The real cause of Brit bike demise?

Arthur Farrow emailed to add a point to what I wrote in the September Fixes about noisy Triumph timing gears. He says that an ex-meriden employee had told him that these were ‘selectively assembled’ at the factory, so all these years later, allowing for wear and possibly a few secondhand replacement parts, noise is quite common. Indeed, a friend of Arthur’s lost the sale of his Tiger 110 owing to buyers’ suspicion of the noise.

Arthur’s quite right and, bear with me on this, I’d even go so far as to say that this was probably more the cause of the British bike industry’s demise than the usual ‘bad management and lack of investment/ forward planning’ arguments. Why? Well, the output of human (rather than computer) operated machinery inevitably lacks consistency. While this provides an artisan-made feel that makes old bikes refreshing compared to today’s soulless transport, the downside of every bike having its own personality was that it was a lottery whether your new bike was a good ’un or a dud.

Fitters would selectively assemble the best match of minutely-varying parts, like timing gears, to achieve the smoothest running set. So while the Japanese worker reached for a part, fitted it and moved on, his British counterpart was still sifting through to find the best fit.

This was fine before World War II, when workers were poorly paid, but improved earnings made such labour-heavy methods financially unviable. The obvious answer was to invest in automated systems, but new machines are costly and automation would have resulted in unacceptable redundancies at a time when the trades unions held industry by the ball bearings. As a nation destroyed by war, Japan had no option but to build new factories with new machines – and, equally importantly, they had a burning ambition to rebuild their nation and they succeeded in that. Britain was literally stuck in the past with a demoralised workforce for whom ‘victory’ meant little more than years of rationing. Nothing’s ever simple is it?