Eric Walsh Bantam genius
“It remains the most amazing bike I have ever ridden” Bill Lomas, 350cc World Champion, speaking on the Walsh Bantam.
If you followed motorcycle racing in the ‘fifties, you would know of the Walsh Bantam and its creator, Eric Walsh. In fact, Walsh Bantams is more correct, since there was always more than one, drawn from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of frames, engines and assorted bits, but generally only one running at any given time.
But first, let’s look at Eric Walsh; the man. Melbournite Eric was another whose racing career was seriously interrupted by WW2. Usually Velocette mounted, Eric was a very handy competitor on grass tracks and what passed for scrambles circuits in prewar Victoria, and resumed racing as soon as he could once peace returned. At places like the annual road races at Ballarat, a little later at Darley and Fishermen’s Bend and Rowville, and at various grass tracks, Eric showed his speed had not diminished during the enforced sabbatical. But a badly broken leg convinced him that a comeback would not be wise, and he turned his attention to the class of racing that was becoming increasingly popular – the Ultra Lightweight or 125cc category.
In the late 1940s Eric was working for Victorian BSA distributors Finlay Brothers, and was highly respected for his tuning skills. The Bantam was a runaway best seller, and not a few people, Eric included, saw potential in this engine for racing. BSA did too, producing sets of close ratio gears for the three-speed gearbox that were readily available and affordable. Prior to his retirement from racing, Eric rode a Bantam owned by Finlay Brothers that featured his own ideas inside the engine, and which was extremely competitive. He did, however, lock horns with a man several years his Junior who was also a fierce competitor and a dab hand when it came to extracting performance from two strokes – Bert Flood. The clashes between these two talented but equally irascible personalities was noted in the Bert Flood feature in OBA 58 – sparks flew at every encounter! Outwardly, there wasn’t anything too special about Walsh’s machines, at least in the early days. Once the plunger rear suspension frame became available for the Bantam it took over from the rigid frame and was used exclusively and largely unmodified. The rudimentary Bantam forks were retained. As the legend of the Walsh-tuned Bantams grew, Eric enlisted two highly talented riders; Ken Rumble and Maurie Quincey. Rumble, in particular, was a gifted all-round rider, excelling in every branch of the sport from scrambles to road racing. Maurie Quincey was the rising star of Australian road racing in the early 1950s, and gladly accepted the offer of a ride from Eric. The Ultra Lightweight class was beginning to gain recognition, and was included on the program for the country’s premier event, the very wet NSW TT at Bathurst at Easter in 1952. The race attracted an amazing entry of 46, with the ungainly racing versions of the Lambretta scooter as the main challenge to BSA supremacy. Charging through the field after a slow start, Quincey crashed at Murray’s Corner but remounted and won going away from Bill Morris’ six-speed Bantam – achieved by mounting a Douglas two speed gearbox above the Bantam gearbox and coupling the pair by chain. Rumble, at that stage more noted as a scrambles
rider, achieved hero status at the 1952 Victoria Scrambles Championship at St. Helena when he won every class from 125cc to 500cc on the Walsh Bantam. The following year, when the inaugural Australian Scrambles Championship was conducted at Korweinguboora, Rumble won both the 125 and 250 titles, and repeated the feat in 1954 when the titles were held in Adelaide. With dozens of title wins, the Walsh Bantams were already legendary in Australia, but in 1956 things transpired to extend the fame abroad. English stars Bill Lomas and Dickie Dale arrived for a sixmeeting racing holiday with a pair of works Moto Guzzi singles, and predictably demolished the local opposition. But Lomas, a noted two-stroke engineer, was flabbergasted at the speed of the Walsh Bantam in Rumble’s hands. He and Eric Walsh became good friends, and Lomas borrowed the Bantam following the meeting at Mildura, recording well over 100 miles per hour on the long downhill straight. Lomas wrote in the British press that this machine would challenge any 125cc GP machine in the world, even the works DOHC MV he had ridden in the World Championships. It was Lomas who arranged a supply of dependable piston rings from the UK, eliminating the main bugbear of not just Walsh’s engines, but other big-port two strokes. The normal cast iron rings would get tangled in the ports and break, but the British-made Dykes pattern