ME AND MY VELOCETTES Andy Barrett and his collection of Velos inherited from his grandad
The family motorcycling gene took time to activate in Andy Barrett, but now it has, there couldn’t be a more passionate young man to be looking after the late Ralph Seymour’s personal collection of Velocettes
To tag 29-year-old Andy Barrett as a ‘collector’ is probably a little wide of the mark. He’s actually the custodian of what was once the personal property of his late grandfather Ralph Seymour, the well-respected Velocette specialist dealer and tuner from Thame, near Oxford. Andy inherited the precious family heirlooms in the form of several very desirable Velocette motorcycles, associated spares stock and copious memorabilia. But he’s no different to any other collector we’ve met, in his passion for classic motorcycles – and Velocettes in particular.
When Ralph died in 1994, Andy was only four years old, so he never got to know his grandad. Andy’s mother kept his business ticking over until she passed away in 2009. Until that point, Andy reveals he’d had little interest in the family business.
“I was never into bikes for years,” he admits. “I was around it all the time and even bought an AJS Regal Raptor in 2008 when I was 18. But I only got that because my mates convinced me it was a good idea. I rode it for five years and was surprised how reliable it proved, despite the abuse I gave it. I was still at school at the time, held back a year because I failed all my exams.”
After his mother passed away, Andy finished his schooling and stepped straight into running the family business! He says: “By then the shop was only selling parts and doing a few restorations, so when I went there it was with a plan to clear everything out and sell off the business, while scouring the workshop for Ralph’s personal bikes, relevant spares and paperwork to keep within the family.”
But Andy’s interest in two wheels had been awakened. “It was shortly after mum died that the motorbike thing finally clicked with me. It was like a big light bulb suddenly being switched on – and I’ve no idea
what triggered it. Maybe her death made me realise just how much our family was in involved in motorcycling. I suddenly felt myself drawn into researching all the history of our family and it was all about bikes. History had always interested me at school, but this was personal.”
Business wasn’t great, however. “The shop was barely making any money. The rent and rates were taking up any income, so I had to work part-time in the evenings at Pets at Home to get any kind of living.”
It took its toll. At the age of 23, Andy had a nervous breakdown. “My mum died when I was 19. My dad was lost without her. I saw my nan daily to make sure she was OK. I was trying to sort the business and, on top of all of that, my own relationship ended. I took six months off, saw a therapist and came out of all that in a much better place.
“I joined Bonhams Auctioneers as administrator for the motorcycles department and worked my way up to being a specialist. It’s a fascinating, addictive job, as you never know what’s around the corner! I’m very fortunate to have a job in which I get to indulge my passion and help people. The travelling and living in America was a fantastic perk, too.”
“I’m also drawn to engineering, because when I finally got around to looking closely at Ralph’s motorcycles as I cleared the workshop, I could see his fantastic attention to detail. It fascinated me.
“I suppose the truth is that I love classic bikes in general; working for someone like Bonhams lets me feed my habit and learn about all types of bikes from different eras, as well as meeting fascinating people from all walks of life. Mostly, though, I’m drawn to Velocette – not just because of the family connection, but because I just love the history of how they created their bikes and developed aspects of motorcycle engineering which are still in use today, like the positive foot gearchange.”
He laughs and changes the mood by saying: “I suppose we really ought to venture into the workshop and see the bikes...”
The workshop is to die for. That familiar old bike smell greets us as Andy pulls back the door to reveal racks of spares, tools and, centre stage, a handful of Velocettes – more oily-rag clean than pristine. These are bikes that are still ridden, rather than hidden.
We virtually trip over a neat MSS inside the door. “It’s a 1954 bike that Ralph bought in 1956,” says our host. “Back in the day, it had a
big screen and a sidecar. He used it for his work commute. Nan told me that during wintertime he’d put a shovel in the sidecar and ride until he ploughed into a snow drift, then get off and shovel the snow out of the way and carry on...” He rolls his eyes at the thought of his grandad’s dogged determination to work.
Ralph traded the MSS for a MAC, which then became the business hack at Seymour’s, but at some point in the ’80s he managed to get the MSS back. “I discovered it in boxes when I cleared the workshop; nan told me Ralph planned a restoration, but never got around to it. I moved the boxes to my bedroom and eventually got my friend Barrie, who’s a mate of Geoff Dodkin [a renowned Velocette racer and tuner] to do me a dry build. I rode it in that state for a year, then I stripped it with another friend, Adrian; we got everything painted up and then did a full build, with a lot of guidance from Barrie. I’ve done around
‘I’VE TAKEN GIRLS ON THE BACK OF THE MSS. BELIEVE ME, THEY LOVE IT!’
