksmith's. He was very young, but he used to ride the big shire horses. He fancied being a jockey, and one racehorse owner took him on for a month to see how he liked it. But he didn't care for racehorses as much as the shires.'

In one of her cuttings, under the headline 'Daredevil lad who won speedway fame: How Tom Farndon led his father a fine dance', a 'Special Correspondent' has written: 'He was a crazy, fearless young daredevil. So mad, so hot-headed, that his father, a downright, plain-speaking coal merchant, would not let him ride a motorcycle.' The reason: Dad feared his son would break his neck. The Special Correspondent wrote that 'Tom Farndon, the speedway ace, had fair, curly hair and passive blue eyes behind which there is a hint of quiet strength and a steadfastness of purpose, but there is certainly no suggestion of recklessness'.

He used to pull bikes to pieces and reconstruct them. Then he started experimenting with motorcycles belonging to friends. He never lost an opportunity to sneak off for a joyride. He had plenty of spills -- and father had to pay.

In the end he wore down his father's resistance and Farndon senior bought him a bike. So when the new speedway opened at Brandon, young Tom was one of the first through the gates. And here is where the 'bit of a lark' came in. That's what Tomthought it would be to try the new sport.

Tom Farndon (outside) seeing off the challenge of Hackney's Dicky Case in a British Championship decider at Wembley early in 1935

He stripped down his machine for practice sessions and, mounted on his improvised speedster . . . he crashed! He crashed more often than any of the others. He never got round two laps without a crash -- according to a Special Correspondent.

Then, one afternoon, a director of the track lent him a proper speedway bike, a dirt track Douglas. First time out on his new mount he beat the previous night's best times. He was only two-fifths of a second off the track record.

At this point, says Hylda, he was spotted by a local motorcycle dealer by the name of Stanley Glanfield. Now Stanley Glanfield just happened to be the Stanley Glanfield who, by chance, had been traversing the globe in a motorcycle combination about the same time as Lionel Wills. They both seemed to end up in Australia just when dirt track racing
was beginning to take off as a national pastime.

It was their reports of what they saw that resulted in the birth of speedway racing in England.

The deal was that Mr Glanfield would supply a machine in return for a share -- a goodly share according to Hylda -- of Tom's winnings. She says: 'Mr Glanfield wanted so much money when Tom won that my husband, Joe, said: "Forget that!" and bought Tom a speedway bike of his own.

'First time out he crashed. He wasn't hurt much, but the trouble was the handlebars. Tom had very short arms and they couldn't find suitable handlebars for him.

'But eventually he got to the stage where he was very, very good. Then the track went bust and he went to Crystal Palace. He didn't like the big Palace track, he liked the tricky little tracks. That's why he was such a success when Palace moved to New Cross. It was small.'

Tom and Audrey Farndon's Wedding Day

It was around this time that Tom met and married a Coventry milkmaid, Audrey Gledhill. They met at a dance, recalled Hylda, but Tom was so shy that he would never ask any of the girls to trip the light fantastic.

So Joe used to say to him: 'Tell me which one you want', and he would make the introductions. Audrey was also shy, refusing to be married in a traditional white wedding gown in a church ceremony because she didn't want any fuss.

Yet, although Tom was supposed to be shy, Hylda said: 'I remember he won a Charlston competition at the Coventry Hippodrome and the prize was a clock. He seemed to be pretty good at whetever he did. 'And when he became a really big speedway star in London, he used to be mobbed wherever he went. He had to be smuggled in and out of places
the back way -- just like modern pop stars. The big stores used to borrow his trophies to display, and he never had to buy anything to wear -- it was all given to him. He was treated like a major celebrity.

'But it didn't seem to change him. I remember him one day racing against Syd Jackson. Tom beat him and Syd threw down his bike afterwards and said it was no good, he couldn't win on it. Tom bought it off him on the spot and went out and won on it straight away.'

Off the track Tom developed an interest in racing greyhounds, at one point owning 14 of them. Hylda said: 'The first we knew about it was when Dad bought the News of the World and in it was a picture of Tom jumping over a fence with two dogs. 'When Tom was killed, I had his best dog and it literally earned me a fortune over the years.'

Our Special Correspondent refers to Tom having a track career marked by an 'almost unbroken run of triumph. Here are the highlights:

Farndon is the only rider who has ever held the National League Riders Championship, the London Riders Championship and the British Individual Championship simultaneously; he alone has successfully defended the BIC twice.'

She forgot to mention that he had also won the prestigious Star Championship in 1933, from his team mate Ron Johnson and West Ham's Bluey Wilkinson.

But it was far from an unbroken run of triumph. For instance, when Fred Mockford and Cecil Smith signed him for the
Palace, they soon found that he was not altogether the success they had hoped. The reason was that he tuned his own motors.

It was said that they used to employ a special member of the track staff whose job it was to walk round the circuit and pick up the parts that fell from Tom's machine.

Things changed when the team moved to New Cross, where Mockford and Smith introduced the track workshop system, under the mechanical guru Alf Coles, where the machines of the entire team were looked after.
It is reported that from then on Tom Farndon didn't have to worry about a mechanical thing. He never saw his machine until an hour before a meeting. He went out and raced, and then forgot about his bikes until the next meeting.

There was controversy too.

It was early in 1935 that a £25 best-of-three challenge match race series was organised between Tom, the reigning British Champion, and Bluey Wilkinson, the Australian Champion and very likely Tom's next opponent for the national title. It was an event obviously designed to 'pack 'em in' almost certainly cooked up by Mockford and his old Docklands 'enemy' Roarin'

The Great Stars of the Day (from left) Tom Farndon, Bluey Wilkinson, Lionel Van Praag, Tiger Stevenson, Dicky Case, Tommy Croombs

John Hoskins, for both were old-school showmen, speedway promoters in the true sense of the word. OK, 'Old
pros' if you like.

Cyril May reported: 'The New Cross ace sky-rocketed round the big West Ham circuit to victory at the record-smashing speed of 45.68mph, which was 0.68mph better than the old record established by Vic Huxley in May 1934.' (So Tom Farndon could ride the big tracks well after all).

But, by all accounts, the two promotional gentlemen concerned failed to inform the Speedway Control Board, which put its collective foot down, forbidding the match to take place in the style of the official British Individual Championship, and ordering the riders to meet for one race only at each track.

Such an imitation as had been planned would, of necessity, detract from what was then the principal competition of the day. And inexorably, events the career of Tom Farndon moved towards his destiny.

NEXT: More records tumble, and then tragedy.