BLUEY WILKINSON 
World Champion Speedway Rider 1939
Arthur Geoge Wilkinson was born in Millthorpe, New South Wales on 27 August 1911. At the age of four, Bluey's family moved to Bathurst. The home was at 14 Violet Street. He really considered Bathurst to be his home town. He was working as a butcher boy when speedway first started at the Bathurst Sports Ground in 1928. It was love at first sight for Wilkinson and he promptly gave up a rugby league career and invested his savings in a battered old belt driven Rudge.
On the Rudge, Bluey Wilkinson wasn't a world-beater, but when Sydney and international star rider Lionel Van Praag came to Bathurst, he loaned Wilkinson one of his spare bikes. In a battle of future World Champions, Wilkinson defeated Van Praag in a match race. 
 
In 1929, at age 17, he headed for England in an effort to be noticed by rich Speedway clubs. He rode in the lower divisions for three seasons before he was offered a contract by the West Ham Hammers and stayed with the London based club until 1939.
 
Wilkinson's 1938 championship win was considered a gutsy effort after he had actually broken his left collarbone in a meeting for West Ham the night before the World Final. Determined not to miss the final, Bluey had the Tottenham Hotspur club doctor put his arm and shoulder in plaster. He ignored the pain he was in to win his first four rides before finishing a safe second in his fifth and last to clinch the World Championship before a crowd of 95,000.
Bluey Wilkinson retired from riding in 1939 to become the promoter at the Sheffield Speedway.
 
After being involved in dozens of spectacular crashes during his speedway career and walking away from them all, Bluey was killed in a road accident in the Sydney suburb of Bondi on 27 July 1940. Riding a motorcycle with his wife Muriel as pillion he was struck by a lorry which had swerved to avoid a car. He was killed almost instantly with a fractured skull. Muriel survived the accident physically with only little more than a few cuts and bruises.
Bluey was buried in Bathurst.
 
In 2017 Inducted into the Australian Motor Sport Hall of Fame