7000 miles on it since, including a track session at Dijon during the Coupes Moto Légende festival. It’s such an easy bike to get on with that I’ve even let friends learn how to ride on it. I’ve also taken girls on the back of the MSS, too – and believe me, they love it!”
The bike that catches the eye, though, is the faded green Rickmanframed racer that sits proudly atop the workbench. “This is Katie – all of Ralph’s bikes have names,” says Andy. “He built it in 1967, with a 1939 KTT MKVIII engine from his original MKVIII that he purchased new in 1939 and raced at the TT between 1946 and 1952.
“Ralph stopped racing after the 1952 TT, because his sisters harangued him so much that their mother was getting ulcers, worrying about him when he was on the track. Ralph was especially close to his mum, as his dad had died early in his life. After he stopped racing, he spent all his time preparing and tuning bikes. As I was only four when he died, I only learned about him from talking to nan.”
Getting back to how the Rickman evolved from a conventional KTT, Andy explains that as part of its development, Ralph made his own Featherbed-style frame (it stands on its end, against the wall next to the Rickman), but then Rickman frames came along in the early ’60s so he built this bike in six weeks to race in the 1967 Manx.
“Nan told me it was a real rush job and that he spent many late nights trying to get the bike finished in time. It has the rare works ‘turbo-cooled’ [ventilated] front drum brake. Ralph had a guy called Vern Wallis working for him; Vern’s dad worked at Brooklands with Eric Fernihough, and Vern became like a son to Ralph.”
Ralph didn’t win anything major as a racer, but a lot of good privateers rode his bikes, too. Fred Walton rode his bike – a bright red Velo with a white fairing – to 19th place in the 1973 Senior TT.
The original KTT frame that donated its engine for the Rickman still sits in the workshop – with a huge aluminium fuel tank adorning the frame. Andy says: “This was Ralph’s original 1939 KTT MKVIII which he bought in time for the August bank holiday race at Donington Park that year. Unfortunately, he crashed it. Then came the war, so he covered the battered bike in a blanket, hid it behind the sofa in his mum’s house and went off to war. He was scared about motorcycles being commissioned to be melted down for the war effort.”
Ralph was in the REME (The Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers), so he never saw front-line action. Post-war, he went to the Manx in 1946 with the same bike and raced it in the Junior, also riding a Norton in the Senior. In the Junior he was allocated ‘Number One’ so he was the very first rider off down Bray Hill after the war! His best TT results were in 1951 and 1952 (45th and 38th respectively), winning replicas as a finisher. As Andy points out, while he wasn’t one of the superstars of the era, he was a leading privateer having a good time!
“Ralph was also a whizz working with aluminium,” says Andy. “As you can see from the oversize tank he made for the KTT. He loved making things with the stuff. Look at the pushrod tunnels on his bikes;
I’m sure he saw what Ducati had done with their singles and thought: ‘I could do that’. He made the aluminium dynamo casings, fitting them to add rigidity to the engine/frame connection. Without them the frame flexed too much. See how he dished the aluminium wheel hubs...
“He was a master craftsman, he really knew what he was doing, yet he was actually trained as a carpenter at Parker Knoll, hence every workbench and tool cabinet in here [all made with wood] was made by him. I’ve no idea where he got his engineering knowledge. I never got around to asking nan about that, which is something I regret, but I suspect he was self-taught.”
For years Ralph worked at the Harris car and bike dealership in High Wycombe, but in 1960 he set up his own bike business in Thame. He was a Velocette and BSA dealer, although the shop later had Lambretta, Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha franchises. The business finally closed in 2012, and Andy’s nan died in 2018.
Ralph was never employed by Velocette but, as Andy points out, the Birmingham-based manufacturer was a big family business and they looked after the independent dealers who supported them. Luckily, Ralph kept copious family photo albums and scrapbooks full of pictures clipped from the motorcycle press of the era, which in themselves form a comprehensive journal of record.
