COLLECTOR: ROBERT LUSK
It’s about more than just the metal for this man – alongside the bikes, he also has a large collection of original posters that reflect the sociological effect of early motorcycling
Ex-racer and entrepreneur’s impressive bikes and artwork
Like many expats, UK resident Robert Lusk has assumed the persona of his adoptive country, while still retaining his soft Massachusetts accent. The 80-yearold émigré from the north-east USA swapped New England for Olde England back in 1968, and built a multi-million pound footwear business which at one time had four London shops and employed almost 100 people. The profits allowed Robert and his Kiwi wife Susan to move to the Kent/ Sussex borders, where they bought a former commercial apple orchard with 80 acres of fruit trees and 135 acres of woodland. “I can ride off-road for an hour each day without touching the highway,” he says.
This came complete with a picturesque period farmhouse and massive Atcost barn (which Robert, with no sense of irony, terms ‘The Shed’) housing three 60-ton steel-lined fridges in which each autumn’s apple harvest was formerly stored. Lusk converted these into display areas to house an eclectic motorcycle collection of around 100 bikes and assorted paraphernalia.
The former fruit packing room became a restoration area as well as a workshop for Robert and his chief aide John Rhodes to race-prepare the bikes on which, in his ninth decade of life, Mr Lusk still competes in CRMC races – and at the sharp end of the field, too!
Lusk is a born-again biker with a fascinating background: “I grew up in the New England countryside in a place where every sort of essential craft was still being practiced on a daily basis. So I had a very grounded practical education. But at 15 years old, I’d help out in a gas station after school. Each day a bloke who commuted to work on his Triumph Bonneville would park it outside this gas station. One day, I went over and sat on it, looked down and saw the kickstarter,
‘DISPLAY AREAS HOUSE AN ECLECTIC MOTORCYCLE COLLECTION OF AROUND 100 BIKES AND PARAPHERNALIA’
then put my foot on it, and it started! In that moment, the only way I can describe it is, God came down and put his hands on me and said: ‘Robert Lusk, this is your life!’” A year later, a 1935 Harley that had been leaning up against a farmer’s barn for several years became Lusk’s first bike. “I bought it for $20, took it home, hand-painted it candy apple pink and got it running. Then my dad co-signed a bank loan on a BSA 650 Lightning. That BSA was an eye opener, and it went from being dead stock to having dual carbs, 357 Spitfire cams, the head ported out, bigger valves, and so on and so on. I hillclimbed it, with some success, and rode it on the road. Then a friend bought a Vincent home in a basket, which he then built up, and I had access to it any time. American roads back then were the perfect place to ride a Vincent. Heaven!”
Lusk got into Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts but never graduated. Instead, he’d found work in a bike shop and became a very early Yamaha dealer. He also started road racing – first with a C15, then a modified 250cc Ducati Diana. “I raced with AAMRR, the Alphabet Club as everyone called it, who were the only people really doing proper European-style road racing in the north-east, and they opened up Canada to me. Mosport was a track I loved, but at that time you couldn’t race on Sundays in Canada, only on Saturdays. So we’d leave work on Friday, drive overnight to Mosport, race most of the Saturday and then drive
‘MY COLLECTION STARTED WITH BIKES I WAS INTERESTED IN ACQUIRING TO RACE’
overnight to Vineland, New Jersey to race there on the Sunday, before driving overnight again to Massachusetts to get back for work on Monday. But you know what? We had fun, we did OK and we were committed!”
With his Yamaha shop as the catalyst, Lusk started advancing up the finishing order as the quality and reliability of those early strokers improved, eventually becoming a regular racewinner. “Yamaha would not sell me a TD1 motorcycle, but in ’64 or ’65 they did sell me a TD1 engine, which we installed in a YDS chassis. It was just the fastest, most shocking thing compared to anything I’d ridden before – once a TD1 came on the pipes, it was an experience that was so instantly memorable it opened up another world – but hold on tight!”
At just 5ft 6in in stature, Lusk was ideally built for road racing – especially on 125s. “A friend named Chester Hooker built a 125cc Yamaha rotary-valve road racer out of a YA-5 engine I gave him. He said: ‘GP racing is coming to Canada, you should ride this in the 125GP’. We went to Mosport for the Canadian GP, and it was fast! I was second fastest in qualifying, behind Bill Ivy on the works Yamaha V4. I think he lapped me three times in the 80-mile race.
