Terry Friday

Very sadly KAMG lost its founder and dear friend, Terry Friday, in 2023. After two strokes, it had been some time since he was able to ride himself, but he was always up for a pillion ride. He simply loved being on a motorbike. The importance of this man, not only to those who knew him personally; not only to the KAMG; not only to the IAM, but also to the literally thousands of motorcyclists across this country who didn’t know him or even know of him, cannot be overstated. This affectionate tribute has been taken from the August 2023 edition of KAMG’s ‘Riders’ magazine.

Whether the thousands of motorcyclists mentioned in the opening paragraph are here in Kent or in Scotland or Northern Ireland or in Wales, if there had been no Terry Friday, they probably wouldn’t be wearing a Green Badge.

That completely unknown rider that you once followed one day in some far-flung corner of the country and who was riding in an obviously ‘advanced’ way, owed something to Terry Friday although he obviously wouldn’t know it. You can always tell a rider who is ‘advanced’ and it is no exaggeration to say that there would not be the vigorous, thriving Advanced Rider movement that we have today if there had been no Terry Friday. Sure, there would be advanced riding without Terry, indeed there was advanced riding before he came along, but it was he who sowed the seed and then nurtured the embryonic movement so that it became the thriving force it is today. The KAMG alone has trained over 3000 riders to Green Badge standard, and add to that the thousands that have been trained by other groups, groups that only exist today because Terry made their existence possible, and you see just how much we all owe him.

Terry became an apprentice shipwright in Chatham dockyard when he left school. Then after doing his national service stint in the army in Cyprus, he returned home to find that shipwrights were not needed. So he joined the police to just play football, but that’s where he passed his motorcycle test on a silent LE Velocette, and he was barely able to hide the scorn he had for that poor ‘Noddy’ bike, but the bike seed proper was sown when his police bike became a 500cc Triumph. Luckily for us he went on to become a sergeant instructor at the Kent Police Driving School and that was the springboard that launched the KAMG and changed the IAM.

There are many Friday stories to be told and we shall tell some in future editions of KAMG ‘Riders’, but until then we shall remember Terry’s infectious enthusiasm and his ear-to-ear grin. Thanks Terry.

Terry was the driving force in establishing advanced rider training in Kent – and nationwide

You may have seen on page 57 of the Summer issue of the IAM magazine, ‘Roadsmart’, pictures of the members of the Bournemouth and Wessex Advanced Motorcycle Group celebrating their 40th anniversary. It was claimed that the Bournemouth group was the first motorcycle group to be affiliated to the IAM. That is wrong – KAMG was the first motorcycle group affiliated to the IAM, and it happened on April 10th 1980.

This is actually a very important date, and it’s not just important to KAMG. Although no one knew it at the time, on that day the IAM itself changed fundamentally. Had not been for the newly formed motorcycle ‘club’ in Kent that morphed into the KAMG, it is quite possible, indeed probable, that there would be no motorcycle-only groups affiliated to the IAM today and, as a result, the IAM would be a much smaller organisation as a result.

Back in 1980 the IAM, which was established in 1956, was decidedly a car organisation, and its influential secretary at that time, a chap called Bob Peters, was definitely anti-bikes and anti-bikers. However, KAMG under the leadership of Terry Friday and, with a strong support team (some of whom are still members), the walls of castle IAM were breached and the KAMG became the first motorcycle-only group to be affiliated to the IAM.

OK. So what? Written in a few lines like that it all sounds a very obvious, simple and yawn-worthy process, doesn’t it? Actually, it was very far from simple. The whole idea of a motorcycle ‘club’ that taught motorcyclists to become ‘advanced riders’ in the sense that we understand that term today, came about when a chap called Terry Friday met a chap called Mike Knowles.

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Terry Friday was a sergeant instructor at the Kent Police driving school in the 1970s, and was training police riders not just from Kent but from police forces abroad, many of which sent their riders to Kent for training. At the same time, a motorcyclist called Mike Knowles, who was the Road Safety Officer of Kent County Council and was liaising with the Kent Police driving school, was also responsible for promoting the RAC/ACU motorcycle training scheme* in the county, and it was in this capacity that he first met Terry.

