Confessions of a Motorcycle Instructor

Back in 2002 a mate wanted to do his full bike ticket and asked me to run him to the training school he'd chosen, as he'd be wearing full bike gear and couldn't drive in it. I agreed as I was a biker up until 1997 and was interested in seeing how learning to ride had changed since my day of a test consisting of a trip around the block on a GP100 as it was in my day. I got chatting to the instructor and we hit it off, so when it came to the road element of my friend's CBT he threw me the keys to one of the ER500 Direct Access bikes and invited me to come along for a laugh. Obviously I agreed as it'd been 5 years since I'd had a bike. When we got back to the compound the senior instructor was for some reason impressed with my riding and laid back attitude and made me the offer of being down trained as a CBT instructor giving newbies lessons, in both the classroom and on the road on our scooters and CG125s. For some reason I jumped at the chance as it gave me the opportunity to ride bikes and get paid for it.

Now time for a little description of what the bike school set up was like. Every other school had instructors that acted and behaved like wannabe police motorcyclists, even down to their choice of ex-plod BMW and Pan European bikes they used for lessons. We were somewhat different in being a school who were more interested in the fun aspect of biking and didn't take ourselves too seriously. When the call came out for marshals to assist on the annual Wirral Egg Run we declined due to not wanting to have anything to do with authority. The other main training school in the area had an after Egg Run family friendly get together at their premises involving bouncy castles and a BBQ while our effort was different, the senior instructor had a pub as well so we had an after run party involving a bawdy rock band playing while our girlfriends served drinks dressed in fishnets taking it in turns to dance in a cage... anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself so let's get back to the story. 

As I had yet to attend my instructor assessment course in Cardington I was only allowed to teach CBTs and our younger learners who weren't allowed to do Direct Access due to their tender age. Some were genuine bikers in the making but I also had to deal with scores of 16 year olds who knew it all and wanted you to finish so they could ride home on their scooter and suffer two wheels until next year when they could buy the Corsa of their dreams. A good 90% of these already had the machine control element pretty much licked before they got to us, the other 10%, mainly girls, were somewhat challenging to say the least. The number of times I asked the question can you ride a push bike only to be answered in the negative is more than I dare remember. 

One such girl, who I shall call Chantelle-Marie for the purposes of this story, was a particular pupil who illustrates this point perfectly. She came to us as she had a job offer and the DWP did/does have a scooter commuter scheme where if you had a firm job offer but public transport wasn't an option they'd bung you a new scooter, helmet and CBT to get you off the dole queue. She was utterly fucking hopeless. Both myself and the senior instructor tried to get her to stay upright on our Honda Vision without any great success. When we eventually got her to go in a straight line she'd promptly fall off to one side when she was told to stop. Undeterred I ended up running around the training compound in front of her getting her to aim for my arse! Sadly, she was distracted by one of our fence posts and, as your eyes are connected to your head, which is connected to your body which is in turn connected to your arms she made a full throttle beeline for said post uprooting it and writing off our scooter at the same time.

A little about the fleet we ran. To begin with we had, starting from the bottom up, a Honda Vision Met-In 50cc scooter, two Lifan CG125 clones, three consecutively registered Kawasaki ER-5s, an older blue ER-5 and finally a Kawasaki GT550 that was given to me as a company bike. The Vision was about as fucked as you'd imagine it to be as it spent its life being crashed on our compound every day. The two Lifans were a disaster, they were both W plated and even back in 2002 they both had totally fucked chrome and starter motors that refused to work. An unusual quirk of them was that they both had no less than three sets of foot pegs for some reason. Our ER-5s were divided into two groups, two were dedicated DAS learner bikes and of the other two one was a mint condition example used only for tests and the older blue one was used as an instructor bike.

Now let's talk about some tricks of the trade. A load of bollocks is talked by many instructors about if you're good enough to pass a test you're good enough to pass anywhere. This is total shit. Any test taken away from your local test centre should be treated as an "away match" with a greater chance of failure. Several times I've taken pupils to Chester, St Helens, Widnes and the like just because a punter has managed to get a short notice test only for them to come home with their tail between their legs and a quivering bottom lip just because they had no idea about the sneaky stop signs and slightly unusual junctions, so my top tip is stay local! Another thing to bear in mind is that we would always strongly advise you to book the 3.27pm test and turn up 20 minutes early, our local examiner liked to get home sharpish and he'd be more interested in an early dart than your rear observations! 

