Motorcycling in the 1970s Volume 3:: Funky Motorcycling! Biking in the 1970s - Part Two

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INTRODUCTION

This series of books is, in some respects, a love letter to motorcycling. It has certainly been written from the heart. I started riding powered two-wheelers in the mid 1970s, on a fabulous little 50cc ‘popsicle purple’ Yamaha FS1-E, and straight away I felt that riding set me free in a way that was not only instantly joyful, but also meaningful and somehow magically transcendental.

I was also aware I was stepping into a great, flowing river of history, and I was deeply glad of it. I quickly became as interested in motorcycling’s past as its present; hungry to find out about the fascinating machines and singular people that made motorcycling what it was, and had been. And I began to explore what it was that set motorcyclists apart from the majority and made biking so uniquely enjoyable. As an avid rider and reader, I became a student of ‘the sport’.

Those thoughts and feelings have endured for nearly 40 years now and while I still find motorcycling in all its aspects as boundlessly fascinating as did my teenage self, it is the period in which I plunged in and joined the flow, the time when I was at my most impressionable and when my mind was at its most absorbent, that still holds the greatest interest for me today. The 1970s. The time when I fell in love with motorcycling.

The first book is a general history, briefly told, of motorcycling in Britain from its beginnings at the very end of the 19th century up to 1969 (interwoven to an extent with two-wheeled goings on in the USA and elsewhere). It charts motorcycling’s pioneering years, skips through two world wars, tells of social acceptability in the 1920s, hard times in the 1930s and growing ostracisation and decline in the 1950s and 1960s. It attempts to make sense of the motorcycling world order, and of motorcycling’s place in society and everyday life, and sets the scene for the larger, more detailed volumes which follow.

Taken together, Books Two, Three and Four form a comprehensive, in-depth history of the bikes and motorcycling trends and events in the 1970s. They tell the story of the arrival of the superbike, the continuing and inexorable rise of the Japanese motorcycle industry and, partly from an insider’s point of view, the wasteful, lingering death of its British equivalent. They tell of the thrilling and extraordinary sporting machines from Italy and of the bulletproof BMW twins designed in Bavaria. They tell of motorcycling culture and of two-wheeled life and lives.

In the 1970s, motorcycling became a leisure activity in a new and exciting way, there were more motorcyclists than ever before, or since, and dozens of new and ever more fabulous and technologically advanced motorcycles crammed the showrooms every year. It was the time of Jarno Saarinen and Giacomo Agostini and of Kenny Roberts and Barry Sheene. The time of Bike magazine, of Motorcycle Sport and Cycle in the USA, of Mark Williams, Dave Minton and LJK Setright in his pomp.

I argue that although the protagonists were largely unaware of it at the time, the 1970s as a whole can now be seen to have been a golden era in the history of the movement, a pivotal decade which represents a high point in the history of motorcycling that is never likely to be matched.

The final book in the series, entitled ‘The Magic of Motorcycling’, takes a sideways look at the 1970s classic motorcycle scene in the second decade of the 21st century and explores what it is that makes motorcycling so special to so many people yet an anathema to a great many more.

And a series of appendices list nostalgic, amusing and sometimes poignant reminders of the life and culture of the 1970s, reminding us of the global goings-on and domestic backdrop underlying the motorcycling scene and, of course, all lesser matters.

Books Two to Five all feature a short chapter containing potted biographies of the interviewees quoted in the text.

Altogether, this gigantic and far reaching but, I hope, always coherent tome, is an attempt to make sense of motorcycling and celebrate its apogee in the 1970s. I have tried to set down a great many facts in a logical yet entertaining way and, as well as aiming to be informative, I have strived to connect with fellow enthusiasts and devotees at an emotional level, and also to convey to non-motorcycling readers something of what is wonderful and fascinating about powered two-wheelers.

CHAPTER ONE

FINAL COUNTDOWN

Although only a grey shadow of its once vital, vibrant pre-war self, Britain at the start of the 1970s was still a formidable industrial and manufacturing country. And the English midlands, with Birmingham at its centre, was its bomb pocked but still beating heart. Birmingham, Britain’s second city since the industrial revolution, and famous for brass buttons and guns, for electroplating and pens, for all types of machinery, for jewellery and for Cadbury’s chocolate, still supported a number of working mills and substantive smokestack manufactories sited along its busy thoroughfares, not least the village-sized BSA works on Armoury Road, Small Heath.

