INTERVIEW
World championship trials and motocross, professional speedway, multiple ISDT gold medals… was there nothing Big Arthur couldn’t do? In a word: No
Interview JOHN WESTLAKE Photography ARTHUR BROWNING ARCHIVE, JOHN WESTLAKE & BAUER AUTOMOTIVE
For most of us, having just one strand of Arthur Browning’s career would signal a life well lived. World championship trials rider, perhaps. That would be nice. Or maybe professional speedway rider. Or factory motocross rider. Or British championship grasstrack rider. Or nine-time ISDT gold medalwinning enduro rider. To have all of them, often with three strands happening in parallel, is bordering on other-worldly. And that, it turns out, isn’t all Arthur got up to.
Standing in his dining room as he rifles through photos beside me, I’m intrigued by a framed picture on the wall of Arthur on a Norton Commando. It stands out amid the shots of him winning things on various forms of mud. “Oh that,” he says dismissively in purest Brummie. “That’s when I was the Milk Tray man.” And he continues his photographic rummaging, conversation apparently over.
This, I’m learning, is classic Arthur – modest to a fault and genuinely incapable of recognising that much of his life seems utterly astonishing to the rest of us. Our conversation is peppered with interruptions from me blurting out: “Hang on Arthur, you did what?”
‘THE BACK WHEEL HIT THE EDGE OF THE RAVINE. THE BIKE FLEW OVER THE TOP OF ME’
“Yeah, I did a Cadbury’s Milk Tray advert, riding for them,” he confirms. “The people doing the filming went to Norton Villiers and asked for some bikes. Norton gave them two Commandos, and Dave George – the sales bloke who ran the off-road side – asked what they were going to do with the bikes. They said: ‘A bit of off-roading’, so he suggested me, and off I went.”
In 1972, the film crew flew Arthur out to the Spanish desert, where he was meant to do stunts on the Commandos. “But trying to ride them on rough ground was a bleedin’ joke,” he says. “They fell to bits. I had to do a jump, and every time I practiced it the footrests snapped. Also, they put these bloody great spotlights on and they ran the battery down, so you had to keep it revving or it would cut out.”
As if that wasn’t enough, in between stunts Arthur was in charge of rider training. “The bloke whose fizzog you see in the advert [the actual Milk Tray man, American actor Gary Myers] could hardly ride, so I spent two days trying to teach him to ride behind a car for a shot. He kept running into the back of it or stalling.”