Motorcycling in the 1970s Volume 1:: A Brief History of Motorcycling from 1887 to 1969
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About this ebook
'Motorcycling in the 1970s' is a series of five books about motorcycling. The books are designed to be read together, but can also be enjoyed separately.
Read more from Richard Skelton
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Motorcycling in the 1970s Volume 1: - Richard Skelton
DAWN
BEGINNINGS
When the Motor Car Act of 1896 famously dispensed with the obligation for a man to walk in front of all mechanically propelled road vehicles carrying a red flag, and simultaneously tripled the British speed limit from 4mph to a heady 12mph, there was no home motorcycle industry to take advantage of the fantastic new freedoms this afforded. In fact, a prototype designed by inventor, engineer and former soldier Colonel Henry Capel Holden is the only British built petrol motorcycle definitely known to have existed at this time.
Holden, 1897
The following year, eight fledgling manufacturers exhibited bicycle based prototypes at the Stanley Cycle Show in the Royal Agricultural Hall in Islington in north London, but in 1900 there was only one motorcycle exhibitor showing its wares under the giant, arched and riveted cast iron and glass paned roof of the Islington venue, and there were quite possibly as few as 20 motorcycles being ridden regularly on British roads.
In the late Victorian era, the invention of the rear freewheel and the universal adoption of pneumatic tyres led to a cycling boom but tricycles were seen as the type of lightweight motorised vehicle most likely to take off (quite literally in many cases), rather than motorcycles.
Butler motor tricycle
Edward Butler had built the first three wheeled British effort in 1888 but by the end of the century it was French-made three-wheelers that dominated the scene. Usually of short wheelbase, the most favoured layout of these new-fangled contraptions featured a rudimentary engine mounted somewhat unwisely on a common axle behind a pair of spindly rear wheels, and with a single front steering wheel controlled by a tiller. Inherently unstable even on smooth surfaces, these unfortunate and ill conceived devices lurched, pitched, bobbed and bucked abominably on Britain’s dusty and rutted roads.
The 1896 Emancipation Act had been a surprise. There were more than three million horses in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. The use of horses was deeply set in British culture and they were used extensively for work and pleasure as well as for personal and public transportation. Breeding, housing and managing the domesticated horse and the manufacture of carts and wagons and equine accessories and equipment provided a source of income and employment for many.
Britain was a horse riding nation and its roads were the trading and fighting routes of its ancestors. The country’s magistrates and MPs were horsemen and traditionalists; motor vehicles were not popular in the corridors of power and this put the pace of British motorisation a little behind that of many countries in Europe.
The British motorcycle industry had been born but it was yet to flourish. Even pedal cyclists were ‘cads on castors’ who were stalked, trapped and fined for speeding and, according to pioneer motorcyclist Basil Davies, the new-fangled cars and motor bicycles were monstrosities that offended both the establishment and hoi polloi. They ‘...bluntly demanded the same road rights as the horse and the pedestrian. They smelt. They were incredibly noisy. They dripped oil. They stirred up the dust’.
The horses weren’t keen either. Davies, who would go on to become both a Canon in the Church of England and a much respected motorcycle journalist writing under the pseudonym Ixion, recalled that his village vicar used a trap pulled by a portly pony to visit his parishioners. ‘Ponies, for the first time in their lives smelt the odour of burnt hydrocarbons, heard the whistle of open compression taps, the staccato of exhausts, and sighted small projectiles approaching at 30 miles an hour, ridden by dusty demons wearing enormous Paris-Madrid goggles.’
According to Ixion, the vicar’s wild eyed pony ‘...went stark staring mad. It reared up like a stallion mustang, it spun round and bolted in the opposite direction’. Motor vehicles kicked up dust which ruined clothing and blighted the landscape, and pioneer motorcyclists were loathed by pedestrians and hated by town horse bus driver and country squire alike.
EDWARDIAN MOTOR BICYCLING
1910 Douglas 350cc, 2.75 hp
(Andy Tiernan)
In 1901, a remarkable 115 motor bicycles were exhibited at the Stanley Cycle Show and the following year 214 were shown. The machines were primitive and crude as inventive engineers struggled to find ways forward. Innovative cycle manufacturers led the way but the conversion of bicycles was not a simple matter; ready-made parts were hard to find, and the patent office was being kept busy registering engine and carburettor designs and defending them against plagiarists. Most of these early motorcycles had foreign engines including De Dion, Minerva (whose engines were fitted by Triumph, a British company founded in Coventry by a German) and the Belgian Kelecom.