Homeward bound. BSA workers on Golden Hillock Road, 1953 (Birmingham University Archive)

The city’s once essential arterial canals, now still and inactive, lay filthy, foul, stale and stagnant alongside these plants, and Birmingham’s once vibrant railway goods yards no longer screeched and clanged and clashed with life as they once did, both by day and, under mighty arc lights, all through the night. Instead heavy flatbed lorries hauled up to factory gates, bringing raw materials; steel, coal, iron and copper, and strained and crunched away in low gear, laden with BSA motorcycles and other shiny, newly manufactured goods, bound for all corners of the country and for the new container shipyards in Liverpool, Southampton and Felixstowe.

The proportion of manual workers and their families in the British population in 1911 had been 75 percent. By the early 1970s it was little more than one in two, but people still worked with their hands in Birmingham. They made things. They worked in big factories. They worked down side streets in redbrick machine shops and single story workshops beside the canals and under the shadow of flyovers, where every inch of pavement was lined with their colourful parked cars.

In the rebuilt city centre, pioneering white collar workers toiled at their desks in cuboid concrete blocks. Where Hitler’s bombs and 1960s town planners had demolished epic Victorian industrial architecture, another form of brutalism had taken its place. De-industrialisation had begun. The 1970s would see an acceleration of it. The 1980s would see the process all but completed.

Change was overdue. British industry was too craft based; too inefficient and too labour intensive. There was too much machine shop work, too much bench work and not enough modern machinery or method. Machines glistened in oil, handles worn smooth by callused palms. Birmingham workers had quick hands and minds, they were skilled, and mostly hard working, they did their work well and did it better daily, but it was no longer enough.

Britain’s surviving manufacturing concerns, both large and small, were existing on borrowed time. Inky storm clouds were sweeping across British industry. In particular, a presage of doom hung over BSA’s Small Heath plant. Its light was fading, its future bleak. It was on the extreme verge of extinction.

SMALL HEATH

BSA factory, Small Heath. Armoury Road entrance, 1968 (Birmingham University Archive)

Small Heath comprised: workshops, tool rooms, power driven machinery. Barn-like, shadowy machine shops, yellowy electric light not quite reaching into their gloomy corners. Men at their machines with too much to do and yet able to do it. Urgent young men with luxuriant sideburns, bad teeth and sleek, bryllianteened hair, wearing smart blue cotton boiler suits. Loafing, goofy-toothed apprentices with shiny new steel toecapped boots on their outsize feet and whispy bumfluff and a clamour of acne on their chins. Small, heavily bespectacled, gone to seed, scurfy, grey haired old men in white shop coats, the tips of black or tortoiseshell plastic combs poking out of their top pockets.

At Small Heath too were neat, tweed jacketed, pensive, pipe smoking men from the publicity department and from the drawing offices who drove to work in hydrolastic Austins or Morrises, and primly unapproachable secretaries who click-clacked along endless corridors to deliver files or to take dictation, and gossiping, hair-netted, salt-of-the-earth women who perched on stools painting pinstripes on petrol tanks, and cheery beehived telephonists who took calls from the old empire, and bored-to-tears teenage wages clerks who pored over spoiled clock cards.

Made in Birmingham (Michael’s Motorcycles)

There were fearless test riders, there were cocky van drivers, there were packers and checkers and busy post room boys, there were beefy security guards and handy maintenance men, there were white-coated lab technicians, there were pin-striped accountants, there were painters and decorators and lavatory cleaners, there were plumbers and sparks and union conveners.

It was a place with a smithy, with jigs, with general machine tools from the 1920s, with filthy floors and blackened wooden work benches, a place of spinning handles, of filing, of hammering, of slide rules, of setting up and resetting and adjusting, a place of assembly by hand and checking by eye. There was the heat of the forge and the ring of the anvil, the thump of trip-hammers and the clank and smash of presses.

Sparks flew from lathes. Shafts spun in the roof. Men whistled and sang. There were breathtaking shock waves of hot vibrating air. There was a background of rhythmic banging, there was percussive crashing and there were fierce bursts of hammering. There was the low throb of antiquarian electric motors, the urgent beat of compressors, the shriek of cutters, the thrash and slap of belts, the shrill shock of electric wall bells, the punch of clock cards, the clatter and peck of typewriters, the deafening cacophony of the canteen, the monotonous, relentless, synchronous tick of the electric office clock, the hum and pulse of the machine shops, the intermittent hissing of the paint shops, the crackle and snap of welding and the dull roar and crackly futz of brazing.

