1967: Burt Munroe, Downright Arthurian

May 21, 2021

By AHNZ

It’s anachronistic what that man did. Like some H.G. Wells fiction story leaping out of the book. A child of the Age of Steam who learned in childhood that airplanes had been invented and could fly. Burt Munroe (1899-1978) came of age during the Great War and that makes him one of what is called ‘The Lost Generation’.

Other ‘Losters’ had their prime in the 1920s and 1930s. Rudall Hayward made his films, Arthur Porrit ran his Chariots of Fire race, Arnold Nordmeyer rose and fell, John Mulgan and Robin Hyde wrote and then checked themselves out of life. Charles Upham retired to privacy, Jean Batten living as a recluse with her mother. By the late 1960s their time was up when Munroe’s was only just hitting the highlights.

It’s true that men of the same generation, though younger, were still active in 1967. However, these men used their mind or pulled strings: Gordon Minhinnick, Dove-Myer Robinson, Frank Sargeson, Keith Holyoake, Colin Scrimgeour.

Munroe on The World’s Fastest Anything on land was an old man from the C19th racing young men in their prime, and leaving them in his salty dust! This was not just mental, engineering, work but physical riding of the bike.

It seems as if this Lost Generation man thought it arbitrary that his time to shine was some 50 years previous with the rest of his batch. It’s downright Arthurian that a man who lit up the scene prior to WW2 would come back again in the Swinging Sixties as a contender then the winner. Munroe came from a culture where the usual procedure for a man his age was to sit on a rocker with a blanket on his knee but he didn’t seem to know about that limitation so it didn’t apply.

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Image ref. Burt Munroe statue, Invercargill; AHNZ Archives (2018)

Image ref. Hemmings.com

Note: Munroe famously set the under-1,000 cc world record, at Bonneville, 26 August 1967. This record still stands. Ref. Wiki

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