“I was running second the whole time until I began to experience some handling difficulties. As I went into the fast corners, it would step sideways. I convinced myself it was the swingarm bearings that had gotten slack and backed off. Tim Coopey went by me for second, but I still finished third. Back in the pits I discovered all the spokes in the rear wheel were so loose it was about to collapse. “Third in a World Championship Grand Prix meant I won quite a lot of money, plus it was the first time we’d ever seen Europeans like Hailwood, Agostini, Read and Ivy, and how they raced. I thought: ‘OK, this is what it’s all about – I’ve got to go there.’”
With an introduction to top UK Yamaha tuner Ted Broad and another to Dave Degens through mutual friends, Lusk disposed of the Yamaha dealership and moved to Britain. Nerve damage in his neck from a serious crash in his last-ever Canadian race, just before coming to the UK, took years to fix and meant he could no longer race motorcycles – but, having got to the UK anyway, Lusk had to earn a living. “I was skilled in leatherwork, so I started to make hand-made leather goods and sold them on Portobello Road Market. It was the Swinging ’60s and people wanted what I made. Besides bags and belts and stuff like that, I was making hand-made sandals – they were good value, well made, people liked them, and that was the beginning of my shoe business. So, suddenly, I had to establish a little production line and it all took off from there.”
By 1997, Lusk’s neck injury was healed and his former motorcycle addiction was cured, too – until his 11-year-old son Chester said: ‘Dad, I want to race mini moto’. Inevitably, dad got hooked on the sport, too. “We had a trial outing to see how we liked it, and after three minutes on track somebody brushed me as they overtook me. Up comes the red mist, and suddenly I’m a mini moto racer!
Both Lusks ended up becoming age-group champions in their new sport – and, having converted Valentino-style from mini moto to full-size motorcycles, six years later Chester Lusk started the 2003 British 125GP as a wild card entry on an RS125 Honda, sponsored by his dad. “He slid off in the race and remounted just as Dani Pedrosa was coming up to lap him!” says dad ruefully. “But he picked himself up and finished, so it was an honourable outing!
“We did 80 races in his first year on the Honda RS125, which Steve Patrickson did a wonderful job of tuning and maintaining, and one day I just thought: ‘You know, I’d like to try this again’. So I rode the Honda in a test day somewhere and it was shocking, because it was just so brilliant. So I went to a CRMC meeting and met a wonderful bloke called Robin Keating who was racing Bridgestones, which I’d had some experience with myself back in America. He built up a race bike for me and I started racing again. Old habits die hard!”
Robert Lusk’s name swiftly began appearing at the top of the race results on the Bridgestone, as well as the 1977 MT125R Honda air-cooled single with which he won
the 2005 CRMC 125cc Championship title. Success came on both sides of the Atlantic, too, with visits to Loudon to ride former rival Frank Camillieri’s Yamaha to podium finishes in AHRMA racing.
“Really, that’s when my collection started, with the bikes I was interested in acquiring to race,” says Robert. So there’s a full set of AMC racers, including a Matchless G45 (“very pretty, but gruesome vibration!”), one of the original 180or-so Matchless G50s (“I don’t have replicas, only originals”) on which he’s a consistent front-runner in CRMC Period 1 events, and the AJS 7R he finished runner-up on in the 2018 Avon Tyres 350cc Lansdowne Championship at the age of 78, just one point behind champion Geoff Leather.
Robert bought racers he’d coveted as a boy, like the Vincent Black Shadow to Lightning spec that he, son Chester, renowned TT winner Charlie Williams and Peter Crew have all taken it in turns to race in the Goodwood Revival. His ex-les Graham 1950 350cc Mk8 KTT Velocette is another Goodwood/lansdowne bike – but with Robert’s Yamaha heritage, there are also Japanese-built racers, too.
“I assembled a fair collection of production race bikes, including a proper TR250 Suzuki, a 125 Tohatsu twin, a 50cc Honda CR110 and 125cc CR93, and quite a few Yamahas, though I never went beyond the TD1 and its different variants. I’ve got the Jim Lee-framed TD1B, which is a fabulous bike to ride. He never got the credit he deserved for making early Yamahas handle, in the way that Colin Seeley did for the Yamsel, and of course the AMC singles.” The Lusk collection also includes a very famous Seeley racer, the lightweight-framed ‘works’ G50 which Dave Croxford raced for the Kent chassis-builder in 1971 [see page 56].
But the racers were simply the seeds of a collection, with
Lusk starting to buy other two-wheeled collectables. “My London office is opposite Olympia, where back then two or three times a year there was a Bonhams sale. The very first bike I bought is still in The Shed here – a Belgian-made 1902 Minerva, which was virtually a clip-on engine delivering basic transportation. I just saw that and melted. I thought: ‘It’s so primitive, but wonderful’. I could only think about its first owner and the impact that this motorcycle must have had on his life.”