BSA range brochure, 1957

There was the acrid stench of chemical vats and the acid taste of iron filings and heavy tang of steel were discernible on the tongue. There was blanketing, baking, leaden heat, there was oily mist hanging heavy in the atmosphere and leaving a smeary viscous film on all it touched, there was the clattery rattle of recalcitrant, cumbrous carts heaped high with components, propelled, swivelling by heaving hand or hauled by donkey engined truck, from shop to shop and just in time to the production line. Pat Slinn worked there.

Pat Slinn: Many of the floors were wooden boards, heavily soaked in oil. The ceilings were high and below them ran ducts and heating pipes that always seemed to be leaking hot water or hissing steam. Large enamelled steel light shades hung down on flexes. There were long corridors, the cavernous machine shops were noisy and there always seemed to be oil in the air.

Some of the machinery was unbelievable. There were whole machine shops where most of the production machinery was driven by leather belts from electric motors in the roof! One bank of machines used a common tank that held cutting fluid which was piped to the different machines by a pump driven by leather belt. The floor was always covered in cutting fluid. The heat, noise and the fumes at times in some of these departments was very unpleasant and, of course, it was dangerous.

There did not seem to be any order to the place. Old large copper water geysers heated by gas burners could be found every so often that were used for heating water for the workers to make their tea. BSA M20 engined Lister trucks were forever hauling raw materials or components in various stages of production from machine shop to machine shop. The hardening shops and the chrome plating departments were a long way from the machine shops and the experimental, developmental and competition shops were well away from any of the production areas, right on the other side of the factory.

In some respects this was good, as it was usually reasonably quiet, but when you needed anything from the production stores it entailed an extremely long walk, especially if you had to visit the frame department which was on the top floor. If I remember correctly you had to climb 115 steps to get there. One of the folk stories at Small Heath was that on one occasion 1950s trials and scrambles star Billy Nicholson rode his trials bike up the staircase to collect something, and then back down again.

BSA brochure, 1958

Small Heath was a violent, hellish place, a tumultuous, cacophonous and chaotic place, a thundering, deafening place. A coarse, manly place. A place of joshing and jokes on the production line, shouted above the din. A hard place. But it was also a purposeful place, a busy place; not a place for slackers. It was toxic and violent but also mellow, warm and familiar. It was a brutal place, but benign too. Somehow homely. Somehow human. To work there was to be part of a family. Pat Slinn had joined the BSA family when he was born, and he started working for the firm in 1958.

Pat Slinn: My father knew how much I wanted to work with bikes, but he decided a good grounding and schooling in engineering was the most important thing so unbeknown to me he had a word with the apprentice supervisor and arranged for me to start work at the BSA guns factory in Birmingham, so my first 14 months as a BSA apprentice was spent in the tool and model rooms at BSA guns.

I was taught to use a variety of machine tools including lathes, milling and shaping machines, drilling machines and a jig borer. I was also taught to braze and weld using oxygen acetylene. I had to attend Hall Green technical college one day and two evenings each week and I started an HNC mechanical engineering course. At that time BSA guns not only produced air rifles and high quality sporting rifles, but also the semi automatic ‘FN’ assault rifle made by the thousand for NATO troops.

After the first year we were allowed to choose a specialisation for the remainder of our apprenticeships and I asked if I could join the experimental and development department of BSA motor cycles at Small Heath. I got my wish but I had to wait another 12 months. I was sent to work in the foundry and forge but first I spent time in the pattern shop, helping to make patterns for prototype parts.

Just after I was moved again to join the press section the BSA management decided to close the pattern shop. They had decided that in future all pattern making would be contracted out. Some of the pattern makers who were there at the time were among the finest craftsman in the country; their skill in making patterns in wood was quite extraordinary. It was the first strange management decision I came across, and many more would follow.

