Drams and drama
THS IS A photo of my dad’s old Triumph Thunderbird – he bought it up in the Shetland Isles in 1965 and rode it for a year before selling it on. The picture shows my dad, Andrew Laurenson (on the bike) with my uncle George Anderson. The bike left the factory on December 20, 1952, and was later bought from Christie’s in Aberdeen by a Shetlands policeman, and my father purchased it from him in 1965.
At the time, dad was just out of his marine engineering apprenticeship with Harland & Wolff in Glasgow. He used to tell me that when they went out on a Friday night to a dance hall, he would pull the spark plug leads on his bike so that nobody could steal it – but would often forget and spend 20 minutes fruitlessly kicking the bike over until he remembered what he’d done. They would then ride home through the Gorbals (a rough area of Glasgow at the time) where they would dodge bottles being thrown at them! The other story he used to tell was how he would race a friend of his who had an Ariel Square Four – and how they’d line the bikes up at high speed and swap passengers.
Dad then sold the bike to a gentleman named Bertie Tait in January 1966 for 20 quid; he rode it until 1971 when it developed a mag fault and was stored until December 2007, when Bertie pulled it out and restored it to a high standard. Later, I got in touch with Bertie, who agreed to sell the Thunderbird to me. I had it shipped to my current home in Auckland, New Zealand and on December 13, 2021 it had it’s first run on Kiwi roads – 70 years after it left the Triumph factory. I’ve done over 1000 miles on the bike and enjoy it immensely, knowing that my dad rode it as a 25-year-old!