Missed chance?
The role of the two McCandless brothers from Northern Ireland, Rex – born in 1915 – and Cromie, six years younger, in providing Norton with the legendary Featherbed frame and swinging-arm rear suspension which transformed the way its motorcycles handled, has been well documented. But what’s less well known is that this was just one of several prototypes that the brothers created in Belfast in the immediate post war era, primarily for Norton, despite the fact that neither of them was ever employed directly by the Birmingham factory.
During the seven years they worked together, the arrangement was that for anything that Rex McCandless – he was the creative genius of the duo, leaving Cromie to run the company – suggested to Norton which worked, he’d be entitled to charge the company £1 per hour on conceiving it, and developing it. But if the idea didn't work, there’d be no payment, so – heads I win, tails you lose. Norton MD Gilbert Smith must have been a masterful negotiator! Despite having left school in Belfast in 1928 aged 13 with no formal education, by 1939 and the outbreak of WW2 Rex McCandless was assembling Bristol Bombay transporter aircraft at Short Brothers and Harland, nowadays Bombardier. This was a reserved occupation which prevented him being
called up, but which still left time for him to play about with motorcycles. Rex began racing his selftuned Triumph Tiger road bike, and in his first ever road race won the 1940 Irish 500cc championship, held at Phoenix Park in Dublin, and he also won the Irish Hillclimb title. This led to a short but successful racing career, in which he was recruited to race for the Norton works team in the 1948 Ulster 350cc GP – his first introduction to the British manufacturer, which led in turn to his working on various development projects with them.
For Rex had become increasingly fascinated with the handling problems he was experiencing on his Triumph racer, and the means of resolving them.
In a 1989 interview with Scottish journalist Gordon Small, he explained his preoccupations. "I had noticed that when I removed weight in the shape of a heavy mudguard and a headlight, that the bike steered a lot better. It made me think about things which swiveled around when steering. I was in an area about which I knew nothing, but I set to find out. It seemed obvious to me that rigidity of the frame was of paramount importance. That the wheels would stay in line, in the direction the rider pointed the bicycle, regardless of whether it was cranked over for a corner, and to resist the bumps on the road attempting to deflect it. Of equal importance was that the wheels would stay in contact with the road. That may seem obvious, but fast motorcycles then bounced all over the place. I decided that soft springing, properly and consistently damped, was required.”
To this end, in 1944 Rex built and raced his own Triumph-engined motorcycle which he called the Benial, the Gaelic for ‘Beast’. It employed a twinloop frame of extremely rigid construction, fitted with modified rear suspension units from a Citroen car, mounted vertically. The success he had with this inspired many local Ulster riders to seek the same benefits, including the works BSA trials and scrambles star Bill Nicholson. Nicholson was employed by McCandless and his long-time friend, future IoM TT winner Artie Bell, who had entered into a business partnership in Belfast to develop and manufacture
Rex’s spring frame conversion. Its efficiency was demonstrated at a Brands Hatch grass track meeting in 1946, when a team from Ireland entirely equipped with McCandless sprung rear ends took on one from England, all mounted on rigid framed bikes. The English team included stars like Jock West and Eric Oliver, on much more powerful machinery, but the Irish team beat them comprehensively in a potent advertisement of the McCandless conversion’s benefits.
