Janet Cox – 25 December 1955-19 January 2025. – WIMA’s first member to be awarded the Ellen Pfeiffer Award.

1Janet Cox 25 December 1955-19 January 2025 – Sheonagh Ravensdale

Janet grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire, and went to University of Sussex to do a Science Degree – from memory, Chemistry and Biology.  She was the first member of her family to go to University.  She did a variety of technical jobs, combining these with a love of motorcycling, travel, cinema and music (the latter two the more obscure the better!).  Here are my memories.  Other memories from some of her closest friends follow on from mine. 

Many of us have known Janet for decades in WIMA.  She, Anna Zee, Katy O’Rourke and Jennifer Killen (who much later became President of WIMA Australia) all met at the beginning of the 1980s at the Women’s Motorcycle Workshop that Anna ran for many years in London.  We went to our first WIMA GB rally at Tinkers Park in Sussex (in 1982 I think) and were all disqualified in short order from the Best Turned Out Bike and Rider – we were scruffy and our bikes were even scruffier.  It didn’t help that Anna’s partner Jim joined us in the line-up…

Janet’s bike of choice in those days was a Yamaha RD400 and it was on this that she headed overseas to the 1983 International Rally in the Netherlands, together with Anna, Jim and myself.  1984 we all went to the Swiss rally and in 1985 Janet and I were the only two British participants at the Swedish International.  However, because we had smelly two-strokes, we were made to ride at the back of the parade which went past the Royal Palace.  I was on my Suzuki T500 which ran out of fuel in a deserted industrial estate – Janet had to go off to find a petrol station and blag a can of petrol.  Then in Hamburg Janet’s RD broke down and the RAC told us in an expensive phone call that if we could get to the ferry, they would recover her from Harwich to Paignton.  However, with no help in Germany, we had a long push to the port.    We used to break down so frequently that we joked that the next time, the RAC man would say “Hello Janet/Sheonagh what’s the problem this time?”  We skipped 1986 and 1987 was in Derbyshire organised by Anne Gale.  Our tents collapsed in the torrential rain and so we suggested to Jennifer Killen that she organise a rally in Australia where the weather would be better – 2000 seemed a lifetime off, so Jennifer agreed… and Anna, Jim, Pat and I went to that rally.

1987 was also the year that Janet and I took sabbaticals from work and flew to Bombay (now Mumbai).   My army brother was studying at Wellington College down in the South and we thought it would be fun to get a bike and ride down there.  Jennifer told us about an Indian racing rider at the TT, so I got his address off MCN and banged off an airmail letter asking him if he could sort us out a bike, omitting the fact that we were two women.   We duly turned up in Pune to his consternation, but his brother ran a bike workshop and soon we were off on the road south on our Rajdoot 350 (RD 350 made in India).  It was unbelievably uncomfortable two up, but we were young!  We had a map of India which had main roads on it and an out of date copy of Lonely Planet India.  Crucially we had Janet who was not only much more mechanically adept than me, but also had an unerring sense of direction, which was fortunate in the days before GPS and the internet.  Over the next six weeks, we rode down to Goa then inland to Hampi and then south to Mysore where a cockroach ran over my face in the night and people fiddled with everything moveable on the bike when it was out of our sight.   A terrible mechanic made things worse and we were eventually hoisted into the back of a truck for the journey up into the Nilgiris to Ootacamund – or Ooty, where we luckily found a super mechanic.   Too many stories to relate here but we rode on down to Cochin and Trivandrum where Janet navigated our way out of this huge city by the sun as there were no roadsigns… Over to the east coast to Madras (now Chennai) and Mahabaliporum, where we declined the offer of being extras in a film as they wanted us in our swimsuits…and finally back to Pune by train to drop off the bike.     I had to fly back to work but Janet sneaked off to Kashmir to do some skiing.

More bike adventures followed – by now Janet had hooked up with Ian – until in October 1992 she had a catastrophic bike accident on her FJ1200 on the way to work – not her fault and the man in the white van was never prosecuted.  Several months passed in the spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville till she was fit to go home in a wheelchair, paralysed from the chest down.  Ian converted the house for wheelchair use and slowly Janet picked up the threads of her life.  Ian reminds me that Janet also learned to drive a car at this point, having only held a bike licence until now.  Also that she went back to work at Thorn EMI around nine months later, testing and repairing circuit boards. There were still a pile from before the accident that no one else had been able to fix, but she soon got it sorted! 

Ian and Janet bought a sidecar and continued to ride to and camp at WIMA International Rallies, They both, plus Anna and Pat, also joined the group tour Yuko and I organised for 28 European WIMAs including Ellen Pfeiffer to go to Japan, and the launch of WIMA Japan.  

Over the years, Janet (with Ian)  did adaptive skiing and sailing, plus snorkelling in the Caribbean with her mum.  All these trips were physically challenging to countries where allowances for disability were unknown.  In short, nothing stopped Janet and when the Ellen Pfeiffer Award was introduced in 2004, there was universal agreement that Janet should be the first recipient for her courage and determination to live life to the full.  She inspired us all.

