One of only 3 extraordinary women who achieved the Gold Star in Brooklands for completing a lap on a motorcycle at over 100 mph averaged speed, (on a 350cc single-cylinder Norton), Theresa Wallach
Born in 1909, Theresa Wallach went motorcycling against the not unreasonable wishes of her parents, and she won a scholarship to study engineering in 1928. She was half of a team that rode from London to Cape Town in 1935, but that's another post some other day. She wrote a book about it, "The Rugged Road", and though no photos were known to exist, her teammate's slides were discovered by accident in Jan 2018, and sold at auction During WW2 she served in the Army Transport Corps, first as a mechanic and later she became the first woman to be a despatch rider in the British Army, where she served for 7 years. After the war she rode across the US, Mexico, and Canada by motorcycle, with a sleeping bag and full saddlebags, travelling some 32,000 miles in the process. The tour lasted for two-and-a-half years and was funded on the long trek by stopping and taking 18 odd jobs – everything from airplane mechanic to dishwasher – just long enough to earn enough money to get ba...