Hence, during 1946 and the first half of 1947 the company had a flood of customers for its rear spring-frame conversion, which it carried out on dozens of competition and touring bikes. One such satisfied customer was James Ferriday, owner of ‚
Feridax in Birmingham, who had a conversion carried out on his own Ariel Square Four. He was so impressed that in July 1947 he arranged a licensing agreement to carry out the McCandless spring-frame conversion for £25 from a factory unit in Cheltenham. This meant that, relieved of the job of looking after the sale of his conversion kits, Rex McCandless immediately began attending to his principal aim, to produce the ultimate road racing chassis on which to mount his “spring heel”, as Motor Cycling magazine had christened his idea. McCandless decided to use the Norton race engine as the basis for his design, partly because he viewed the existing Garden Gate plunger frame as being well past its use-by date. Race chief Joe Craig, another Ulsterman but primarily an engine man, had developed it, and though Rex was by then riding for the Norton team, he lacked confidence in Craig’s ability to design successful frames. "In 1949 we went to the Continent with eight racing bicycles and five spare frames,” he told Small. “We came home with three roadworthy machines. All the rest were broken, some in several places. Joe’s answer to frames breaking was to make them heavier and stronger." Rex believed that the poor record of Norton racing frames at that time showed insufficient understanding of the structures involved. "All they did was to fit together bits of tube and some lugs. There were ninety-six machining operations in a Garden Gate frame. My Featherbed frame had two, it never broke when I myself made it. It steered perfectly, and was sixty pounds lighter." Creating a brand-new frame proved no easy task and McCandless produced several prototypes, each one tested by Artie Bell and proving an advance over the one it replaced. A breakthrough came when Norton director Bill Mansell invited Rex McCandless to work freelance for the company, and he duly created the Featherbed frame specifically for them. “I said to Gilbert Smith, "You are not unapproachable [Norton's slogan back then – AC], and you are not the world’s best road holder. I have a bicycle that is miles better," McCandless told Gordon Small. Norton didn't believe him, so a test was set up in the autumn of 1949 in the Isle of Man where a relative of Cromie McCandless’ wife was the chief of police. "There wasn't much traffic about on the roads we wanted to use, and what traffic there was, was stopped!" Rex recalled. "Artie Bell was on my bicycle, Geoff Duke was on a Garden Gate, and both had works engines. Gilbert Smith, Joe Craig and I stood on the outside of the corner at Kate's Cottage. We could hear them coming from about the 33rd Milestone. When Geoff came through Kate's he was needing all the road. Artie rode round the outside of him on full bore, miles an hour faster, and in total control. They then knew that my bicycle could out-handle theirs – but would it break? We took a Featherbed to the Montlhéry Bowl near Paris, and Artie, Geoff, Harold Daniell, Johnny Lockett and I belted it around for two days. We went through two engines, then the snow came on. The frame still hadn't broken, so we all went home.”
In the Isle of Man in 1950 the first three places in the Senior TT and Junior TT were taken by Norton riders. All were mounted on Nortons fitted with McCandless frames and Rex's own patented hydraulic shock absorbers, with a reservoir built in to stop the oil overheating and cavitating. However, Norton itself was unable to reproduce the frames
“A breakthrough came when Norton director Bill Mansell invited Rex McCandless to work freelance for the company, and he duly created the Featherbed frame specifically for them.”
in-house, and neither could Reynolds Tubes. So Rex McCandless and his welder, Oliver Nelson came over from Belfast and set up in a disused cart dock at Norton’s Bracebridge Street factory. With their own jig they built the first 10 frames for the works team, then returned to Belfast where they made the rest of the works Norton frames between 1950 and 1953. However, the problem of adapting the Featherbed frame to volume production remained, so to eliminate the manufacturing problems then entailed, especially in producing the wide loops to the duplex frame, Rex McCandless conceived a composite version of the frame for series production. This saw the front part retained, but now attached to a rear section comprising a pressed steel structure such as would be readily obtainable from any of the numerous concerns in Norton’s West Midlands base supplying such parts to the British motor industry headquartered there. To power the model, as Norton’s engine of the future rather than a single, McCandless chose the recently-launched brand-new OHV 497cc parallel-twin Dominator motor designed by Bert Hopwood, which began reaching customers in 1949 in the plunger-framed Model 7. In creating his swinging-arm prototype, McCandless not only employed his by now well-established twin-shock rear end, but also paid close attention to the styling of the bike, not just to make it look good and suitably avant-garde, but also to address the problems of weight distribution and swivelling mass he’d encountered a decade earlier in adapting his
Triumph Tiger for racing.
The result looked good and reportedly handled well, so in the aftermath of the Featherbed frame’s successful debut at Blandford in April 1950 and its blitz of the Isle of Man TT races two months later, McCandless presented the Dominator prototype to the Norton directors that summer. But when Gilbert Smith saw it, he’s reputed to have shaken his head and announced that Norton couldn’t consider taking it on, for the good reason that they’d just ordered two years’ worth of frame lug forgings for the Dominator Model 7’s plunger chassis, and couldn’t conceive of paying the penalties for cancelling that! So that’s why the Featherbed-framed Model 88 Dominator wasn’t available to British customers until 1954.
Almost inevitably, the abortive prototype McCandless-framed Norton Dominator has ended up in that paradise for prototypes, the Sammy Miller Museum on England’s South Coast. Growing up in Belfast, Sammy began worshipping at the Rex McCandless altar of inspired alternative engineering, at the age of 14. “I and my pals would stop off at the McCandless garage in Woodstock Road quite often on the way home from school, and occasionally they’d let us sit on the bikes,” recalls Sammy. “The one I remember best was their prototype fourcylinder Norton with a 1938 Fiat 500 car engine set lengthways in an extended Featherbed frame, with a pressed steel rear end. The gearchange was on the handlebar, like on a Vespa scooter!”