Fast forward to 2012 and Janet told Pat and me about a new charity in the UK called The Bike Experience, founded by Paralympian Talan Skeels-Piggins.  It offers disabled riders the chance to ride again on specially adapted bikes and Janet decided it was time.  And 20 years after her accident she did just that – Pat and I went along, trained as “launcher” and “catcher” and Janet took off round the airfield at Odiham, in atrocious weather.  A few months later, she rode at speed round the Castle Coombe Race Track – mission accomplished.  (They always need volunteers, so if the idea appeals…. give it a try!)  You need a high level of trust as a rider that you will be safely stopped, and the “catcher” needs to trust that the rider will stop! A disabled rider without the use of their legs has their knees and feet taped to the bike – imagine!  Janet was one of the first if not the first woman to do this training – other riders have gone on to get their racing licences since, and the charity now even trains people with disabilities who have never ridden a bike before.

Janet lived quietly in West London for the last few years, but never lost her interest in the world and the activities of her friends.  She was a keen horticulturist, maintained an interesting garden and pond and was always our go-to source of knowledge when we sent a pic of an unknown plant or flower.  Visits to Kew or Wisley or stately home gardens were always an education as well as a chance to catch up.  Janet’s wit and wry sense of humour kept us entertained all the time we knew her.  Many of us WIMAs will have our own memories, from decades back.  RIP.   

Anna Zee’s (ex Chair of the BMF and ex-President of FEMA) and partner Jim Freeman (current Chair of the BMF) add their memories here:

After University, Janet moved to Carshalton to work for the Medical Research Council as a Lab Technician and when she left, they gave her an electric kettle with a dedicated plaque! I’m not sure what that says about Janet or the MRC!  Carshalton was where she swapped her blue CD175 Honda for a white RD 400. She more or less wrote it off in an accident, late at night going to a party, with a young man on the back, breaking her leg – there may have been an unconsumed bouteille down the front of her jacket, which survived the incident!

I (Jim) rebuilt her bike. I distinctly remember collecting it with Janet, leg in plaster, on crutches, from the police storage. Anna helped me with the rebuild, though ever after it had a slight problem with the left hand exhaust to silencer connection. Janet became an expert in the application of tomato tins and hose clips 🤣. She was a very practical motorcyclist, especially with Anna as her mentor.

From Carshalton, Janet went to work for STC in Paignton, Devon, before returning to South London to work at STC’s Greenwich Tunnel facility, all of it on fibre optic development.

Janet, Sho, Anna and myself went to many events, all WIMA, across Europe, all on various 2-strokes, Janet on her RD and the rest of us on GT/T 500 Suzukis; they might have been smelly but we certainly did the journeys!

Later still Janet, between tech jobs, worked with me as a courier in my company Swift. Her sense of direction came to the fore! Not too long after, returning to lab work, just after the WIMA rally in Berlin, which she attended with Anna, she was riding into work when she suffered her life changing accident.

Later still, I remember her being piloted by Ian in the FJ sidecar; Janet had nerves of steel… But also joining Ian, myself and Rowena Inzani*, another WIMA stalwart, on a snowmobiling holiday in 1999 in Caribou, Maine, USA, to celebrate Anna’s 50th anniversary. Janet took to ‘sleds’ (snowmobiles) like a ‘duck to water’. They were powered by 2-stroke 2-cylinder motors, very much like her favourite motorcycles.   Janet Cox, a woman of respect, her friends loved her, and we will miss her.

*Rowena was for many years WIMA GB Newsletter Editor and Janet was the dispatcher at the same time – ie she collected the large pile of printed newsletters, put them all in envelopes, stuck the stamps on and posted them.  Rowena also built the first wimaworld website.

Anna, Ian and Rowena also have vivid memories of the USA snowmobiling trip:  The guide picked them up at the nearest airport and looked a bit dubious initially at Janet in the wheelchair and Rowena with her dangly earrings and dyed red hair… However a couple of days later, Janet was doing 90 kph along the railroad track…  she had to be strapped to the snowmobile as she couldn’t hang on with her legs and there were some hairy moments when the going got rough. Her lightweight travelling wheelchair was tied on at the back!

Ian finishes with: we did several long-distance trips including New Zealand for our 50th birthdays.  We also took the sidecar to the Finland rally in 2000 and carried on via the Arctic Circle through Sweden and Norway.  Around 6,500 km, camping along the way, riding a home-modified sidecar, with a bunch of maps and a toolkit, but no breakdown cover as it wasn’t available for sidecars, and no mobile as they didn’t work in Europe in those days – hoping it would all be ok…. And it was.

Janet was indeed a worthy recipient of the Ellen Pfeiffer Award.  Dear Janet, We miss you – RIP.