‘True mates’ restore Gary’s biking life with Yamaha trike

Yamaha trike Gary Mayle

Gary Mayle was just 21 when he suffered devastating injuries in a motorbike accident that nearly cost him his life.

He was in and out of hospital for months for repairs to his shattered right leg, suffering a mystery infection, sepsis, and a cardiac arrest along the way, before coming to a life-changing decision.

“The surgeon said to me ‘look Gary, I can carry on but we don’t hold much hope – you can either carry on and be in and out of hospital for five or 10 years, or I can take your leg off and you can get on with your life’,” he remembers. “I said ‘well take it off then’.”

Never riding on two wheels again was a bitter blow

For a bike-obsessed young man, knowing he would never ride on two wheels again was a bitter blow.

And although he still attended rallies as a pillion or in a van for several years, it wasn’t the same.

“I kept saying I wanted to get there on my own,” he says, chatting at his home near the Norfolk Broads, “and my mates would say ‘one day, one day’.”

Little did he know that, for some time, his biker friends had been working on constructing the trike you see in these pictures, based on a 1978 Yamaha XS750 with a whole lot of other stuff thrown in.

“True mates”

“They went above and beyond,” says Gary, who was presented with the trike in 1989 – eight years after the accident. “It was like winning the Lottery. They are what you call true mates.”

Over the past three decades the trike has undergone several major changes, like a constant work in progress, and given Gary the chance to live a life he thought had gone.

“It means a lot to me,” he says. “A boatload of absolutely great memories, good friends, some of whom are no longer with us, bless their hearts.

“I’ve loved it, getting myself out and about and the freedom, the rush of the air.”

Gary’s biking life started at 16 with a Puch moped, followed at 17 by a 1964 Francis-Barnett Plover he used for commuting when, as a police cadet, he was posted to Reigate in Surrey.

“I passed my test on that beastie in April 1977,” he says, “On the way to test the heel of my cowboy boot fell off, and the bloke said ‘have you got any impediments?’ I said no, then he asked ‘why are you limping?’

Bump starting the bike

“Then it wouldn’t start, so I asked if it was all right if I bump started it. I went running down the road and off I went.”

Gary would take the Plover from his parents’ home in Blackfen, Kent down to Reigate, stay there for eight days of work and return to see his mum.

“This was before the M25 and it took forever, between two and three hours,” he says. “I used to load it up and plod on down there. It could only do a top speed of about 60mph, downhill with the wind behind you. 

“I managed to fit a battery which gave me three candle watt power from the light instead of the previous one, and it was not the most reliable thing. Bits kept falling off, like the exhaust, which then got run over by an artic.

“Dad and I made an exhaust cone for it out of beer cans and wire wool just to get me home, then I went to the local breakers and came across a near enough brand new silencer that was better than the old one.”

Next came a Triumph Tiger 100T bought from a friend of his father who used to drag race Triumph twins.

“What he had done to that Triumph was nobody’s business,” says Gary. “He had put on Thruxton cam followers, Thruxton pushrods, slightly bigger overhead valves etc. I paid £250 and rode it home.

Tiger 100T was Gary’s best bike ever

“It was a beautiful bike to ride, my best bike ever. I did something like 60,000 miles on that, to Wales, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and a lot of bike rallies where I met a load more mates.”

After a while, however, Gary swapped the Triumph for a six-month-old Yamaha DT175MX trials bike.

“I needed a little bike I could take to and from work and not wake everybody up in the morning when I started up the Triumph,” he explains. “It was a grand little bike, nice and whizzy, with good lights, but I’ve regretted selling the Tiger ever since.”

Having set his sights on something bigger, Gary wandered into Mottingham Mopeds just before his 21st birthday and ordered a brand new Yamaha XS850.

It was 1980, and he’d been working “almost 20 hours days, seven days a week”, keeping the peace following the Brixton riots.

“It came to July and me and my mate Billy, who had a really nice Honda 900, decided to take a couple of weeks off and drive to the South of France,” he says, taking with them out of date maps showing old road numbers.

