MCCANDLESS NORTON
We ride a rare prototype from the man who created the Featherbed
Stylish and with a radical frame that pre-dated the construction method later used by the most popular motorcycle ever, this Mccandless prototype could have revolutionised Norton’s future. But it was rejected by small-minded management with a lack of vision
The role of the Mccandless brothers from Northern Ireland – Rex, born in 1915, and Cromie, six years his junior – in providing Norton with the legendary Featherbed frame and swingarm rear suspension has been well documented. But what’s less well known is that the Featherbed 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. The ‘Mccandless Norton’ pictured on these pages is one such creation, although it proved too radically different from the norm for the company’s management to put into production.
As regards the Mccandless brothers’ modus operandi, Rex was the creative genius of the duo, leaving Cromie to run the company. In the seven years that they worked with Norton, the arrangement was that, for anything Rex suggested to them which worked, he’d be entitled to charge the company £1 per hour for conception and development. But if the idea didn’t work, there’d be no payment – a case of ‘heads I win, tails you lose’. Norton Managing Director Gilbert Smith must have been a masterful negotiator!
Having left his Belfast school in 1928 at the age of 13, by the outbreak of World War II Rex Mccandless was assembling Bristol Bombay transporter aircraft at Short Brothers and Harland. This was a reserved occupation which prevented him being called up, and 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 he won the 1940 Irish 500cc road race championship, held at Phoenix Park in Dublin; he also won the Irish hillclimb championship. 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.
Rex Mccandless 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 swivelled around when steering. I was in an area about which I knew nothing, but I set-to 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 Triumphengined motorcycle which he called the Benial (Gaelic for ‘Beast’). It employed a twin-loop frame of extremely rigid construction, fitted with modified rear suspension units from a Citroën car, mounted vertically. Its success inspired many local Ulster riders to seek the same benefits, including the works BSA trials and scrambles star Bill Nicholson, who also hailed from Belfast, and who by the summer of 1946 was dominating much of the British mainland’s off-road sport, thanks partly to the sprung rear end of his bikes. Besides his BSA works contract, Nicholson was also employed by Mccandless and his long-time friend, future IOM TT winner Artie Bell, who had by then entered into a business partnership in Belfast to develop and manufacture Rex’s spring-frame conversion. Its efficiency was demonstrated when a team from Ireland, entirely equipped with Mccandless sprung rear ends, took on an English team mounted on more powerful rigid-framed bikes at a Brands Hatch grasstrack meeting in 1946. The Irish team beat them comprehensively in a potent advertisement of the Mccandless conversion’s benefits. During 1946 and the first six months 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 Ariel Square Four
owner James Ferriday, owner of Feridax in Birmingham. 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. Thus relieved of the task 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 used the Norton engine as the basis, partly because he viewed the existing Garden Gate plunger frame as being well past its sell-by date. Race chief Joe Craig, another Ulsterman and 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 fix together bits of tube and some lugs. There were 96 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 60 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 that it replaced. A breakthrough came when Norton director Bill Mansell invited Rex Mccandless to work for the company on a freelance basis, and he duly created the Featherbed frame specifically for them. “I said to Gilbert Smith: ‘You are not unapproachable [Norton’s slogan back then], 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’s 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. 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 outhandle 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.”
The Featherbed, of course, proved an immediate racing success – but Norton was unable to reproduce the frames in-house, and neither could Reynolds Tubes. So together with his assistant Oliver Nelson, Rex Mccandless made all the works Norton frames between 1950 and 1953 in Belfast. To address the problem of adapting the Featherbed frame to volume production, Mccandless conceived a composite version of the frame. This saw the front part retained – but now bolted to a rear section comprising a pressed steel structure such as would be readily obtainable from any of the numerous suppliers to the motor industry in Norton’s West Midlands manufacturing base.
To power the model, as Norton’s engine of the future rather than a single, Mccandless chose the recently launched brand-new overhead-valve 497cc parallel-twin Dominator motor designed by Bert Hopwood, which began reaching
‘THE NEW DOMINATOR ENGINE WAS CHOSEN TO POWER THE PROTOTYPE’
customers in 1949 in the plunger-framed Model 7. In creating his swingarm prototype, Mccandless not only employed his twin-shock rear end, but also paid close attention to the styling of the bike – not just to make it look good and suitably avantgarde, but also to address the problems of weight distribution and swivelling mass he’d encountered a decade earlier on his Triumph.
Mccandless presented the prototype to Norton in the summer of 1950. But when Gilbert Smith saw it, he’s reputed to have shaken his head and announced that Norton couldn’t consider it, as they’d just ordered two years’ worth of frame lug forgings for the Dominator Model 7 chassis, and wouldn’t dream of paying the cancellation penalties!
Almost inevitably, the abortive Mccandless-framed Dominator has ended up in that paradise for prototypes, the Sammy Miller Museum in New Milton, Hampshire. While 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 four-cylinder Norton with a 1938 Fiat 500 car engine set lengthways in an extended Featherbed frame, with a pressed steel rear end!”
Like many of the exotic Nortons to be found in the museum’s Norton Gallery, the Dominator-engined Mccandless prototype arrived 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 specialbuilder in his spare time, and I had the greatest respect for his constant ability to come up with something new 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 Street was shut down as Norton production moved to Plumstead in 1963, 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,” explains Sammy. “So he acquired whatever he was allowed to take, like the side-valve Dominator police bike we have here, or the 1953 Military twin next to it, 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 North West 200, as well as the 250cc high-cam prototype, the horizontal-cylinder F-type, the rotary-valve cylinder head, and many pieces of the abortive 500cc four-cylinder racer. We have a lot to thank him for.”
Sammy acquired the Mccandless Dominator in 1970, making it one of his earliest acquisitions for the museum, but it has never been run in public. Sammy and his helper Jim Devereux had to recommission the bike’s Dominator engine (number 28955 E12), which included getting the magneto rewound and other sundry tasks. The result is an insight into what the world of Norton might have been if
it hadn’t been for Gilbert Smith’s parsimony in bulk-ordering plunger frame lugs! Its post-modern styling not only looks much sleeker and more stylish than the neo-vintage-looking plunger-framed Model 7 Dominator of the day, 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 55½in (1410mm) wheelbase. That’s partly because the height of the very neat-looking seat (with separate pillion section moulded in) has been lowered an inch to 29in, 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.
Combined with the gently pulled-back and slightly raised handlebars, 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 shocks are 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’ve presumably had very little use helps. The Roadholder forks were 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 similar vintage. The elderly original tyres – a 20in front and 19in rear – meant I couldn’t exploit the presumably superior handing of the composite frame around a tighter bend, but I can report that the unregistered bike sat rock steady at 60mph 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 for Norton, both in terms of styling and dynamics – but especially also of cost. Less than a decade later, the Ariel Leader 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. It was simply too far ahead of its time.
PAY THE MCCANDLESS PROTOYTPE A VISIT
To see the Norton Prototype, visit the Sammy Miller Museum in New Milton, Hampshire. It’s open to visitors daily from 10am. Call 01425 620777 or visit sammymiller.co.uk for more details. Changing government guidelines regarding social gatherings during the Covid-19 pandemic may affect museum opening times. Please check before travel.