Barry briggs autobiography for kids

When asked what time he'd started, the boy replied 'Five o'clock this morning'. Stunned, and amused, the boss told him he'd be earning a good bonus at the end of the week, and wondered aloud what he'd spend it on. But the boy knew, and immediately replied, 'I'm going to race speedway in England. That boy was Barry Briggs, and it was just the start of his great adventure.

Briggs also created a domestic record by winning the British League Riders Championship for six consecutive years from —, representing the Swindon Robins. As a result of the accident, Briggs lost the index finger of his left hand, but returned inthen announcing in that this would be his last season but actually returning for another year with Hull Vikings, retiring for a final time in In retirement, Briggs became the mentor to many young riders who went on to race in World Finals including fellow Kiwi Mitch Shirra.

The dangers of speedway, too, were always working against the sport. Despite these dangers Briggo rose quickly to the forefront of speedway and stayed there for three decades. How did he find such great success so quickly? When things get really bad, can you handle it? And I played a lot of sport — rugby league, soccer and hockey every weekend.

Wearing no shoes was part of the deal. Phil takes up the story: "It was fun helping the guys from Thames Television piece together their tribute to Barry and, along with Junie and Murray, suggest who should figure on the actual show. The big problem was that it was live TV and they only had 30 minutes Even late the night before Briggs was due back from New Zealand they were still making changes.

I nearly drowned! Not only was Ivan an integral part of Barry's story, he had made special arrangements to get back to the UK 24 hours ahead of Barry. No way could Ivan be left on the sidelines. A very harassed scriptwriter had to go back to the drawing-board and Ivan's appearance was restored. Barry and Junie were away and the chances of him realising what was going on, which would have resulted in his programme being unceremoniously binned, were slight.

Barry had signed to ride for Wimbledon and the programme was scheduled for a week before the start of the season. We arranged for a private practice session for the Dons to be held at their Plough Lane stadium on the day BB arrived back. It was planned to shoot some film of sons Gary and Tony that morning and then drive them and Junie, who somehow managed to persuade Barry to let her come home a day early, to the London studio.

Barry is not the sort of bloke you can 'con' into doing things he doesn't want to do.

Barry briggs autobiography for kids

We decided that we needed a very special reason for keeping him at Wimbledon, when he was anxious to get home, and to explain why there were a number of TV outside broadcast trucks in the car park. We also told him that Thames TV wanted to film a preview to the speedway season and that was why the trucks were there. He did later confess that he was bemused by the TV units around but thought no more of it.