Sidecars I have known
For many of us, our path through life has been dictated by chance as much as design. Although for Mick Payne, and many other motorcycle scribes, a passion for two and three wheels has provided direction…
Midlife crisis? Quite probably. I’d given up my job as a design engineer at Renault, working between the UK and France, to take on the uncertain life of writing about what I loved.
This was done pretty much on a whim following the publication of a piece in the long-gone British Bike Magazine. That feature was about a trip to the former Yugoslavia on my Triumph T140E Bonnie, the same machine that was later hitched to an early Charnwood Meteor. That is the important fact, I could ride a sidecar. There were plenty of scribes writing about bikes, but far fewer who could also keep an outfit on the road. Back then I owned a somewhat lowly MZ ETZ250 fitted, by Wilf Green, with a Squire ML1. It taught me, in no small order, the fundamentals of sidecar control.
So, armed with my rather battered old Exacta camera and a brand new Apple computer, I set off on my newly chosen career.
I’d been editing the British Two Stroke Club magazine for several years and knew Colin Atkinson, a fellow committee member, well. Colin owned a massive saloon sidecar hitched to an 883 Harley Sportster. The sidecar was so big that it was known as the Popemobile after the special vehicles built for the Pope’s UK visit. This particular combination was put together by Keith Wash and his team at Sible Hedingham in Essex.
So started the serendipitous links that led to so many friendships in the sidecar world.
This piece was published in Motorcycle Sport, ‘The Quality Monthly’, when Cyril Ayton was editor. Cyril liked the idea of a regular sidecar feature so A Bit on the Side was born. This meant a regular feature was required but it also gave me the credibility to approach the people behind the sidecars for features. Thankfully there were more builders then than now.
Following an interview with Keith, and an introduction to the characters that made up the ‘H Team,’ I was loaned a Hinckley Triumph Trophy fitted with an SS Hedingham. A real ‘giant leap for mankind’ from the little MZ – I think the trust came from the belief that if I could control my outfit there was a good chance I could ride a well-sorted one! I took that first test very tentatively indeed. Keith later informed me that a tester from a well-known weekly had parked the subject of his test close to the factory wall. The reason? The sidecar mudguard had made intimate contact with the scenery somewhere along the way!
Around this time I included Watsonian and Charnwood
Classics into my contact list; being welcomed by, respectively, Peter Rivers-Fletcher and Jim and Rose D’Arcy. My understanding and interest in sidecars was growing as I realised that each manufacturer had their own niche. Around this time I was loaned an Indian Enfield hitched to a Watsonian GP and it proved to be my transport for several weeks, although it had no more performance than the MZ. Used a lot less petrol though!
There will be more of this subject next time, when I sampled some blistering sports outfits built by Charnwood, a most unusual Squire and BMW built for the Kremlin alongside a few other long-loan machines. Oh, and a few I’ve owned myself. I hope you enjoy my little trawl through my memories of the sidecar industry.