Because of his police instructor status Terry was approached sometime in the late 1970s to be the IAM car examiner in the south east and, naturally, he asked if he could cover bikes as well. There were no IAM bike groups back then, but there was an IAM Advanced Rider test, which had been introduced in 1975, and Mike Knowles thought that it would be a good idea if all the volunteer RAC/ACU instructors took that IAM advanced rider test.

And so it was arranged that on one day Terry Friday and another police instructor, Barry Hill, would conduct the tests. The RAC/ACU instructors were keen, but unfortunately their riding was not really up to snuff, and when they were tested not one was of ‘Green Badge’ standard; in fact, two of them even wanted to take the test on bikes that they had damaged by crashing into each other on the way to the test!

Fortunately, Mike Knowles also took the test and was the last rider on the day to do so, and he, having read Motorcycle Roadcraft, passed. That was a significant moment because, as Terry later told me, “In that moment my day changed. No, my life changed!”

The two of them, Terry and Mike, recognised that taking the RAC/ACU training scheme and passing the ‘driving test’ did not properly equip people to ride motorbikes either well or safely.

There was a need to provide some form of advanced training to motorcyclists, and to their surprise the riders of that time were very enthusiastic about the idea too and were keen to become ‘advanced’ riders, a keenness borne out by the numbers that turned up for the first tentative discussion meeting at the KCC, there were over 100 riders there and they came from all over the south east, even as far away as Southampton.

Two weeks later at the second ‘gathering’ there were even more. The inaugural meeting of “a motorcycle club to be formed for the advancement of riding skills”, as it was described in the minutes of that meeting, was held on Monday March 24th 1980, and it is from that day that the show was officially on the road. But it was not to be a smooth road.

The IAM advanced rider test was the only accepted civilian standard available and obviously in order to take that test a rider had to become a member of the IAM, but in order to become a member every one of this large group of riders would have to become part of an existing IAM group, and all the groups were car groups. There were small pockets of motorcycle members within some car groups, but there was no such thing as a motorcycle-only group.

Moreover, the IAM definitely didn’t want separate motorcycle groups. Yet it was clear to Terry Friday that the two factions couldn’t really mix satisfactorily; apart from their common interest in improving their skills, the needs of the riders and the drivers were different and he wanted there to be a separate motorcycle-only group. This, however, conflicted with the IAM’s rules and they insisted that the Kent riders would have to join the nearest car group.

However, not all of the local car groups welcomed this idea, as they could see themselves being swamped by a 100 or more grubby bikers in their own groups. Yet the IAM couldn’t or wouldn’t accept the Kent ‘club’ as a motorcycle-only group.

Another founder member, Rod Collins, was the valuable diplomatic liaison conduit in the negotiations with the IAM hierarchy, and was an important counterbalance to Terry Friday’s sometimes ‘less calm’ approach, when dealing with the powers-that-be at IAM HQ. Another member who was also in at the beginning and who later became the group’s Chief Observer after Terry, was Kevin Chapman. He told me that he remembered Rod recounting the battles with the IAM about the proposals to break away from the car group, and Terry’s not always polite or respectful responses to them. “Terry was the drive,” Kevin said, “but Rod was the diplomat able to communicate at their level.”

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Undeterred by these difficulties, Terry, Mike, Rod and others started to beat on the IAM’s doors to get the rules changed, and, fortunately for the Kent ‘club’, help was at hand in the impressive form of the 2nd Baron Strathcarron. Lord Strathcarron was obviously a good bloke to have on side; he had a weighty CV, as you might well imagine, including being an IAM council member, and he was instrumental in getting the IAM to change its mind about having motorcycle-only groups.

Sadly, he died in a motorcycle accident with a dustcart in 2006 aged 82, but up to that point he had led a pretty active life as a racing driver, WW II bomber pilot, motorcyclist, businessman, and motoring journalist, but above all, for my money, he was a proper peer, not some shallow pop-star or civil servant artificially bumped up to the peerage by some outgoing prime minister settling his debts to his cronies.

Most importantly, Lord Strathcarron was an active, year-round, motorbike rider; indeed, he had been the very first person to pass the IAM Advanced Rider test in 1975, and as a council member of the IAM I assume he had some influence at the time when the Kent ‘club’ was trying to become affiliated as a motorcycle-only group.