Like many of the exotic Nortons to be found in the Museum’s Norton Gallery, the twin-cylinder Dominator-engined McCandless prototype arrived there courtesy of the late Bob Collier. “I knew Bob quite well when I was at Ariel in the ‘50s, and he was just round the corner at Norton, working in their Experimental Department,” says Sammy. “He was an inveterate special-builder in his spare time, and I had the greatest respect for his constant ‚
ability to come up with something that nobody else had thought of, and the fact that he did all of the work in building these bikes himself, often on a shoestring.”
According to Miller, Collier had “quite a big van”, so when the Birmingham factory at Bracebridge St. was shut down as Norton production moved to Plumstead in 1963, a decade after it had been acquired by AMC, Bob began clearing out the numerous prototypes and special parts before they reached the rubbish tip. “He couldn’t stand the thought of all those bits of Norton history going to the scrapyard,” says Sammy, “so he acquired whatever he was allowed to take away, like the side-valve Dominator police bike we have here, or the 1953 Military twin, or indeed this McCandless pressed-steel twin. He was also responsible for saving the Kneeler that I’d watched Ray Amm riding in the 1953 NW200, as well as the 250cc high-cam prototype, the horizontal-cylinder F-type, the rotaryvalve cylinder head, and many pieces of the abortive 500cc four-cylinder racer. If not for him all these pieces of Norton history would have been scrapped, so we have a lot to thank him for.”
Sammy acquired the McCandless Dominator from Collier in 1970, making it one of his earliest acquisitions for the Museum. The Dominator has never been run in public, having spent the past fifty years as a static exhibit after being started just once on acquisition to ensure it was indeed a runner. So to fire it up for me to take the unregistered prototype for a series of runs along the mile-long private driveway leading to a neighbour’s house, Sammy and his helper Jim Devereux had to recommission the bike’s Dominator engine no. 28955 E12, which included getting the magneto rewound, and other sundry tasks.
The result was a window on what the world of Norton might have been if not for CEO Gilbert Smith’s parsimony in bulk-ordering plunger frame lugs! Even devoid of a rear numberplate and lighting, the postmodern styling of the 1950 McCandless prototype looks far sleeker and more stylish than the neovintage looking plunger-framed Model 7 Dominator of the day, with its old-style sprung separate seat, and would have represented a potent challenge to that bike’s biggest rival, the market-leading Triumph Speed Twin. But it’s also more comfortable to sit on than even the Model 88 version of the Dominator sold in Britain from 1953 onwards, despite having the same 1410mm wheelbase. That’s partly because the height of the very neat-looking seat with separate pillion section moulded in, has been lowered 25mm to 737mm, but mainly because the pressed-steel section ending between your legs where it meets the seat is quite a bit narrower than the Wideline Featherbed tubular steel frame which eventually adorned the Model 88. This essentially was a mild steel copy of the racing chassis McCandless had designed for the Manx GP racer, where rider comfort was a lower priority than how well it handled at speed in turns. This means you feel more comfortable on the composite-framed Dominator, with more of a sense of being a part of the bike than on the Featherbed model, without the frame rails digging into the inside of your thighs, and it’s also easier to put your feet flat on the ground at rest.
Combined with the gently pulled-back and slightly raised handlebar, the result is a comfy, rational riding stance which also benefits from the far superior ‘spring heel’ rear suspension on the McCandless bike, as compared to the plunger-framed 1950 Model 7 Dominator. The twin rear shocks were of the Belfast brothers’ own manufacture, and even 70 years on they work really well by the standards of today, though I suppose the fact they’re presumably pretty much brand new might help explain that, with just two miles on the Smiths speedo that came with the bike, probably clocked up mainly by being pushed around from one storage area to another. The Roadholder fork was already a Norton breakthrough in terms of suspension, but the McCandless rear end made this bike seem a much more modern ride than anything I’ve sampled before of that vintage. The elderly original tyres – a nowadays scarce 20-inch front and 19-inch rear – meant I couldn’t exploit the presumably superior handing of the composite frame around a tighter bend, but the bike sat rock steady at 60 mph around the pair of fast sweepers in the driveway, one with a bump right on the apex.
The McCandless Dominator concept was a giant missed opportunity by Norton, both in terms of styling and dynamics, but especially also of cost.
Less than a decade later the Ariel Leader in Britain, and most notably the world’s most popular motorcycle ever, the Honda Super Cub, which both debuted in 1958, would demonstrate the advantages obtained by the extensive use of steel pressings in their manufacture. Sadly, Norton had the chance to beat them to the punch with this prototype – but failed to do so. Perhaps it was simply just too far ahead of its time.