Now our local examiner was, and still is, a decent bloke. He hated working for the DSA and out of all the local training schools he had the best rapport with us as we were the only outfit that didn't claim that he used us to train his own kids which was a common lie told by other instructors. In fact for the record, his son was at the time 18 and had a Max Power Corsa with no interest in bikes and his 21-year-old daughter was a hairdresser who would cut her own head off before wearing a helmet. This lead to a few perks for us like when the examiner was given money to replace his helmet he'd buy one and sell it to us cheaply but the biggest perk was the Saturday morning scam. Part of his job was to visit training schools and observe us giving CBTs and we had an arrangement, we'd sign off that he'd been to visit us and he'd not bother to turn up and still get the overtime.

During my stint as an instructor, a police officer was killed when his ST1300 Pan Euro crashed into a truck. What this meant for us is that the DSA immediately stopped examiners using their DSA provided Pan European bikes for tests which meant that most, but not all (and I'll come to that later) bike tests were conducted with the examiner following in a car. Now because we had a decent relationship with our examiners we were often invited to 'ride along' with the examiner while he was testing our candidate. Now this was a perk only offered to us over other training establishments because we would never spend the 40 mins talking shop or DSA procedures but we'd listen to him moan about his job, talk about a plumbing course he was thinking of attending, make various sexist comments about our lady pupil's arse, you get the picture? All in all we managed to swing it for a few of our punters while in the passenger seat.

Now I've already told you about our local examiner so let's discuss the other two who were not only based in Chester and Widnes but used to cover our local test centre on holidays and overtime. This is a tale of two Daves.  Firstly there was Daffy Duck Dave, so called because of the Daffy Duck tie he wore to the office. He's the sort of prim and proper person who put his immaculately ironed hi-viz on to walk to his Mk. 1 Toyota Avensis and then fold it up on the back seat before getting in to conduct a bike test. I never knew him to ride a bike although he was a decent guy and friendly enough. He used to invite me along for a ride along although I never summed up enough courage to ask him why he drove his Avensis automatic locked onto second gear for the entire duration of a test.

The second Dave was someone we referred to as Dave The Cunt. He worked almost exclusively out of the Chester test centre and was unaffected by the Pan Euro ban due to being a BMW rider. An ex-military man, he expected candidates to be turned out in the right gear and for it to be clean and presentable which if I'm being totally honest was a higher standard than even us instructors managed! It was hard work to keep yourself from uttering 'Oh fuck, it's him' over the one way radio when turning up at a test centre and seeing his 1100RT parked outside.

Sometimes things don't go according to plan...  now your average CBT candidate counts down the days until his 16/17th birthday when he can finally hit the road. It's his/her first taste of independence and if you're 16 you can't wait to be signed off and collect your scooter and cause mayhem while a 17-year-old sees this as their first step to a full licence and finally getting that restricted SV650 or Bandit. In both cases, they're jumping up and down outside the gates before you get there in youthful excitement. Sadly for the instructor, whether he be a taxi driver or a publican it's just another day at the office and to be honest we'd rather be still drinking or tucked up in bed. Most of us are capable of conducting a CBT in our sleep and according to my then girlfriend, I actually did just that once! The DSA have strict guidelines on how long the off road compound element of a CBT should last but as this is a work of fiction and I'm amongst friends I'll tell you the truth and say it lasts as long until the instructor thinks he stands a sporting chance of passing a police breathalyzer. Sometimes things go almost well with both pupils having similar levels of ability and learning curves my I can assure you that this is rarely the case. CBTs were booked in where one guy was a 16 year old who'd been riding stolen scooters for years and positively romped through the compound work while the other punter was a lady who couldn't even ride a push bike and had zero balance.

Over the years a few incidents are burned into my brain, for example, the other instructor had a test scheduled and all went well until the test finished and the happy punter had passed their full A licence, all good so far but when it was time to return to base the instructor realised that his ER-5 had run out of fuel. No problem, give the pupil a pilly back and then summon help. I walked over to the test centre to recover the dry Kawasaki from what was then my home a few hundred yards away from the test centre with a can of unleaded but no funnel. Fortunately, the pupil had left their complimentary copy of Ride On, the magazine given to all newly passed riders behind the test centre wall so I made a cone out of it and filled the bike up.  Having no way of carrying the can back to base I left it behind the wall before returning the ER-5. So far so good. The other instructor then offered to give me a lift home which I obviously accepted and made a mental note to pick up the petrol can on our way back. We got back as far as 250 yards away from the test centre only to find the whole area cordoned off by the police due to a bomb scare at the test centre. Yes, a car examiner known as Grizzly Adams had seen my fuel can and as this was the week following the 7/7 bombings had decided to report it as a suspect package. Needless to say the bomb squad were less than impressed with his somewhat overzealous reporting...

