PEOPLE
“During the 12-year period that he made motorcycling competition his main and/or sole means of livelihood, he typified all that was best in professionalism. Though essentially an enthusiastic all-rounder he was always a force for the racing ‘maestri’ to reckon with. Tenacious as the badgers of his native Gloucestershire, he was, in adversity, worth a wagon-load of Gunga Dins. And, in spite of the severe handicap of an asthmatical and bronchial tendency, he was just as tough as you’d expect a sprig of Cotswold farming stock to be.”
Such extravagant prose was unusual even in the late 1950s when it appeared, firstly in the weekly magazine Motor Cycling, then in book form in ‘Past-masters of Speed’, but it was journalist Dennis May’s unmistakeable style, and it presents a good, if rather vivid, word-picture of the subject of this short profile, Bob Foster.
Bob was indeed a Gloucestershire man, born in Stow-on-the-Wold in 1911, where his father managed a nearby large estate, and where the teenager’s motorcycle career began. His