I moved from the foundry to the press section to work in their tool room. They would hand finish press tools and once again I was amazed by the skills of some of the craftsmen. The engineer that I worked with was called Willy Wyatt. Willy could beat or bend a piece of metal into any shape you could imagine and the competition shop used to send their damaged oil and fuel tanks along to him to be repaired. I once saw him beat a single piece of aluminium sheet into a petrol tank. The only equipment he used apart from files and shears was a selection of self made dollies and hammers and some sand filled leather cushions.

The skills those guys had were absolutely outstanding and I learnt such a lot from them. I learnt how to bend steel and alloy and to beat and planish sheet metals to a given shape. Willy even taught me how to gas weld alloy. Many of those rare skills have stayed with me to this day.

Then one day I was told to go for an interview with Bert Perigo, who was BSA’s chief development engineer, and Bill Johnson. Bert had been a highly successful trials rider and was part of BSA pre-war history, and Bill had also been part of the 1930s trials team. They decided I had the necessary calling to work for them and I was appointed as one of two apprentices in the engine development department.

At that time the engine development department was a separate unit in a building that was part of the general experimental and competition shop. We had our own Heenan and Froud DPX dynamometers and I was trained how to use them. In the back of the building was British sidecar champion Chris Vincent’s workshop where he built and developed his A10 racing engines and gearboxes. It was also a repository for long forgotten prototypes, including the MC1 250cc GP racer that Geoff Duke helped develop and had hoped to race.

I worked with senior development engineers on a variety of engines. Some had a lot of money and resources spent on them but never became production models. More fruitfully, one of my first jobs was to work on converting a 350cc B40 motor to a capacity of around 400cc. The motor grew in stages until it was eventually a full 500cc. In 1964 and 1965 Jeff Smith won his two world motocross championships on a 440cc version.

It was during 1964 that the design and development staff from Ariel in Selly Oak was incorporated into the unit at BSA. Sammy Miller was given a bench in the shop where he mainly worked on his famous 500cc Ariel trials bike GOV 132, Clive Bennett, Ariel’s development and competitions chief also found a place, as did Ken Whistance, who I believe had been chief designer at Ariel.

Other outside personnel who were found benches and drawing boards at Small Heath at around the same time included Mick Bowers (Bonkey), who joined from Royal Enfield, and two-stroke wizard George Todd. It was at this time I came to understand a little about company politics and became aware of the bickering, petty jealousies and downright rudeness of certain people in the ‘new’ management structure of the development and design departments.

Slinn started riding at 16 and was soon riding bikes for the company, representing BSA in competition and at exhibitions at home and abroad.

1955 125cc BSA Bantam D1 with plunger rear suspension (Andy Tiernan)

Pat Slinn: My mum and dad bought me a 175cc BSA Bantam for my sixteenth birthday. It was, in fact, an old development shop hack that had been reconditioned. We collected it from the experimental shop and I was planning to go for a ride on it at midnight on the day, but in actual fact I nipped out a few days before my birthday. I soon discovered that it had a four speed gearbox! When the development shop lads had decommissioned it they deliberately left it in! The Bantam was traded back in a few months later and I was given a prototype C15 trials bike.

While I was still an apprentice I was asked by the export sales department if I would take a A65 Lightning and Watsonian Monza sidecar to the BSA owners club rally in Vienna, Austria. In their infinite wisdom, the BSA travel department decided the best way to cross the channel was by air from Southend to Rotterdam. I was presented with the tickets the day before I went so there was not much I could do about it. I drove off the plane in Rotterdam and motored down through Holland and into Germany.

I was pleasantly surprised at the performance of the Lightning. It had a lot of bits and pieces in the sidecar that I was taking to the Austrian importer so it was quite heavy, but it cruised at 80-85 mph all day on the autobahns. I then spent a lovely evening at a small hotel at the side of the river Danube and I thought how fortunate I was to be a BSA apprentice sent to Austria representing the factory.

The following day I decided I would continue on what, from the map, seemed a good mountainous road. I really gave that outfit some ‘wellie’ and abused it on the hairpin corners. But after I had arrived at my hotel in Vienna I found out that both wheels on the Lightning were about to collapse! A lot of the spokes were broken and others were very loose so I had to have the wheels completely rebuilt by the BSA importer before I could ride home.

