Joy Mckean Part 5

Beirut to London and Europe. North America. 

Place and country names are those Joy used in her diary.

Joy was riding out from Beirut on 17 July 1956, heading for Byblos in Lebanon, when two men on scooters raced up and stopped her. One said, “We are from BSA and our manager wants to see you”. They also told Joy there was a photograph of her on their shop wall. The Beirut BSA agency overhauled the Bantam, repaired the kick-starter damaged in the fall at Alexandria, replaced both fork springs, sealed the gearbox which had been leaking oil, painted the name of all the countries she had passed through on the tank - and did not charge her anything. Joy thought they “were really wonderful” as they made an excellent job and the Bantam was running better than at any time in the previous few months. “I felt the bike was getting very worn and I don’t think I’d have reached London if it hadn’t been for what they did.” 

She entered Greece, went south to Athens where she visited the Acropolis and other major tourist attractions before ridingnorth to Delphi. While on the Greek coast she met the Bennetts, an American couple who became lifelong friends. Going north into Yugoslavia she travelled over 300 miles on dusty gravel roads. She rode through to Italy and visited Rome where she slept on a bed, the first since Istanbul, vowing it would be the last she paid for unless the weather forced her indoors. Two punctures delayed her on the way to the Brenner Pass and then it started to rain and became much colder. Joy now found it warmer and dryer to sleep under bridges at night rather than out in the open. Joy’s letters home remarked on the farming practices she noticed while riding though Germany. 

On one of the long climbs in Switzerland the Bantam started making very ominous engine noises. Joy knew this was serious and managed to reach a motorcycle shop in Lucerne where she was told the big end had failed. They did not have the correct parts for a repair but in spite of that said they would do their best. Joy stayed in a Lucerne campground for five days waiting for the work to be completed. The cost was £5 which was a big blow as she was “getting very, very low on money”. The Bantam was still not running well but she limped off toward Paris, made a quick visit to Versailles and arrived at the Paris BSA agent just as they were about to close. Their advice was, “You are too near home. Go on get the train”, to which Joy replied with a determined, “No, I am not going to take the train”. 

The next day she rode to Dieppe and took the ferry to Newhaven in East Sussex arriving on 8 September 1956. There were problems with customs and immigration as her carnet had expired, both her New Zealand driving licence and her international driving permit had expired and she had no more pages left in her passport! Luckily AA came to the rescue and issued her with Q plates. Normally these were for vehicles of uncertain age or identity. Later, when Joy went to the London County Council to renew her international driving permit, the official at the counter said she would have to take a driving test! Joy argued saying that she had just ridden all the way from New Zealand and most certainly did not need to take a test. The argument ended when another official at the back of the room called out, “Give it to her. Go on, give it to her!”

Joy had a “terrible job” getting to London from Newhaven and later recalled, “I was so grateful that I knew England and felt just as happy there as if I had been back in New Zealand''. Just after crossing Westminster Bridge at about 11pm the Bantam stopped. She was in the gutter trying to start it when a policeman came along and asked what he could do for her. “You can’t do much,” was Joy’s reply. When she did get the motor started, she had to contend with the bumper-to-bumpertraffic in Charing Cross Road of theatre patrons going home. Her knowledge of London enabled her to take some detours to avoid more traffic and she eventually arrived at a friend’s home in Hampstead Garden about 1am. Her friend was elderly and Joy did not want to disturb her at that hour so she slept the remainder of her first night back in England outside the front door.

A report of Joy’s ride to the United Kingdom was published in New Zealand: 

Warmly wrapped in an oilskin coat and leather gauntlets a travel-weary New Zealand nurse rode recently into London on a two-stroke motor-cycle with nearly 34,000 miles showing on the speedometer. From Te Puke, Auckland, 36-year-old Miss Joy McKean has ridden through 22 countries on her way to Britain to revisit friends made during wartime nursing days in London. Her lone journey is one of the longest solo efforts by a woman motorcyclist, and is a tribute to her courage, endurance and initiative, but Joy McKean remains modest of her achievement, saying only that “travelling by ship is a little too easy.” (Press 13 October, 1956 p13)

The day after Joy arrived she had a call from the BSA factory asking if she was coming up to Birmingham. Her reply was, “Yes, I am coming but I don’t know if I will arrive on a motorbike. It is running just terribly but I will do my best”. Halfway to Birmingham the game little Bantam finally stopped and was carried the last 50 miles to the BSA factory at Small Heath on the back of a truck. Joy recalled that the BSA staff were wonderful to her. They paid for her to stay three nights in a hotel, showed her all over the factory, explained how Bantams were made and had a photographer and television camera on hand to record the occasion. All this time the Bantam was being “made like new”. When they had finished Joy thought the only original parts were the wheels, frame, seat and tank which still had the country names painted on. 