Being a biker focused outfit as opposed to wannabe bike plod we were somewhat treated with disdain by the other training schools. One instructor decided to have a sign made saying "Advanced Instructor" stuck to his fairing, needless to say within 24 hours I had a sign made saying the opposite on the front of my bike.

Here's a handy tip. You'd think it was perfectly reasonable to ask what the pass rate at a school was right? Well, pass percentages only tell half the story. Other outfits would never dream of renting out a bike to a customer just to take their test on without selling them a full training course first, we'd happily rent you a bike under those circumstances. Whether the punter passes or fails isn't exactly our fault, is it?

Anyway, one such lad was taken to the test centre by myself and no further thought was given until after an hour neither him or the examiner had returned back to base. The time ticked away and I was getting worried when after an hour and a half both returned back to the test centre. It turns out that he was doing a double length test after a disqualification! He passed quite comfortably and our favourite examiner mentioned that the lad had been to his house several times before, no problem until the punter said he had to take an extended test because he was caught riding under the influence of drugs! Needless to say the examiner went home that night and quizzed his son about his mate's drug use and whether he was using himself!

One lunchtime back in 2005 I'd nipped over to Liverpool (on the boss's Fireblade) to collect some legal stationery, and as I was on my way back I noticed a couple of lads on sportsbikes having a hoon. Naturally, I joined in and much fun was had between the traffic lights and general two-wheeled delinquency. Eventually, we were getting close to the training compound so I backed off only to be surprised to see the aforementioned sports bikes pulling into our compound! Obviously, I was shitting myself that they were going to report me because the recognised the bike I was riding so I mentally prepared some bullshit excuse and followed them in. I took off my helmet and the senior instructor calmly said that "I believe you're already acquainted with your 2pm CBT". Yep, these two lads had been riding illegally for decades and now Merseyside Police had started getting themselves ANPR cameras they'd decided to finally get their full licences. The irony was that although both were highly skilled riders one of them took three attempts to finally pass the ministry test. For a non-judgemental training establishment like ourselves, the 2005 introduction of ANPR was a great moneymaking year for "teaching" learners who'd been riding for decades. Plenty of times we put hardcore 1%er riders through their tests with little or no effort required. Some of these fuckers you really wouldn't argue with so I was happy that they all seemed to pass without any issues. 

One Saturday I was taking a couple of pupils out for some general road work, nothing too taxing and easy money for yours truly. One pupil was a truck driver and the other was a recently divorced lady who fancied herself as a bike chick. We left the compound on time and headed over to the petrol station to fill the bikes up. After topping up I headed into the shop to pay and was greeted by an attendant that knew me a bit from going there in the middle of the night to fill up my taxi. The conversation went as follows...

"That girl you're teaching today has a great figure" said the attendant.

"Yeah but she's got a face like a smacked arse" I replied.

I then casually strolled back out to see her hunched over the bike crying. Yes, dickhead here had totally forgot that he was wearing his one way microphone and both pupils could clearly hear the conversation I had with the attendant.  The following two hours seemed one hell of a lot longer.

Another time I'd dropped a learner off for his test who I'd actually taught. Now this lad was fucking huge, complete with a moon pie face and learning difficulties but I'd managed to get him up to the required standard and was hopeful of a pass. 20 minutes later the examiner rode back into the test centre car park alone. Now that had never happened to me before but I was pretty certain it wasn't a good omen. Apparently, he'd got as far as the U Turn exercise and put his foot down, an automatic fail as he very well knew and then promptly got off the bike, took his helmet off, launched it over a wall and started crying! He was sobbing "I want Warren" at the top of his voice while seated on the kerb...

Let's talk about the police for a bit. Nowadays if you're a serving police officer and fancy becoming a police motorcyclist Merseyside Police will no longer train you to pass your CBT and full licence before training you up on their motorcycle traffic division, they only choose riders with a full motorbike licence. This, coupled with an apparent macho sportsbike riding on your day off culture of serving police officers meant that we always had a policeman or two going through our system at any one time. They could be neatly fitted into one of two groups. The first group was the perfect type of pupil, they listened attentively and were great at following instructions while the second group were by far the biggest bunch of know it all arseholes you could ever imagine, ironically serving traffic officers usually fitted in the second group and regardless of riding ability hated to be corrected on the proper riding procedures, especially off some scruffy fucker who they'd already made a mental note of to breath test them next time they saw me on the road.

