May 19th
T. E. Lawrence dies after an accident on his Brough Superior near his home in Dorset. Having changed his name twice to escape the nightmare of his enormous fame, Lawrence of Arabia was 46 years old.
New York State Trooper Lenny Bauer begins his attempt to break the motorcycle cross-country record of 45 hrs 41 mins established by Tibor Sarossy in 1968. Delayed by traffic twice, the attempt failed by just 28 minutes.
"The Motorcycle Diaries" features at the Cannes Film Festival.
This is the story of the extraordinary journey which Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Alberto Granado took through Latin America on a Norton 500. Reviled by the ignorant as a "lefty woke commo", Che Guevara is revealed in the film based on his book as a deep and thoughtful soul.
Filmed in 1968, "The Girl on a Motorcycle", starring Alain Delon and Marianne Faithfull, is released on DVD. Marianne Faithfull plays the character of Rebecca, and the book on which the film is based, La Motocyclette, is inspired by the life of Anke-Eve Goldmann, a close friend of the French author. Tall and shapely, Goldmann was quite famous in motorcycling circles in Europe in the 1950s and 60s as both a competition rider and a multilingual journalist for Cycle World, Das Motorrad, Moto Revue and many others.