The Bantam was given a completely new engine and stamped with exactly the same serial number as that on her original engine. This was to prevent any trouble with customs on herhomeward leg. Joy’s photograph was taken with BSA up-and-coming trials riders Brian Martin and a very youthful Jeff Smith. Brian Martin went on to be a Six Day Trial winner and BSA competitions manager. Jeff Smith was later twice Motocross World Champion – and became the patron of the New Zealand BSA Motorcycle Owners Club.

Joy headed north from Birmingham late one afternoon. She stopped at a television shop in Tamworth where she asked if a set could be put on for her to watch the six o’clock news. Joy, the manager and a customer stood and watched as Joy appeared on the news talking about her travels in Africa. She continued her tour to Glasgow, round Loch Lomond and through to Edinburgh on a very foggy day. Here she caught up with former colleagues at the Simpson Memorial Hospital before returning to London. During the ten months she was in London she first worked day shifts at the City of London Maternity Hospital before going on to night shifts so her days were free for riding. 

Joy was a special guest at the 1956 Earls Court Motorcycle Show exactly eight years after the very first BSA D1 Bantam had been introduced to the motorcycling world at the Earls Court. Joy’s ride was mentioned at a cocktail party with 400 motoring and motorcycle journalists. Her journey was believed to be the longest solo motorcycle journey undertaken by a woman at that time. BSA arranged for a photographer to take photos of Joy in London and asked her to be at their stand when the show was officially opened. There she met one of the Mortlock brothers from the Perth BSA agents. Shewas presented to the Duchess of Gloucester and found the Duchess very easy to talk to as she asked sensible questions including, “Was dust a problem?”  BSA made the most of Joy’s extraordinary ride to advertise the economy and long-distance potential of Bantams. The London photograph of Joy in front of Big Ben complete with double decker busses in the background was used for the cover of The Motor Cycle on 24 October 1957.

On 28 June 1957 Joy left for a tour of Northern Europe. This was 25 days of riding through Belgium, Holland, Germany and Denmark where she was impressed with the clockwork efficiency of the ferries between islands. There was even a person going along the lines of waiting vehicles asking if anyone needed petrol. Sweden at that time was the only country in Europe where vehicles travelled on the left and Joy forgot this, almost causing an accident. She rode into Norway where in places the snow on either side of the road was three to four feet deep and on north to the Arctic Circle where she was greeted with, “Hello Aussie,” to which she replied, “No, Kiwi”. She was most impressed by the mass of pink, blue and white wildflowers in Scandinavia and the buttercups were the largest she had ever seen. On her way back to London she visited a maternity hospital in Stockholm. She thought that Hamburg “was terrible, still bombed but cleaned up,” and rode along the Rhine and visited WW1 cemeteries in Belgium. 

Joy had already begun planning the American leg of her tour and spent some time at the Automobile Association offices on Pall Mall. There was only one book on travel in Central America which could not be borrowed so she had to copy all the information out by hand. Joy had two weeks after her European tour to have the Bantam overhauled and make herself ready for America.

On 6 August 1957 she sailed for Quebec on the Columbia, a long and “none too pleasant” crossing of the Atlantic. From there she rode to Montreal, Ottawa, Niagara Falls and south down the Delaware Valley to Long Island, New York. To get to Long Island she had to cross ten lanes of traffic to reach the Triborough Bridge (now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) and fortunately for her a hand signal was enough for traffic to stop and let her get across the lanes. Joy stayed at Fire Island, south of Long Island, with the Bartletts who she had met the year before at Kimberly. This was another of the lasting friendships she formed while touring. Joy said later that Mrs Bartlett had “some very influential friends” after she found herself sitting next to a director of The New York Times. After two columns about Joy’s travels appeared in that newspaper Mrs Bartlett was inundated with calls from people who had New Zealand or motorcycle connections. One of the calls was from the producers of the television game show Strike It Rich. Joy went on the show determined to win some money to help her meagre finances and took away $US125 and a slide projector. She then rode south through Washington for three days along Skyline Drive in Virginia and then on to the Blue Ridge Parkway. This was in late August with the autumn colourings just coming beginning. 

