Four-page special on ‘café racer cowboy’ Allan Cole’s youth
In this Way We Were special, CB reader Allan Cole recounts his teenage years as a café racer cowboy – and the social changes that made them possible
WE DIDN’T KNOW we were ‘baby boomers’. Back then, no one used the term that came to describe those of us born after the end of World War II in 1945. Growing up in the countryside, we had the freedom to wander and explore – first on foot, then by bicycle and eventually by motorcycle. The ‘family car’ was a new concept and as hire purchase agreements made it possible to live more luxuriously, dads and uncles across the nation were abandoning their faithful motorcycles for the warmer, drier four-wheeled option. Teenage boomers saw things differently. Excitement was our option – and the income from a newspaper round or a few hours’ serving petrol each week could open the door to the world of motorcycling and change your life forever! That led to me battering a couple of mopeds, then a rigidframed AJS, around as field bikes... until they eventually succumbed to my lack of maintenance and mechanical ignorance.
The next step for me was my first
road bike, a 250cc BSA C11 – and with it came new-found freedom, as it did for many of the youth of the ’60s, ripping up the country lanes of post-war England. Sadly, my personal love affair ended suddenly, when the little Beeza (and my right leg) were smashed against the front of an Austin A55 doing a right turn.
Soon the leg was back in one piece, initiating a move up to a bigger, faster bike. When a neighbour decided to join the trend to car ownership, hang up his ‘storm coat’ and buy a car instead of his 650cc Huntmaster, I thought the old Ariel would be a match made in heaven for me. But it turned out to be a sensible bike with a quiet, siamesed exhaust, air filter, big mudguards, the lot! Of course, that had to change, so before too long I had turned it into a café racer.
As the Ariel was ‘first cousin’ to a BSA A10, any customising bits for Beezas would look good on it, and in this way the transformation of the Ariel progressed, step by step. An apprentice’s budget didn’t allow anything OTT, but clip-ons, rearsets, a glassfibre tank and sweptback exhausts with Dunstall long megas gave the look (if not the performance) of the iconic café racer. My favourite was always those curvy swept-back pipes. They looked like they had been blown back into that shape by doing the ton – and never mind that if you dropped the bike, they were gone because they were the most vulnerable part of it!
Life in mid-’60s England was pretty grim. World War II was still a vivid memory for most adults, and although there was a growing faith in a better future, repair and recovery was society’s theme. But that was not so for the young bunch who had been conceived during the wave of euphoria that had swept the nation in the late ’40s.
The war had ended, the Brits had persevered and won – and when the young servicemen returned home, the young women dropped their collective guards (and other things). Of course, that resulted in a tidal wave of babies. By the ’60s, that tidal wave was out of school and collecting wages. For a few years, we were the 16 to 19-year-olds – somebody had invented the
‘EXCITEMENT WAS OUR OPTION. THE INCOME FROM A NEWSPAPER ROUND COULD CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER!’
teenager and we were, for the first time in history, in no hurry to be carbon copies of our parents. We had grown up with comics and films that glorified the war heroes of Britain and America. John Wayne had won the war, and many of us were looking around for our own brand of hero. Rock stars filled that role in the dreams of many a teen, but some of us wanted the men we worshipped to inhabit a bit more of a dangerous world – we saved our adulation for the guys who risked their life on race tracks, from the local lads like John ‘Moon Eyes’ Cooper through to world champion
Mike ‘The Bike’ Hailwood.
Our heroes had open exhausts – and we wanted the same. Our heroes wore leather – and we did, too. Our heroes had rearsets – so did we. Of course, these fashion trends soon became caricatures and the bikes began to wear clip-ons so low that you could hardly see over the headlamp. One particularly memorable example (as seen in the photo above) was a Triumph belonging to Ian Mace, a mate who was a couple of years older than us and worked as a mechanic at Copes, a local bike shop in Mansfield. Wow! He had a Bonneville, he had a steady girlfriend and he had a dream job. He was inspirational!
Another trendsetter and style icon was Paul Liversidge. Just look at the blue Triumph pictured above – he had all the gear, clip-on ’bars, sweptback exhausts, glassfibre tank and seat, and open reverse-cone megas. What a glorious sound – every gearchange and roar on the overrun could be heard as he rode home to the next town, over five miles away!
At first, as many of us were 16 or 17 years old, we couldn’t go into pubs for a beer, so we rode out onto the newly-created ring roads and motorways, where transport cafés were conveniently sited for longdistance truck drivers. Here we could park up, swagger around, look menacing (ha-ha), make a noise, play the juke box and talk for hours, all for the price of a cuppa. My parents used to moan: “Why don’t you go during the daytime?” and: “What are you lot up to – just drinking coffee?” The generation gap was setting in...
As an apprentice diesel mechanic with some knowledge and spannering skills, fixing the many discarded and unwanted Brit bikes of the ’50s and ’60s was fun. Between us, a nearby friend called Graham, my brother Dave and myself, we built some unusual specials. There were a couple of TRIBSAS, a Velocette with glassfibre bodywork and twin (back to back) front brakes, some lowered and modified sidecars and a Gold Star hybrid using a Scrambler engine. They were all what we now call café racers – and our greatest thrill was to goad a fast car or sports car into a duel. A big problem, however, was that Brit bikes were equipped with Lucas electrics. On the maker’s badge ‘Joseph Lucas Ltd’, we all mentally added: ‘Prince of Darkness’. It was always a 50/50
‘IMAGINE THE TERROR AS YOU SNEAKED PAST A SPORTS CAR AT SPEED, THEN – BANG! DARKNESS!’
gamble when, returning home after being out, you switched on your lights. Would they work or would you be tailing a more fortunate mate whose lights still worked?
So a number of our bike projects had no lighting systems at all, especially a Super Rocket of mine that let go of its generator while I was riding it (I didn’t stop to pick it up, as I saw the damage it had done to the front of the following car!) The solution to our lighting problem was to put bicycle lights on the front and back of our motorbikes. Imagine the thrill/terror as you finally sneaked past some sports car you’d be dicing with at high speed and then – bang! Darkness!
As dedicated café racers, we had to make our pilgrimages to the local race circuits: Cadwell Park, with its mini-mountain that saw many bikes doing wheelies over the crest; or wind-swept Darley Moor, which had been a WWII airfield in a previous life; or the tight and twisty Mallory Park. Mallory was a spectator’s track where our lads and lasses of the Mansfield White Cross club would spread out on the bank overlooking the main straight. As the old Brit singles would come past on full throttle, the sound bounced off the advertising hoardings that lined the track with a strange ‘zinging’ echo. Almost half of the track consists of Gerrard’s – and to watch such equally matched 500cc singles, tightly bunched and banked over to the limit round that long, sweeping bend was exciting stuff.
Wandering around the pits or even the parking area was aweinspiring – and it was while inspecting the show in the bike parking at Mallory one day that I saw my first Beemer. Yes, it was an old man’s style of bike. Yes, it was foreign. But it was so smart and purposeful. It stood out like the proverbial ‘dog’s bollocks.
Surrounded by British bikes of various dark muted colours, it shone like a ray of sunshine – brilliant white from front to rear, with huge mudguards and a massive lump of a petrol tank. Many years later, I found out that it was a BMW R69S, but that unique and stunning vision stayed with me – and years later, when I moved to South Africa, I would realise what it was like to experience riding that vision. But that’s another story.
(To be continued…)