Kirsteen britten biography samples
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I, like any other red-blooded motorcyclist, have cultivated a long-held fascination for the work of the late John Britten.
I don't recall the first time I heard about or saw a picture of a V1000. I do remember that I experienced the same reaction most people have when they first encounter a Britten: "what in the almighty hell is that?"
This amazement was followed by an intense curiosity spurred on by the extreme styling, the gaudy colours, the elemental design. After the shock of the whole subsides, the strange little details suddenly pop into your periphery. The machine becomes more and more fascinating the closer you look. Just what is this strange, organic machine painted in bright blue and pink livery?
Then, inevitably, you learn how the Britten came to be: the condensed and mythologized story of a man in a shed in New Zealand building a world-beating race bike, one that had the performance to dance with multi-million dollar factory efforts - and beat them fair and square
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The Making of John Britten
Words by Felicity Price, author of the 2003 official biography Dare to Dream: The John Britten Story
CHRISTCHURCH CATHEDRAL WASoverflowing for John Britten’s begravning on September 9, 1995. A thousand people from all over New Zealand and some from the other side of the world filled the church and spilled into Cathedral Square, where they listened to the service on loudspeakers in the cold spring afternoon. John had died kvartet days earlier from inoperable cancer.
The service was led by family friend and Anglican minister Louise Deans, who said: “John told me he wanted a miracle to save him from death. I forgot to tell him he was the miracle.”
Andrew Stroud, who had ridden the Britten V1000 past the chequered flag many times, read from I Corinthians, and Mayor Vicki Buck, who had presented John with a special civic award just two weeks before, concluded her heartfelt eulogy with the thought that when John arrived at the Pearly Gates, he would sugges
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For reasons too complex to dwell on here, the writer of modern English church history is peculiarly reliant on biography, autobiography and memoir. Of old we knew to distrust people’s own accounts of their lives; memory sometimes plays us false. More recently we learned to suspect the conscious or unconscious construction of a life to give it coherence, a sense of purpose, even (in some cases) to cleanse it of its moral blemishes.
It is a particular perspective given only to biographers to observe the full extent to which a memoir matches the actuality of a life. Such was my experience when writing my book on Walter Hussey, Anglican patron of the arts. Hussey left a carefully curated set of papers, under the control of his successors as dean of Chichester, and kept by the West Sussex Record Office. But they have to be read in a state of dialogue with his memoir, Patron of Art.
Hussey retired to London from Chichester in 1977, to be nearer both to his closest friends and to the