Lusk’s earlyriders include a 1910 four-cylinder Pierce and 1912 Henderson Four – early American exotica from the dawn of his parent country’s motorcycle heritage. A 1907 Minerva came along, too – a proper V-twin motorcycle which flanks its humble clip-on ancestor. There’s a fraillooking but complete Labre et Lamaudière made in Paris in 1901, while an even earlier example of a French-made device is Lusk’s 1898 Rochet tricycle with 2½hp De Dion engine, which he bought in Italy. “It just speaks to me – and to others, too,” says Robert.
A more sedate period conveyance is the younger 1912 New Crescent with 600cc side-valve Precision engine and wickerwork sidecar, which recently found fame on an ITV programme when Robert loaned it to multi-world Trials Champion Dougie Lampkin to take Covid-19 pandemic fundraiser Captain Sir Thomas Moore for a ride. ‘Captain Tom’ had famously marked his 100th birthday this year by walking 100 times round his garden, raising over £32 million for NHS charities in the process.
Robert explains: “New Crescent was a largely unknown maker, because at that time entrepreneurialism was really rampant in this new-born industry, and anybody who wanted to have a go at manufacturing motorcycles could. It interested me that, having looked at the catalogue for the 1910/1911 Olympia Motor Show, there were many,
‘I THINK ABOUT A BIKE’S FIRST OWNER AND THE IMPACT IT HAD ON HIS LIFE’
many component suppliers there; you could go there and buy all the bits to make a bike like this. With any motorbike, I’m fascinated about the engineering side, but especially the people side of it – that’s what really interests me.”
In that case, acquiring Cecil Downer-groves’ self-built creations must have been a no-brainer. This Jamaican-born inventor who came to Britain in 1897 when he was 17 to train as a pattern-maker’s apprentice, built his own 249cc two-stroke engine from scratch in 1922 to power a 1919 tandem bicycle he’d obtained, with suitably strengthened frame. According to a history written by CD-G’S granddaughter: ‘the finished engine produced the desired effect, and the tandem and passengers enjoyed many years and miles of effortless travel’.
Robert Lusk acquired this in 2011, and later purchased CD-G’S principal means of transportation, a 1928 Matchless V-twin combination with a self-made sidecar comprising a fully seaworthy rowing boat, which CD-G would unhitch from the frame and use to go fishing off the Sussex coast, before reuniting them for the journey home. The fact that it came to him complete with the wooden patterns CD-G made, as well as the outboard engine to power his sidecar dinghy, was the icing on the cake.
Later, more conventional motorcycles form the backbone of the collection, however, headed by the 11 MV Agustas in the Lusk line-up. There are both drum-braked and discbraked versions of the iconic 750S four-cylinder roadburner – and an 1967 example of the 600cc four with its distinctly unlovely square headlamp.
“The drum-brake 750 came from Denmark,” says Robert. “I’ve got its original bill of sale, and it was very low mileage when I bought it. That’s the interesting thing with MVS of any age – a lot of them are low mileage, because I think they’re just revered and respected, not ridden. I do all three!” In another section of The Shed are half a dozen Rumis, all 125cc two-stroke twins ranging from the Formichino and
Scoiottolo scooters to a street-registered 125 Grand Prix road racer. “They’re Italian design at its best, yet just so bizarre in a way. I love all the Italian accoutrements on them, like the rocker gearshift lever which an Italian chum told me is so you could shift gear with your heel back then, without ruining the shine on your shoes!”
But after peaking at just over 100 bikes, Robert slimmed the collection. “I’ve always had an interest in art, and I became fascinated with the art of the poster,” he explains. “I began to ponder what sort of impact the motorbike would have had on artists in the period, back when it was new – around the turn of the century. Their influences up until then had been either landscape or horses, or ecclesiastical and historical images – but then suddenly there’s this selfpropelled thing presenting the thrill of travel. A car or motorbike could go anywhere, and it suddenly became highly influential in people’s lives, if only because it was visible. So that was the beginning of all this. I just wondered, how did these guys react to this? How it did influence them?”
So is there any bike that he hasn’t yet got that he’d like to have? “Dozens!” he exclaims. “An FN four-cylinder would be a good start – and I’m still looking out for obscure but innovative models. I recently saw a Dresch for sale, a 1930s French bike built by a multi-millionaire French-algerian industrialist named Henri Dresch, which had so many clever features on it, like flat steel handlebars instead of tube, a pressed steel frame and so on. I’m still looking out for anything on two wheels that’s truly innovative – oh, and some more nice posters, too!”
‘A LOT OF MVS ARE LOW MILEAGE – I THINK THEY’RE JUST REVERED AND RESPECTED, NOT RIDDEN. I DO ALL THREE!’