Minerva
At this time motorcycle manufacture was, as yet, an unborn industry and in Ixion’s view, petrol engines and the two, three and four wheeled contraptions powered by them were merely ‘...amusing scientific toys for wealthy amateurs’. Car drivers were no more accepted than motorcyclists. Motoring was ‘...generally considered an absurd and perilous hobby adopted only by lunatics with too much money...’ ‘...The men wore black leathers, huge gloves and enormous goggles, and, in winter, ridiculous coats of China goatskin. They were normally smothered in dust, which a shower of rain rapidly converted into mud. Their cars shook and rattled. The daily press recorded how they caught fire or got out of control down hill’.
In the first years of the 20th century the French, Italian, German and Americans were fortunate to have main transport routes already being purpose-built for the motor car but Britain’s roads were truly terrible. Often no more than meandering tracks and footpaths widened for the horse and cart, they were narrow, dusty, bumpy, pot-holed and overhung by trees. Livestock was driven along them and horse drawn travel was largely a leisurely affair. The caddish cyclists were generally the fastest users.
Britain’s roads were made from water bound macadam. Loose stones, broken into pieces at the roadside by labourers with hammers, were stuck together and covered using a muddy water-based paste. More than seventy years later, First World War Lieutenant Colonel Claude Bowden recalled his days as an Edwardian motorcyclist ‘...when ancient stone crackers could be seen beside their pile of cracked stones peering at one through slits in their leather eyeshields’.
The roads were heavily rutted by cart and wagon wheels, corners were especially chewed up and repairs were carried out only when absolutely necessary. Progress on unsprung, boneshaking, top heavy, clutchless motorcycles with smooth or barely treaded tyres was uncomfortable and often downright dangerous. The roads were also covered in animal dung, and as motorised traffic increased, gritty, grey dust from stones and decaying faecal matter became a terrible problem in dry weather. Great plumes of dust rooster tailed skywards behind each passing vehicle and, subsequently, a smoggy brown cloud of muck would hang in the air for up to an hour.
On a ride from Cornwall to Surrey in 1902, Ixion called in on friends but felt unable to enter their home. ‘I was in an indescribable condition of filth, filmed deep from head to foot with the loathsome powder, of which pulverised animal droppings were a substantial ingredient. My eyes, ears and nose were full of it. I could not have sat down on any upholstered chair without fouling it.’ Rain kept the dust down but filled potholes ‘...with a nauseating liquor, owing some at least of its colour to the incontinent horse’.
Wet weather turned Britain’s unmetalled roads to filthy mud. Drive belts slipped, engines raced and spark plugs disintegrated. In small towns, cobblestones were commonplace and wood paving was used in cities and wooden blocks or setts were deployed in industrial areas to prevent sparking from horses’ hooves and to reduce noise. These surfaces were slimy and lethally slippery when wet.
Various unsuitable and incongruous ideas were explored before the motorcycle’s standard layout was decided upon. The French Werner brothers achieved early sales success but their towering, top heavy design was far from perfect. The engine was located over the front wheel which it drove via a twisted belt and their motor bicycle was, according to Ixion, ‘...the champion skidder of all time’.
Ixion once watched a Werner mounted pioneer come through his home town on a wet day. ‘He skidded and fell heavily, as well he might, for the machine was very tall and carried all its mechanism on a small platform above the front wheel, while his tyres were virtually bald. As soon as the machine lay flat, it caught fire and burnt furiously.’
Author Roy Battson began his motorcycling experiences on his brother’s 1904 Minerva. In a memoir in Motorcycle Sport magazine in the 1970s he recalled it had had an enormously high frame which carried a little inclined engine clipped to the front down tube. Below the crossbar was fitted an extremely narrow and deep underslung cupboard which contained petrol, oil and a battery and sprouted sundry small control levers with wooden handles. The saddle was mounted on a swan necked pillar.
‘Such drive as existed was, of course, by belt, over a microscopic engine pulley to the rear wheel and there was, thoughtfully, pedalling gear, though it is true that the riding position for this exercise, with the saddle aft of the rear spindle and the pedals nearly two feet further forward, did not give the best mechanical advantage...’
Minerva 1904
‘...To start, it was first necessary to unstrap, from the back of the saddle, a small metal pyramid, where it did duty as a carrier, and swing it down to ground level when it became a rear stand; the machine was then pulled onto