Of Texas Joy wrote in the April 1958 Midwives Chronicles and Nursing Notes:

When you are in the U.S.A. you get the idea that Texas is about half of the U.S. and when you are in Texas you forget that there are 47 other states. It is exceedingly rich through oil and agriculture. As I passed along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and through the pretty towns of Galveston and Corpus Christi, I saw miles of cotton, rice, oil fields and cattle ranches. It was not uncommon in the U.S.A. to be asked where I was from and on saying “New Zealand”, to receive as a reply “Where’s that?” In Texas a young man, driving the latest car, asked such a question. Another common remark was “You speak good English”.

Joy emphasised that solo lightweight motorcycling was the best way to see the world when she was quoted in the Corpus Christi Caller, "Even if I had $1 million with me, I would have done it the same way" she said. "My idea was to go around the world and see as much as possible as cheaply as possible”.

Joy had wanted to travel further south into Central and South America but her research in London had indicated that the Pan American Highway was not yet passable. The notorious Darién Gap, a roadless and treacherous section between Colombia and Panama, was impossible to cross. Reluctantly she turned north after Mexico City to Guadalajara and El Passo. Arizona was one of the highlights of her tour. First the Meteor Crater, then the Painted Desert and then the Petrified Forest which she described as “Really wonderful, very real”. She spent from 1pm until it was almost dark riding round the rim of the Grand Canyon watching the spectacular views change as the angle of the sun moved. She spent the night at a camp ground. Next day she crossed the Colorado River and saw the Vermillion Cliffs before heading north over an 8,000-foot pass to Salt Lake City where she stayed for two days. 

Just after crossing the Bonneville Salt Flats as it was getting dark she had a puncture. It was October, there was snow on the ridges, and it was very cold so she spent the night in a culvert where it was slightly warmer. When it was light enough next morning she mended the puncture. She enjoyed a short visit to Yosemite but rode 270 miles that day which she thought was far too many for one day. “It’s just too much, it was really dreadful.”  She passed Lake Tahoe and on to Davis where she spent a week with her aunt, “Straightening myself out and getting clean again.” She enjoyed meeting her cousins, being shown around Sacramento and giving a talk to a local motorcycle club – after getting her shoes and “costume” cleaned. She was interviewed for the Davis Herald, not by a travel reporter or even the motoring editor,but by Mrs Edith Howarth the “Society Editor”. 

From Davis Joy rode north and was in first gear for most of the climb up a gravel road heading to the 5,000-foot Mendocino Pass when the Bantam stopped. She waited for it to cool, ate her lunch, changed the plug and had no more trouble. When she came out on the coast at Eureka a strong wind limited her speed to 25 mph. North of Coos Bay when she was too cold to continue Joy stopped, lit a fire and cooked sweet potatoes which she ate, followed by fruit and nuts. The autumn colours and picturesque farms almost compensated for the cold. Before crossing what is now the Lewis and Clark Bridge over the Colombia River her hands were so cold and wet the toll collector had to get the toll money out of her bag for her.

At Vancouver she went to Fred Deeley Ltd on Broadway Avenue, the last of the BSA agents visited on her world tour. It was only a courtesy call as the Bantam did not really need any attention, but the staff were very interested to hear about her ride and offered to clean the motorcycle. She boarded theOrsova on 26 October 1957 after riding 10,000 miles in North America. 

Joy arrived back in New Zealand on 10 November 1957 after being away for two years and three months, passing through 34 countries and riding 54,000 miles. She had spent a total of £740 on travel. She said, “Throughout the world I have had generous and efficient help from the agents of BSA, which has greatly helped to make the trip a success.”

Extracts from Joy McKean's diaries of her 1955 to 1957 world trip, as compiled by her niece Catharine A. McKean and following Joy's death, have been included with the permission of Catharine A. McKean's estate and Julian K. McKean as the trustee of Joy McKean's will. These diaries reflect the views and impressions of Joy McKean only and the language is that in use at the time her diaries were written.

Acknowledgements

Suzanne Barnaby

Geoff Clarke

Annice Collett, Vintage Motor Cycle Club 

Steve Foden, BSA Owners Club librarian

Lynda Goulden

Julian McKean 

Bernard Kerr

Liz Robertson

Jane Skayman

Heather Woods, New Zealand Nurses Organisation

References

McKean, C. Midwife on World Safari. Privately printed for the McKean family. 

Interview with Naomi Margaret (Joy) McKean, Date 21 May, 10 July 1984. Ref OHA-2175. Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand.

The Motor Cycle.

Trove. https://trove.nla.gov.au/

Papers Past https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers