The Autumn of a ’46 BSA C11
Neil Cairns was born the same year that Al Capone was shot, India gained its independence and Princess Elizabeth married Prince Phillip. In the USA the first radar speed trap was used to catch motorists breaking their new 50mph speed limit.
The story is set in a small Home Counties village, with me the eldest son in a family of six children (later seven), with parents in serious financial straits.
It was mid-1962 that we arrived in Wavendon, having spent the last five years up in Cumberland. We had lived in the small market town of Brampton, and we children had picked up a slight Geordie accent. The four eldest of us – me, Mary, Andrew and Janet – soon got to grips with the local village children. The local children, born and bred in the village, picked up on our accents straight away. After some initial fights that our accents caused, the majority of local children accepted us. I still had a year at school and was enrolled at Bletchley County Secondary School along with my sister Mary, two and a half years younger than I.
We travelled the six miles to Bletchley by bus, mixing with the Bletchley Grammar School children from the village. Again there were often fights between the boys of each school. But as there were not that many children living locally, we eventually all got on with each other. The younger siblings went to the little village school, where two classes covered all years.
The first day my sister Mary and I stood out on the grass verge opposite the row of houses we lived in, waiting for the school bus, a large lad took a kick at my briefcase. This contained my sandwiches and a few books. But the thermosflask inside broke under the attack. The other children stood to one side grinning at this. So I bunched up my right fist and took a really hard swing at his nose. It flattened on his face and began to bleed badly. He might have been half my size again but the bigger they are, the further they have to fall, as my father often told me.
The attacker was John Brown, with whom I became great friends; he was even the best man at my wedding years later. No one else tried to humiliate me after that. John had the day off school and I had an ear bending from his mother. She was also angry her huge son had been thumped by a skinny kid and in front of all the village children!
Going technical
It was at my school I met likeminded lads, who had been chosen to form the very first ‘fifth year’ the school had ever run. Typically the ‘technical’ class I was in was all male, whereas the ‘secretarial class’ was all female, bar one lad. We learned all about lathes, milling machines, workshops practices, apprenticeships, engineering drawing, and how a motor car engine worked. This only wetted our appetites for more.
Because of the way the school year is made up, it was not long before some lads hit their 16th birthday. I was about half way down this list, as I was 16 in March. This meant I could legally ride a motorcycle, as well as smoke in public.
My father had taught me to drive a car before I was 14 on Crosby Aerodrome (now Carlisle Airport), and I had driven tractors on friends’ farms for years. On my 16th I had obtained my first provisional driver’s licence, it covered both cars and motorcycles and my father often let me drive the family car under his supervision. The licence was then obtained from the local council offices in Aylesbury, and cost five shillings for a six month provisional. If and when I passed either test it would then cost £1 for three years, the full licence for either acting as a provisional for the other.
It was one school dinnertime when the technical class I belonged to had one of its meetings in early winter 1962. These meetings were like a ‘club’ and as we were ‘senior pupils’ we were given some privileges. It was decided to turn these meetings into a proper engineering club, and the metalwork teacher, a Mr Brown, agreed. A disused temporary wartime concrete classroom was given to us for use as a workshop (‘temporary’ but still used 17 years after the war!).
A bench and a vice were installed, with the agreement we could use the school’s metal workshop machines under supervision of Mr Brown. He was as keen as we were (eventually retiring to the Isle of
Man to work on the steam railway.) The inevitable happened, and fellow student Clive Peerless purchased an ancient two-stroke motor scooter to ‘do-up’ in our little workshop club. That winter was terrible. The country froze up solid in January and snow laid about very deep until mid-February. This meant there was little chance of us using the club workshop as it was far too cold. But, when March, arrived things cheered up. Unlike today when a slight snow shower closes schools, we attended every day through deep snow drifts, and sat in freezing classrooms.
Our free milk had to be placed by the radiators to thaw out. (School children had a free one-third pint of milk a day issued to them, this was stopped in the 1970s by Margaret Thatcher.)
The ‘club’ was given a very elderly and worn 1935 250cc BSA with a hand-change gearbox by
a benefactor. It actually ran and impressed us all.
One of the group lived on a farm where the Milton Keynes Bowl now stands, on the east side of the then busy A5 Watling Street trunk road, just north of Bletchley. This old
BSA was taken to the farm, and we would go at weekends to ride it.
We all learned a great deal about riding two wheels, though some of us failed to remember some of the finer points in later life (usually me!). I was the one who caused the demise of this little vintage machine (almost worthless in those days) as I came off the top of a mound in the field we were using alongside the London to Birmingham main line railway. The bike took off and landed with its gearbox hitting a huge rock. This smashed the gearbox, and that was the end of our fun. The bike was dumped in the hedge, and is still probably there rusting away. I have forgotten the lad’s name whose farm it was, though I do remember he joined the Royal Navy upon leaving school.
It was in early March that I saw an advert in Baldry’s shop window. Baldry was the local taxi firm, as well as running a second-hand motorcycle shop next to the railway bridge and station in Bletchley Road, Bletchley. We often walked to this shop during the dinner hour to look at the machines on display.
They were usually a motley lot, often things that Arthur Mayle’s shop at the other end of the town refused to take in part-exchange. Arthur’s shop was a temple to us, with its shiny brand-new machines on display. The little card, handwritten, in the shop window said simply '1946 250cc BSA for sale, tax & Mot, £6' with a phone number. Only the year previous, the government of the day had passed a law which restricted learner motorcyclists to a machine of 250cc or less.
The advert for the BSA said £6, which was a small fortune to a 16-year-old lad then. I had £6 in my Post Office Savings. This was a collection of the florins, half crowns and rare 10-bob notes I had received for my birthdays over the years. It seemed I had been saving for my first motorbike for 16 years! My mother had religiously saved for all of her children, we all had a Post Office account. (Florin = two shillings, now just 10p; half-crown = two shillings and six pence, now just 12.5p; 10-bob is half a pound; and 10 shillings, now just 50p. As a guide, a Mars Bar was then 3d, equivalent to 1.5p now.)
Real starter
The fact I had the money excited me a great deal.
I phoned the number there and then, with my classmates crowded around the kiosk. They too were very interested, as it was the first ‘real’ motorcycle any of us had a chance of owning. This was also true of the village lads, if I obtained the little BSA it would be the first motorcycle in the village amongst us postwar boom-babies.
However, there was one very serious fly in the ointment. When my father had discovered my friends and I had been roaring about the old brick works (he had found out from the Lethern Bottel pub grapevine) in Woburn Sands on that moped (the ‘BSA flying wheel’) he had forbidden me to ever own a motorbike. True, like the others I had come off it a few times, ripping my trousers and gaining a few cuts and bruises. Trousers cost money so I ‘got it in the ear’ for the damage. Now that
I was growing eventually to reach 6ft (and only nine and a half stone or 62kg) he no longer chastised me. He saw motorcycles as dangerous machines. The fact he had run numerous prewar motorcycles in his youth did not seem to count. So it was I had to work on my mother in secret to get my savings book.
The head teacher did not like motorcycles either, but we had Mr Brown as a mediator. I won a prize for my technical drawing at the end of the easter term, and was awarded 10 shillings (50p) to be spent by choosing a book from WH Smith in the town. I chose Motorcycles and how to Manage Them by Iliffe, cost seven shillings and sixpence (35.5p.) I still have it. The head grimaced when he had to award it to me as I walked past him in line with other winners on that same stage. I read this book from cover to cover. It boasted on the cover that over 250,000 copies had been sold. I noted I had a 33rd impression, the first one being published in 1900 no less. On page 18, as fig 16, I was proud to see that a BSA C11 cylinder barrel and head was displayed.
I eventually convinced my mother to give me my Post Office Savings Book, as I was now 16 and capable of deciding my own life. She agreed but was none too happy about my father’s probable response when he found out.
The following day at school, I again phoned up the vendor of the elderly BSA to arrange a visit with the intention of buying it, if it met my needs. When I telephoned, it was from a kiosk outside the school, and I was ably assisted by a number of my eager classmates, all of whom wanted to accompany me on my adventure. They were, to a man, amazed that I was being permitted to buy a motorbike, and on my own. I explained my problem with my father’s view on the matter, and my intention of keeping the bike at the school’s club room, just as Clive was doing. Clive’s father was a motorcycling enthusiast so he had no problems in that direction. I arranged to view the BSA that evening in late March after school. With me as we walked all the way to Old Bletchley (the original village before the railway arrived) through the town was Clive and another classmate whose name I have now forgotten.
Good runner
We arrived about five o’clock, just as the seller arrived home from work on the bike. This was good news as if it was in regular use it must be a good runner.
The excitement was welling up inside me, as it was in my two friends. The house was the usual postwar three-bedroomed semi that surrounded the town in those days, built to accommodate many people who had moved out of London after the war.
Upon arrival I knocked on the front door, which was opened by a middle-aged man still wearing an old trench coat and corker helmet. He grinned and asked us all in. He took us out into the back yard and standing on its centre stand, parked alongside a small wooden shed, was my dream bike. In reality it was a well-worn, quite dirty and drab, little commuter motorcycle that the owner used to go the few miles to and from work each day. To me it was a shining machine that promised loads of fun and adventure. It was a BSA C11, the C11 being the model type indicating it was of 250cc capacity. It had been built in 1946, along with tens of thousands of other
BSAs that year.
As it was late March, and the roads were filthy and wet, the machine was quite dirty. It had a reasonable rear tyre, but a well worn front tyre. There was a frame for panniers on the back, it had a pillion seat, and the tank was coloured green with chrome flashes down each side.
The speedometer was set in the tank opposite the filler cap. Being quite modern it had coil ignition. I walked round the bike and inspected it. The owner then kick-started it and it fired up immediately then ‘ticked over’ evenly. I was impressed. He turned the switch on the headlamp on to work the side lights, then the headlamp, making it dip with a thumb switch on the handlebars. He depressed the foot brake pedal and the rear brake light worked. Switching it off he explained what all the levers on the handlebar actually did. I already knew but listened anyway. My two friends stood spellbound at the sight of a real working motorcycle. The horn was a hand-operated rubber-bulb type fitted on the handle bars.
We went back into the house, and the owner switched on the kitchen light. Only then did I realise it was getting dark. He produced the buff log-book from a drawer, along with a current MoT certificate. I was warned the road tax would run out in three months and the MoT before that. Wow, the thing really was road-legal, all I needed was insurance and a set of ‘L’ plates. I agreed to buy it, leaving a small deposit. We agreed to return the next evening with the cash and to take the BSA away.
Next month – does Neil return and collect the C11? And what will his father think?
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