Scramble ace ‘Badger’ Goss dies aged 80
by Roger Guttridge
Tributes have been pouring onto social media following the death on January 6 of Blackmore Vale motocross legend Bryan ‘Badger’ Goss. He was 80. Bryan was born at Yetminster on September 11, 1940 – during the Battle of Britain, hence his middle name, Winston, after wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It was also at Yetminster that he acquired his ‘Badger’ nickname. His lifelong love affair with motorbikes began early, and before he got his own, he used to ‘badger’ fellow villagers for a go on theirs. The habit led to one of his friends calling him ‘Badger’ and the name stuck. His first bike was a 197cc Ambassador, which cost the teenager £40. Badger entered his first motorcycle scramble soon after his 16th birthday. Perhaps inspired by grasstrack star Lew Coffin, another Yetminster resident, he also tried his hand at that discipline but crashed heavily at Exeter and broke his leg so badly that he was out of racing for a year.
‘I vowed to stick to scrambling from then on,’ he later recalled. In 1959 Badger Goss became a works rider for Cotton and promptly beat some of the region’s best competitors to
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register five race wins during a memorable afternoon at Ham Hill, near Yeovil. After Cotton failed to capitalise on his success, in the early 1960s he let Greeves, a leading works team from Essex, know that he would like to race for them.
The move kick-started the heyday of Badger Goss’s illustrious career. The 1960s were also the era of scramble meetings at Bulbarrow, which helped Badger to become a sporting hero in his own backyard.
To his surprise, they offered him a £25 retainer – a moment that Badger later described as a ‘dream come true’. ‘It was everyone’s ambition to race for Greeves at that time,’ he said.
A generation of Blackmore Vale folk can still remember the sight of Badger and his rivals, such as brothers Don and Derek Rickman, flying over the jumps on the spectacular hillside course. In the mid-1960s, Badger switched his allegiance again, this time to Husqvarna, a Swedish company, who would provide him with some of his greatest triumphs.
