Sat in a dusty cupboard in the bowels of the Royal Automobile Club, leafing through ancient volumes of The Motor Cycle and Motor Cycling, the name jumped right out at me. How could it not? Mr Eric Crudgington Fernihough Esq. And the faded photos on yellowing, brittle paper, almost a century old, did full justice to the name: cravat, plus-fours, neatly trimmed moustache and a supercharged Brough Superior.
If I had made this discovery half a century earlier, the actor Terry-Thomas would’ve been a casting director’s dream for Ferni the movie.
Fernihough had been long forgotten, which didn’t seem right. His story was more than worth telling, so I set about researching and writing a book about the man and his adventures. And what adventures!
Fernihough was an orphan, adopted by a wealthy lady, who ended up at Cambridge University in the early 1920s, from where he graduated in chemistry and engineering. Or brewing fuels and making motorcycles, as he preferred to call his studies. The motorcycle bug bit ‘Ferni’ early.
“A quarter of a century ago, a very small boy, rummaging in the family wastepaper basket, found a catalogue of motorcycles and their accessories,” he wrote in 1936, at the age of 31. “He kept it, studied it, and from it learned to name the component parts of the machines he saw. It was dearer