rings, which were so flexible they could be bent out of shape without snapping, virtually cured the problem. “I suggested to Eric that a full streamlined fairing would give an extra six mph”, said Lomas, “and I let him measure the Guzzi fairing and he managed to get one of similar shape made and fitted before the meeting at Fisherman’s Bend. I had a day trying it out for him on some quiet outback roads. The speedo showed 110 mph! I had 200 steel piston rings made for him in the UK, and forged pieces of RR56 alloy to make pistons from. These helped to improve the reliability.” Paul Reed was a contemporary of Walsh’s and successfully raced a Bantam of his own in the same period. “My Bantam was quicker in acceleration but Walsh’s had much faster top end, but no torque. We were all working on the principle of continuous flow of gas in exhaust ports even when the piston was coming down to produce an extraction (expansion) effect. All good Bantams used available over-thecounter BSA CR gears. Never gave any trouble. Bill Morris had a two speed Douglas gearbox mounted above the Bantam gearbox under the carb, producing a 6-speeder somehow*. Eric’s bike (and several
others) used Bantam forks with a Royal Enfield 7 inch front brake – cast alloy hub with ribs. There was never any one definitive (Walsh) bike. He used standard frames with several different engines. He was always trying variations of heads, barrels etc.”
Shortly after Lomas’ visit however, tragedy struck when Eric Walsh was severely injured in a freak workshop accident. The engines were rightly described as ‘light switches’ – either on or off, with virtually no low-down torque. According to Trevor Pound, the method of warming the engines up was to hold the throttle on full bore for several seconds, then shut off and repeat the exercise. While performing the operation, Eric was leaning over the bike when the outside flywheel disintegrated. He copped the full blast in the face, and the recovery process was very slow. In fact, it ushered in the end of the Walsh Bantam era. In September 1957, Trevor Pound persuaded Eric to encase the engine in a special lay-down frame, which was itself enclosed in a cigar-shaped shell. The shell was in fact an ex RAAF aircraft belly tank, suitably cut about. The idea was to contest the Australian 125cc Land Speed record at Coonabarabran in outback NSW, but after the marathon trek from Melbourne the usually reliable engine disgraced itself by lunching the magneto on the first run. With no replacement available and no repair possible, the trip was wasted. Trevor Pound remembers his experiences with the Walsh Bantam well. “I’d been racing the 125 Walsh Bantam as well as Jimmy Guilfoyle’s 250, 350 and 500 BSAs. The Walsh Bantam was virtually unbeatable in its day and pretty much ahead of anything in Europe at that time. It was the fame of the Walsh Bantam that led the editor of the UK Motor Cycle magazine to interview me as soon as I arrived in England to race in 1959. Eric had received severe face and head injuries and had not run the Bantams since that injury, until the build up for the Coonabarabran Speed Trials (See OBA 6). This was to be his “swan song”. Unfortunately, Eric had never kept much in the way of written records and relied pretty much on memory, and after the head injuries he was struggling. Eric had an old aircraft belly tank lying in his backyard and he asked me to see if I could fit inside it, laying flat, and if so whether we could build a special frame to fit into it with the engine behind my back. I could, and we did. Eric welded up a trial chassis and we tested to see if it was steerable (with one foot on either side of a small front wheel) without engine by Eric pushing me up and down the street outside his house. We got the
chassis to work OK but the “belly tank” needed some aerodynamic work which we did by making up a plywood tail fin and a bit of other smoothing. I also designed a cockpit top to fit over my head when I was inside the shell, but we didn’t get time to finish this before the scheduled trial date. We had to cut open slots under the footrests on each side of the front wheel so that I could drop my feet and stop the bike falling over … this turned out to be a bit tricky at times. “Eric had never known what revs the Bantams did, they only ever had speedos and no rev counters, and Eric only knew gear ratios by what chain sprockets he used on different tracks. So we had to guess the gearing that we’d try at Coonabarabran. Considering the state of his health at that time Eric did a brilliant job of putting a competitive engine together, but it was not anything like his best engines, and we had troubles with the engine over the total time of the Coonabarabran trials. But we got there OK.”