Riding through the Alps

“We just had to head for where we thought we were going, following road signs. We went up through the Alps, which was one of the most memorable occasions. Coming down out of the mountains the smell from the perfumeries in Grasse was absolutely intoxicating.

“We stopped at Agay and had a great time, met up with a few other friends in a camper van. Coming back we went round the Peripherique (the Paris ring road), and if you’ve got no map and you don’t know which junction to take you’re just looking for a road name with everybody going round you at 90mph, all bloody mad.

“We got to the port early and the fuse went, the only thing that ever went wrong with it.”

Then came the fateful night in September 1981 that would change everything.

With his then-girlfriend Alison on the back of the Yamaha, Gary met his friend Clive, nicknamed ‘Madness’, at the Man of Kent pub in Eltham High Street.

Disaster struck

They set off for a burger bar at Blackheath but, just after a set of pinchgates on the heath, disaster struck.

“There’s a junction to the left and I saw this headlight coming towards me, which turned out to be the pilot light of a Honda CX500,” he remembers. “It swerved and disappeared off the road and on to the heath, and the next thing I knew it reappeared and drove straight over the top of me at 50mph. I was only doing 30mph but I didn’t have time to brake.

“His bike hit my foot, my knee, my arm. He was three times the legal limit for alcohol in his system.”

Alison and the other rider lost consciousness and were taken to hospital, while Gary was conscious throughout.

“I was left up on the heath for about 45 minutes, my thigh bone sticking through my leathers, my arm broken in three places and hanging out very oddly,” he says.

“My foot was the size of a big Swan Vesta matchbox. Every bone was shoved up, but I could move all my toes even though my shin was shattered in God knows how many places. My knee worked, but not very well, and my femur was broken and twisted.”

Alison, who also suffered a broken leg, was in a coma for 14 days before recovering, but the other rider sadly died in hospital.

Painful recovery

Gary’s recovery was far from straightforward, first picking up “some sort of odd black death on Blackheath”.

“It was a virus and to this day I don’t know what it was,” he says. “They had to get medication from Switzerland to sort it out.”

Surgeons operated twice a week to try to set Gary’s shattered bones, his mates paying regular visits to the ward.

“All my biker mates, every single one of them, came in and made sure I had everything I wanted, but all I really needed was company because I was in a side room with this weird infection,” he remembers.

“Madness would come and see me on a regular basis, with snakes in his pockets. That’s why he was called Madness!”

Gary was finally allowed to go home on Christmas Eve for a break from the constant surgery.

“I had been getting weaker and weaker,” he says. “They kept pumping me full of this sedative, which I was taking longer and longer to recover from, and eventually I arrested in the hospital before an operation.”

From bad to worse

Things went from bad to worse when he caught sepsis, an extreme reaction to an infection, and was taken by ambulance back to hospital.

“It was a lousy hospital and my mate Tex, who was a union rep for the police and a biker through and through, got me into St Thomas’ Hospital,” he adds.

That was when the surgeon, Mr Reynolds – “a real gentleman” – gave Gary the choice of years of painful operations, or amputation.

Nine months after the accident he was back at work on light duties, but retired from the police through ill health before his 22nd birthday, eventually taking on a role with the Crown Prosecution Service in London.

For several years, Gary still lived a biker’s life, but without the bike, riding pillion with his brother-in-law Chris, who had come to live with him and his then-wife Jacqui.

Friends hatch a plan to give Gary back his freedom

Soon, Chris had hatched a secret plan with Gary’s mates to give him back his freedom.

“He met my mate Pete, or ‘Elvis’ as we called him, who was starting up his own business called Jap Bikes, and while I thought he was working in London most weekends the tricky little beggars were playing trike builders,” he says.

“Loads of them got together and started fabricating – they all had different skills and put them together. 

“They got this Yamaha XS750 from a breakers yard and started chopping bits off. It had been a getaway vehicle from a petrol station robbery in Essex. It wasn’t very successful because it broke down!

“Elvis, with his pencil and paper, measured it all up, got some pipe and started welding, and it’s all still there.”

Gary was completely in the dark until January 1989 when he and Jacqui attended another friend, Mark’s, birthday party in Crayford.

