John Britten
Books
Zen and the art of motorcycle enterprise
by Bruce Ansley
JOHN BRITTEN, by Tim Hanna (Craig Potton Publishing, $49.95).
Tim Hanna's experience of a legend is byzantine. When John Britten died, Hanna was the writer initially approved by Britten’s widow, Kirsteen, to tell his story. He produced a book of almost 500 pages on the Christchurch engineer, designer, entrepreneur and businessman best known for his sculpted racing motorbikes. Britten was more than engineer, or designer, etc; he has been acclaimed as both visionary and hero, and this thick volume is testament to both.
Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this is more than a book about motorbikes. Bike buff Hanna explores Britten’s personality and quite a lot about the New Zealand character without so much as missing a cog.
John Britten was Christchurch to the core. He was wealthy, handsome, personable, largely self-educated. He loved machinery and a good time, although readers of this book might conclude that the two were mutually exclusive. The legend, in its bald form, has Britten seizing upon the idea of a world-beating motorbike, inventing it from scratch, building it in his garage and beating the world on a shoestring. It fits the New Zealand self-image of courage, enterprise and ingenuity perfectly and, combined with Britten’s death in 1995 at the age of 45, it is hardly surprising that he was virtually canonised.
Astonishingly, Hanna’s painstaking five years of research show it all to be more or less true. Not all the ideas were his own and the garage was pretty flash; nor did he make everything himself, but the execution was so brilliant that only the churlish would quibble. And he did take on the top manufacturers in the world and win.
Hanna does not overlook Britten’s peccadilloes. Britten may have been an original thinker, but it was his drive that made him successful and he spared no one, least of all himself. He grossly overworked the people who worked for him sometimes around the clock and whom he often, apparently, paid little or nothing, either in terms of money or respect. He frequently neglected to give his own workshop heroes credit for their achievements, although they were in large part responsible for his triumphs.
This led to a lot of gripes, faithfully recorded by Hanna, but nothing unexpected of someone working single-mindedly towards a goal and refusing to let anyone or anything stand in his way.
One side of the story, however, is virtually missing: the tensions within his own and his wider family. These are alluded to by Hanna: Britten’s father left almost the entire family fortune to John, and it passed in turn to John’s widow. Kirsteen, former beauty queen and model, is damned by faint criticism and receives scant mention. We are left to guess the sort of life his three children had with their driven dad. The reader knows all is not well – a former girlfriend briefly shared a room with the dying Britten in his converted stables home – but otherwise is left guessing.
Hanna’s is one of two Britten books now in the shops. The second was written by Kirsteen Britten’s cousin, Felicity Price. Hanna’s book went through three publishers. According to Hanna, Kirsteen Britten retained the power to vet throughout. He dealt in the end with the trustees of the Britten estate and says he made almost every change requested, although they were usually minor. Perhaps the acrimony between author and widow led to a degree of self-censorship. Certainly, it caused fierce public exchanges, Kirsteen alleging the book was long, distressing, biased and tall-poppyish, Hanna that she hadn’t so much as read it.
I have some personal experience of the difficulties. When publishers first pressed their suits upon the newly widowed Britten, one of them asked me to write their proposed book. On our first and only meeting, she said she wanted a story their children could be proud of, and insisted on vetting rights. I took this to mean that the story could not be told in the round. Fortunately, as it proved, she did not think me a good idea, either. She had found something disagreeable in a story I’d written in the Listener about John before his death (unusually, for most find their objections to be more than singular).
Hanna wrote the book, and he’s made a good job of it. His biography is probably Britten’s best epitaph; the legend is a good deal larger than the legacy. Britten left little tangible evidence of his genius. A motorbike in Te Papa is properly displayed as a sculpture (his bike business died after he did). His grand vision of a tram junction near Cathedral Square with its soaring glass room and intricate design is emerging, under another developer, as the faintest of echoes.