Eric never completely recovered from his injuries and was fast losing interest, and in 1958 sold one of the complete machines to NSW rider Noel Gardiner. Gardiner thought the plunger frame was out-dated – a view not shared by Eric – and so the engine was placed in a swinging arm frame prior to the sale. Victorian Motor Cycle News, aka The Green Horror, reported the sale as a front-page scoop on May 30th, 1958.
Walsh Bantam sold!
The world famous Walsh BSA Bantam road racing model has been sold, and for the first time the guarded secrets of its “internals” – and tuning – will be known to other than Eric Walsh himself. Neil (sic) Gardiner, of Windsor NSW, a young rider who raced at Bathurst last Easter, is the new owner and has accepted Eric Walsh’s condition of sale that he take delivery of the model after the 125cc race at Darley on June 16, as confirmation of its engine performance. It is said that “about £300 was the price paid”. The Walsh Bantam which is said to have completed over 3,000 racing miles since it came into being some six years ago – has been greatly modified
and improved in the light of experience gained in racing. It has a formidable list of title races and lap records to its credit, ridden by Maurie Quincey, George Morrison, Ken Rumble, Don (sic) Miles, Don Cameron and Trevor Pound. Authoritive proof of its performance, and which gained it world recognition, came when Bill Lomas, as the 350cc world champion, race-tested the model himself to claim it “well capable of over 100 mph”. Dickie Dale also confirmed his report in a road test. At the Easter Bathurst GP in 1959, Gardiner sensationally defeated the four stroke MV Agusta of Roy East to win the 125cc GP. But it was to prove the last gasp for the Bantam, with other MVs and then the first of the Hondas taking over the class. Eric Walsh drifted away from the motorcycle scene (at least, for a while) and became enmeshed in the booming go kart craze, where he prepared McCulloch engines that were immediately successful, as were his McCulloch chain saw engines that won two world championships.
But Eric wasn’t completely finished with bikes, nor with Bantams. Although he had sold ‘The Walsh Bantam’ to Noel Gardiner, it seems there were a few more stashed away in the shed. Bill Pound, Trevor’s brother, was the man chosen to pilot the last incarnation of the Walsh Bantam, which even in the ‘60s, continued with Walsh’s predilection for the plunger Bantam frame. Bill takes up the story:
“I knew Eric well after the successful era of the Bantams, I met him through the days I used his workshop to make flywheels for the Guilfoyle BSAs that brother Trevor rode in the 1950s. I later made flywheels for the Walsh Bantams. But I also worked for Eric in the early sixties, when he owned a petrol station (BP North Ivanhoe) and I ran it for him. At that time he was heavily involved in go karts and the old Bantams were just laying around his place.
I don’t recall how I got the bike, I never bought it or sold it so I assume Eric just gave it to me to use. The version I had was the last development of it. Eric had been playing with putting a vacuum gauge on the crankcases to see if there was any primary vacuum in the cases, when he found none, he tried mounting the remote bowl of the GP carb on a bowden cable. The bike had a magnetic tacho and he told me when it got to 9,000 rpm, to raise the float level. He raised it 1/4” with an advance/retard lever. How the hell this worked defies logic but as soon as I did that, it would go to 12,000rpm. Nobody ever checked what maximum speed was. With the 3-speed gearbox it was no match in lap times with contemporary 125 bikes but it was a lot faster in top speed than the CB92 Honda I had back then, which was well over 100mph. He used a gramophone needle to prevent the piston rings rotating, and used a single cord spacer ring as a compression ring. Eric would laugh like buggery when he went to meetings and all the other Bantams had the same exhaust as he had on at the last meeting; some were square, others round. He said the bike went the same with no pipe at all, it just spewed oil all over the place.”
Eric Walsh passed away in September 1984. The ex-Noel Gardiner Walsh Bantam, now owned by the late Noel Gardiner’s family, is on permanent display at the National Motor Racing Museum, Bathurst.