After considerable to-ing and fro-ing and careful diplomacy by Rod Collins, the IAM doors were eventually eased ajar and the KAMG squeezed itself through them. In fact, it was during a tea-break at a committee meeting of the so far un-named ‘club’ on April 10th 1980, that they heard that they had been invited to become the first motorcycle group to be affiliated to the IAM as the Kent Advanced Motorcyclists’ Group. (That pedantic apostrophe seems to have been lost in the intervening 43 years.)

At that moment it must have seemed that they had achieved what they wanted to achieve but, as can be seen from the extract of the minutes, it was Rod Collins who presciently said that, “we (KAMG) would be a model for other motorcycle groups in the country, and our actions would set a precedent for them.” This proved to be the case, and the importance and significance of the KAMG to the motorcycle growth within the IAM extended way, way beyond Kent.

KAMG members rode all over the country at their own expense, including far afield Northern Ireland and Scotland, helping and advising embryonic motorcycle groups, and some of the junior motorcycle sub-groups within one or two car groups, how to become affiliated in their own right and how to set up their training programmes. Kevin says these trips occurred almost weekly and he remembers going to Hawick in Scotland, to Taunton in Devon, to Norfolk, Slough, Oxford, and the home counties as well as places further north, although he can’t remember where exactly. “It was,” he says, “a real Terry Friday Show. Although sometimes Rod or I would stand in if Terry was busy. I was pushed forward because I was only in my early twenties.”

It was actually Rod Collins who wrote the first Pass Your Advanced Motorcycle Test book for the IAM, although for some reason it was apparently credited to someone who Kevin describes as “the in-house editor” presumably at the IAM. And it was Rod, Kevin and Dave Walters from Norfolk who wrote the first Observer Guidelines that were used by all groups country-wide in order to ensure that there were no differences in the standards between the widespread groups.

After the initial club meetings and the committee meetings at the KCC and the Police Driving School, the by now officially designated KAMG adopted The Lantern on Charing Hill as its regular group meeting place and on the first night at its new home, on 28th April 1980, 170 riders attended!

The significance of that number cannot be overstated ‒ remember there was no email then, there were no mobile phones or social media to enable messages to be broadcast to a wide audience quickly, in fact only about half of all homes even had an ordinary telephone, and yet somehow 170 people heard about that first group night and turned up.

At the second meeting on May 27th there was a chance to meet Lord Strathcarron and the IAM Chairman, Michael Pickering, and then to see a film about motorcycle tyres entitled ‘Wobble and Weave’, followed by a Roadcraft video as demonstrated by the Kent police.

That’s how the KAMG – the UK’s first IAM-affiliated advanced motorcyclists’ group – started life.

And although its success was far from being a solo effort by Terry Friday, those who were then and are still members today, all say that he was the powerhouse. Four years ago, we nominated Terry for a UK honour, but our very well supported submission did not succeed.

It’s easy for us to take all this history for granted now, and perhaps the IAM probably does too. Yet without Terry Friday, Mike Knowles, Kevin Chapman, Rod Collins, Brenda Vickery and the many others who were there 43 years ago, but who are sadly not here now, the KAMG wouldn’t exist and the IAM and, indeed, the wider motorcycle world would be the poorer for it.

“The Father of Advanced Motorcycling, a true visionary who leaves a huge legacy and who will forever be remembered as the pioneer for IAM motorcycle groups.”

Farewell Terry

An impressive contingent of KAMG riders were led by Kent police and KF&RS in escorting Terry’s ashes by motorcycle from Mickey’s Diner to Headcorn airfield for the scattering of his ashes from a light aircraft on the morning of Monday 2 October. After a foggy start to the day, conditions cleared sufficiently for the aircraft to take off and Terry’s ashes were duly scattered from low altitude.

Afterwards Terry’s family, friends, former work colleagues and KAMG members reminisced in the Headcorn airfield bar & restaurant, ‘Wings’, over light refreshments generously provided by Terry’s family. A book of condolence was signed and packets of ‘Forget-me-not’ seeds given out for all to plant and to remember Terry by.

A more fitting write-up will follow in the next edition of KAMG Riders magazine, and on our website thereafter.

Click here to read a little more about Terry’s dedication to motorcycle safety and advanced rider training.

“The Father of Advanced Motorcycling, a true visionary who leaves a huge legacy and who will forever be remembered as the pioneer for IAM motorcycle groups.”