Another race bike in the workshop is Ralph’s 1967 Velo Thruxton known as ‘Bellowing Bella’. Andy explains: “This one was ridden by Danny Shimmin in the production TT in 1977 and ’78. He didn’t have great results on it, but set a really fast lap of 93.5mph in practice – pretty impressive for a four-stroke, pushrod, single-cylinder production bike. It has never had an amazing racing history as such, but has been used on short circuits ever since the production TTS and is still pretty much original. I don’t think I’ll ever restore it. It would ruin all the history.
On the bench is a prototype 250cc side-valve engine that Velocette planned to build. Andy found it when clearing out Ralph’s shop. “I’ve even got the blueprints for it. It was known as ‘Little Donkey’, but nothing came of it. Ralph had it on display at Stanford Hall for a
‘RALPH WAS THE FIRST RIDER OFF DOWN BRAY HILL AFTER THE WAR’
while.” Next to it is a pre-war MAC engine. “Another gem I found in the workshop,” he grins. “It’s my test engine – I’m using it to learn how to build one from the ground up. I can do all the basics – the maintenance, timing, etc, but I don’t have the experience of building engines. I’m lucky that I have Velo experts like Geoff Dodkin and Nick Payton as friends who will help me fix stuff, but I need to learn how to build engines and gearboxes. I figure if I can do that, then I’m pretty well covered, but it’s not going to be easy. The MKVIII KTT, for example, is quite a complex thing and you need to have insider knowledge, like fitting shims at room temperature, ensuring the girder forks are correctly set up, the clutch... and other Velo quirks to build a Velocette correctly. The devil is in the detail and it’s the detail I need to learn.”
Then on another bench sits a pock-marked Rickman frame – another Barrett project! “I’m building a Rickman Velo using this frame and it will be based on one of Ralph’s builds. I’ve no idea who Ralph built the bike for in the photo [see previous page], but I like the style and
‘I’M BUILDING A RICKMAN VELO BASED ON ONE OF RALPH’S BUILDS’
want to build a road bike based on it. The frame is the last one that was left in the workshop when we closed down, though I’m not sure what it was ever used for. There were two others we had which were sold purely as Rickman frames and definitely not Seymour specials because they were never used as such.
“I’m going for a high-spec Venom engine, anodised black. It’ll have a Fontana front drum, just like the bike in the picture. I’m not sure what finish I’d have on the frame, probably not nickel plate because most Rickman frames have that finish,” he says and pauses, allowing the ideas to percolate... “I’m thinking I might do it black – and have black rims, too. The entire bike would be black with some gold pinstripe highlights. The most important thing is to build it with the same kind of detail someone like Ralph or Francis Beart put into their bikes. It’s definitely going to be a good project for me to learn from.”
We stand looking at the frame, the picture and back, imagining how cool the finished bike might look. Then Andy cuts away...
“What about some riding shots? I can ride this KTT,” he offers. “It’s road legal, if a little bit loud...”
Andy grabs his leather jacket and helmet, wheels the bike out, turns on the fuel, runs alongside it, leaps onto it and bump-starts it. The KTT barks into life, its open mega filling the nearby industrial estate. As we watch him ride away, an old boy stands at the zebra crossing, transfixed. He’s either never seen or heard the like of it before or knows exactly what it is and is wondering what the heck a KTT is doing thundering around his locality.
The bike is apparently called Eileen. In the late ’80s Ralph bought it in tea chests and then used the parts to build this bike for Andy’s nan. Ralph got Bernard Guerin, a Frenchman who had been national champion as far back as 1953, to ride it in the 1993 classic races on the Southern 100 course. While wheeling it out and getting ready to bump it, Andy mentions with a smirk: “I do want to ride it at the Goodwood Festival. I can’t use at the Revival, I’m not a good enough racer, but I think it would be fun to run it up the hill at the Festival – and people would appreciate seeing it.”
Andy is still buzzing from his little spin on the bike: “I just love riding these things because you can feel it working away underneath you. It’s got a life of its own and you can hear everything going on. Someone wrote that I was into riding Velocettes because of the family connection, but that’s bollocks. I just love the experience riding old bikes gives you.
“I ride more modern bikes, but they are so perfect – you can’t even feel or hear the engine running. And they don’t leak oil. I own a 1989 Honda GB500TT which has a ’60s style, but there’s something that the old bikes have that can’t be replicated in these modern bikes – that soulfulness or character that each one exudes... or something philosophical like that,” he says while laughing and rolling his eyes.
“I love the reaction of people when they see and hear bikes like this. If I can inspire one youngster to want a motorcycle after seeing me on the Velo, then that would be fantastic.”