Another issue that was personal to me was that they had a police traffic officer who loved picking on us taxi drivers. This prick took great delight in singling me out because he was the brother of our next door neighbour from hell who still goes out of her way to make my ex-wife's life a living nightmare. Now, this prick was keen on the "nothing personal, just doing my job and how's Alison (my ex-wife)?" attitude whenever he decided to visit our compound to distribute Bikesafe leaflets.  Obviously I never once bore a grudge and made him a coffee after rimming the cup with my cock... Ironically the only other time I've done that was to Anneka Rice and her glass of orange juice but that's another story. 

Now picture the scene. It's a sunny Saturday morning and I thought I'd take my two learners out for a little ride around rural Wirral. I find this lovely little country lane that's a dead end with no through traffic and as I'm due a fag break I decide to pull over and let my pair of newbies practice their U turns on our shiny, new and whisper quiet CG125s. all was going well until a pair of wrought iron electric gates silently opened and a bloke who looked like the chairman of the local golf club strode out with a face that nowadays we'd call "gammon" demanding that we take our lesson elsewhere or we'd feel the full force of the law upon us. Now being a responsible citizen I did just that. As an aside we had a display rack back at our base full of cheap motorcycle chains and locks which I most certainly didn't grab a handful of and chain his electric gates together that evening.
 
CorsaBoy used to work on the docks (Sounds like the opening of a Bon Jovi tune) and loved to tell us tales of collecting and delivering various supercars along with his stories of when he was a rally navigator and liked to tell us that he's buying an R1 when he breezes through his test despite us saying that he'd be better with a 600 Bandit. Undeterred, the owner of the training school was keen to move on his 2002 Honda Fireblade (after bodging the gearbox) and after finding out this info demanded that we give him first refusal. Now there was no fucking way we'd let him test ride it without either paying for it or at the very least passing his test first but to silence his whining I agreed to give him a pilly run on the back up the M53. CorsaBoy insisted that he wouldn't be scared by a bit of speed and requested that I showed him what the bodged Honda could do, fair enough. As it was a quiet Sunday morning I took him on the back at sane speeds around town until I hit the start of the motorway whereupon I then unleashed all 160bhp in all the gears (except the bodged third) until we ran up to about 160ish before looping a fast roundabout at junction 4 and then nailing it again of the homeward leg of our fast and very illegal test ride. After returning back to our compound I discovered to my dismay  that my arse was wet through, CorsaBoy despite his demands for speed had managed to piss himself and in the process piss over me as well. Lacking any excuse that would leave him any credibility he apologised and ate humble pie for the next two hours. Eventually after passing his test, first time in his credit, he bought a GSX600F and never spoke again about his tolerance of speed. 

Another lad I remember was a 20 year old that we called Marilyn due to his habit of wearing Marilyn Manson T Shirts. Now Marilyn had a few quirks. He was a diabetic who was into self harm but was gifted at IT and wasn't short of cash in his job of troubleshooting EPOS systems at supermarkets. He drove a 18 month old company Focus that he had picked all the foam off the steering wheel because it distracted him from cutting himself with a razor blade. Now Marilyn was a pretty good rider but for some reason he just couldn't get himself to get through the test much to our dismay. On his third and final unsuccessful attempt with us we rode back quickly to our training compound because his diabetes was playing up and he urgently needed sugar which shouldn't be a problem as he had left a Mars Bar in our office. Sadly Andy, the new owner of our school, had seen said Mars Bar and thinking it was mine had decided to eat it...

Another pupil we called Danny Six Tests due to how many attempts it took him to get through. Danny was a nice enough lad but he sure had his quirks. He had bought a 535 Virago in anticipation of getting his full licence and left it with us at our compound while he was learning and used to visit often to modify it to how he wanted it. Now Danny was resigned to never getting a girlfriend so he modified his Virago to being a single seat. When I say seat I mean some sheet steel covered in vinyl. Sadly his Virago shat its main bearings a week after passing his test so he pushed it to a local bike shop. When he was told how much it'd cost to fix it he asked the owner of the bike shop to buy it. Now obviously the owner of the bike shop wasn't really interested so for a laugh he offered £15 which Danny happily accepted. Obviously, this pissed me off no end as I'd have offered £20.

Warren T Claim