“Everything was very jolly, but I noted that there were a heck of a lot of my mates there, especially a large contingent from Essex,” he says. “Then Mark said ‘Gary, we’ve got something to show you’. He said they had a Triumph project in the garage and, as I knew a lot about Triumphs, could I have a look?

“The beast was mine”

“I went out with the revellers, and there were cameras flashing and video cameras whirring away. There in the garage was the trike and I was taken aback and humbled. It was bloody marvellous. I got on it and the beast was mine.”

After tidying up a few bits and pieces, Gary got it legally registered, retaining the donor Yamaha’s registration number, and rode it to the MOT testing station.

“I set off on my own, very nervous as I hadn’t ridden since the accident, but the buzz of adrenalin was back,” he says. “I felt freedom, absolute freedom. 

“I had to get on it and go ‘think trike, think trike’, because if you don’t you try and go for a gap and there’s two bloody great wheels sticking out the side.

“When I stopped I thought ‘where’s the side stand, it’s going to fall over’. Silly arse!”

Perhaps understandably, it took Gary a while to become confident enough to ride the trike longer distances.

“A little apprehensive”

“I was a little apprehensive, but I still had the urge,” he says. “I think it’s in the blood – I’ve got oil in my veins. I just wanted to get on there and keep riding.

“On the first bike rally, I didn’t have the bottle, but Pete took it all the way down to Brighton and he was putting it through roundabouts sideways. On the way back he said ‘look, you’ll be all right, it’s motorway all the way, daylight, and dry, just get used to it’.

“I think I’m plodding along but Chris shouts ‘slow down!’. My speedo said I was only doing 50mph, but he said I was doing 80 or 90, so I had to get a new speedo…”

From there, Gary went to rallies all over the south east and south coast, as well as a couple of trips to Scotland.

But after three engine rebuilds and four gearbox changes, he decided it was time for an upgrade, buying a Yamaha XJ900 lump for about £200.

Tight finances meant the unit wasn’t fitted until several years after a move to Norfolk in 1999, when Gary met a man in North Walsham known as Mike the Trike.

“He got the engine in, but it was no good because we couldn’t get a CDI for it, and it turned out it was cheaper to buy an entire second hand XJ900, complete with wiring loom, lights, fairing, and other bits and pieces,” he says.

“I’d pop over there, get the spanners out and do bits and pieces. We ended up with a completely new front end, upgraded brakes, better pipes, and made our own silencers.”

Koni shocks extended Gary’s “numb bum durability” from 60 miles to more than 300.

“Fun piece of kit”

“On one long weekend we ended up doing more than the previous year’s entire mileage, some 1,021 miles in three days,” he says. “A new rear axle, wheels and a paint job and we had a reliable, fun and practical piece of kit.”

To give an idea of just how much this is a mix and match machine, let’s run through some of the other current components: fuel tank from a Yamaha XS850; front seat from a Honda Valkyrie; rear seat from a fork lift truck, fitted with Girling shocks; Reliant Robin rear axle with BMW wheels; Caterham Super 7 mudguards; LED sidelights from a lorry trailer board; and a Suzuki top yoke.

Until 2017, when Gary, now 61, had issues with his shoulders – partly a legacy of the accident – the trike was used regularly for rallies, meetings and runs to tea shops.

“Mike and I were often the winners of chariot races they used to hold, where we tow a plastic barrel cut in half lengthways with one of our mates in it,” he smiles. “We’d also have a kind of pursuit race, on an oval grass circuit with two people on the back to weigh it down.

“You’ve got to catch the other one up, and we once had one of the longest races. I was catching up with him, but after a while my tyres got too warm and started to slip, so he caught up with me. It was all great fun.”

After marriage to Fiona in 2017, a combination of home improvements, ongoing shoulder problems and then Covid restricted Gary’s use of the trike, and it’s now in need of a bit more work to get it back to its best.

“It has started to shake at the front at about 28 to 32mph,” he says. “With one hand off, it wants to shake itself to pieces. But the plan now is to get it up and running again.”

To Gary, the trike represents “really good mates, really good times”, and more than 30 years of biking after he thought that chapter of his life had closed forever.

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