WAY WE WERE
The usual wander down Memory Lane
‘RICK BOUGHT HIS BIKE AS SOON AS HE WAS 16 AND QUICKLY PASSED HIS TEST’
A This is my younger brother Rick and his friend Steve Bingham on their 200cc Triumph Tiger Cubs. Rick bought his bike as soon as he was 16 years old and very soon passed his test and got rid of the L-plates. The other picture shows Rick (aka Dikk) wearing his distinctive leather jacket. He joined the RAF a year later and his motorbike proved a welcome cheap and efficient form of transport to get home from camp some weekends and when on leave.
TIM MEADOWS
I was very surprised to see Neil Hickman’s classic jumper along with his Harrisframed Laverda Jota in November’s ‘Way We Were’. The dates in the article were a little confused, but I can confirm that Neil and the Jota were on the Isle of Man in 1980, as I was also there along with a few other friends from the Bournemouth area. I have included a photo of Neil – wearing that jumper again – holding a rock above the head of our friend, Martin. The bloodied handkerchief was as a result of Martin being hit on the head while we threw rocks off a bridge into a river (don’t we all do that?). The Moto Guzzi is my Le Mans, which I bought two years earlier. I recall chasing Neil on mad Sunday and getting the Le Mans weaving so badly I bought a set of Marzocchi Strada rear shock absorbers in an attempt to control the back end. PHIL SKINNER
These two pictures were taken in 1975 of a special I started building in about 1968. Having already had many single and twin-cylinder British bikes, the object of my desire turned to four cylinders. The only option at that time was an Ariel Square Four and, as I was already a Norton Dominator fan, the choice seemed obvious – build a special with the 1000cc Ariel engine in a Norton Featherbed frame. It was not as straightforward as building a Triton, and took me a long time to complete using a 1960 Norton Dominator 99 and a 1949 MKI two-pipe Ariel Square Four engine. But to look right the bike just had to have four pipes – I achieved that by using Paul Dunstall one-into-two silencers. But what to call it? Arton? Noriel? I eventually settled on Norsquare Four. On the road it had good torque up to about 60mph, but above that my Suzuki T500 was more powerful. PETER STEELE, NEWPORT, ISLE OF WIGHT
Dyer, on his James 98cc, taken about 1950/51 at Portishead, North Somerset. I remember this bike being buried in our garden cesspit in the late ’60s when it could no longer be repaired. The other photo is of his parents, James and Margaret Dyer, on a Norton combination – I think the picture would have been taken in London around the late 1940s. Any information on either of the bikes would be great. STEVE DYER
The James is a 1950 model registered in Bristol in June 1951, you can just see the elaborate transfer on the tank – for that year only it had a Dan Dare-type picture of a comet speeding through the firmament. The Norton looks like a 16H model, registered in Canterbury in 1936. The sidecar says ‘Weymouth’ on the front which isn’t a model I know; perhaps a souvenir of a holiday! Cheers, Rick