1967 BSA Spitfire (Michael’s Motorcycles)

Another year I was asked to represent the company at a motorcycle show in Brighton. I was part of the team that was sent to fix the machines to the stand and help pack up afterwards. During the show we had to arrive in good time each morning to remove the dust sheets, replace the tank caps, reflectors, control cables footrest rubbers etc that would inevitably have disappeared the day before, and to polish the fingerprints off the bikes ready for the new day. During the daytime I was a member of the stand staff, answering questions from Joe Public and after the show we had to stay behind for an hour or so to act as security guards.

There were three of us in the team, and we stayed in a rather grubby bed and breakfast establishment in a Brighton back street. It was the pits. I later found out that the sales representatives were staying at a somewhat better establishment on the seafront and so it went on upwards from there, with each layer of staff and management staying at better and better places. The company directors stayed at a grand country hotel about ten miles from town. I know this because I had to take some tickets out to the hotel for the BSA/Triumph fashion show and I went there and back on a bike! A lesson learned in discrimination!

Before we set off for London I had been given an amount of cash to cover my meals and expenses, something like £10 a day. I found this to be quite adequate and when I arrived home from the show I filled out an expenses sheet and handed back the money that was left over. Within a very short time I was summoned to see the sales department accountant and told that there was a problem with my expenses. I protested. I told him they were definitely accurate and I had submitted receipts to cover all the money I had spent.

He said that was not the nature of the problem. Surely I had bought a newspaper each day? What about chrome and wax polish? Hadn’t I taken dealers to the bar and bought them food and drinks? (a strange one this, as BSA/Triumph had a free dealers’ hospitality room!). But I soon got the idea. I had not claimed enough! Everybody else had spent a lot more than me and if somebody in authority saw my expense claim and checked it against the others, it could cause a problem. Another lesson learned. How to fiddle your expenses. All part of my apprenticeship training!

BSA Small Heath, Armoury Road, 1968 (Birmingham University Archive)

By the 1970s the BSA factory was a place redolent of the past rather than looking to a brightly starred future. A place where off-road ace Bill Nicholson rode his bike up the stairs. A place with a showroom, a trophy room, a works canteen, a salaried employees’ dining hall and a management restaurant. A place that had a social club and an annual sports day. A firm that owned the houses on the other side of the street and whose workers lived in them. A firm that paid well and a place where 7,000 people had made motorcycles in the 1950s. A place once proud of its precision engineering. A place now stumbling, bumbling and inept.

BSA had become a business run by accountants not motorcyclists. People in the company with a love of motorcycles were largely not listened to. According to Dave Minton at the time, motorcyclists in Roland Jofeh’s management team were seen by the BSA big boss as dirty-fingernailed inexperts and enthusiastic amateurs who had no right to administer the running of a motorcycle company. Many of these motorcycle men left the company.

1968 BSA 650cc Lightning (Michael’s Motorcycles)

Veteran engineer Bert Hopwood, whose career had started at Ariel long before the war, stayed. He had long wanted to design a new range of bikes around a modular concept. Instead, an Ariel badged 50cc shopping scooter went into development. It would be a total disaster. And a new five speed 350cc twin, Edward Turner’s last hurrah, was announced as part of a huge new range for 1971.

Turner’s double overhead camshaft twin design was expected to be refined and brought to production by Hopwood (the role he had played for his old boss on many occasions since the 1930s) and also by Doug Hele. The sporty new middleweight would be built as both a Triumph (Bandit) and a BSA (Fury). The rest of the range was mainly the work of the group’s crop of bright young designers based at Umberslade Hall and would mainly comprise revampings of existing models.

Sales literature for the BSA group’s 1971 model range included the Triumph Bandit and BSA Fury, 350cc models powered by a double overhead camshaft twin designed by Edward Turner

The 1971 BSA/Triumph range had been announced the previous year with great fanfare and much expensive publicity both in Britain and in the USA. In October 1970 there were extravagant dealer and press launches in top London venues and expensive advertising campaigns were set in motion. Altogether there would be 16 bikes (more if counted differently) including Turner’s twin.

Think Big! BSA’s management did

Dealers were impressed. Big orders were placed. But it was all bluff and rather silly empty hope without substance. There was much tooling up at great expense, the advertising campaigns continued to run and parts books were drawn up and printed, but the twin never went into production and the factory was so badly organised and run it could only meet a fraction of the orders it received for its redesigned machines. The debacle cost the ailing group around a million pounds.

Pat Slinn: Sometime during 1970, BSA Triumph announced all their new models at a very expensive dealer convention held at the London West End