An early passion for motorcycles

Reading Neil Cairns’ article, The Autumn of a 46 BSA

C11, in the September issue certainly brought back some very fond memories for me and made me aware that

Neil and I have quite a lot in common!

I was born perhaps a couple of years before Neil, at the end of the Second World War in December

1945, but I had a passion for motocyclces from the age of about 13. Indeed, we had even more in common than I first realised – I too won some book vouchers for GCS General Proficiency (the only prize I ever won at school) and hot-footed it down to

W H Smith to buy the very same excellent book that Neil did, Motorcycles and How To Manage Them. It was even the same edition, the 33rd, published in 1960, which I still have to this day.

My best pal at school, Rob Lee, who lived two doors down from me, shared my early teenage obsession with motorcycles. We would take turns to buy The Motor Cycle every week (9d per copy!) and drool over Manx Nortons, Triumph Trophys and Bonnevilles, Velocettes,

BSA RGSs and Gold Stars!

Strangely enough, Rob’s first motorcycle was even a 1946 BSA C11 with wine colour paint, with a top end of about 60mph, which seemed fast after a push bike.

My first motorcycle was a 1949 P&M Panther 65 (registration MKE 759) with solid rear suspension and Dowty Oleomatic front forks, which I swapped for an electric guitar with a trainee teacher at my secondary school in Ramsgate. It had a burned-out exhaust valve and I had to push it about two miles home one dark, drizzly November evening in 1962 when my dad had taken my mum to the flicks. He, like Neil’s father, was dead against me having a motorcycle, so I leaned it up against the front wall of the house and very nervously awaited their return from the local flea pit!

On stripping it down with an engineer/fitter friend of the family, we found that someone had placed a

350c ‘pot’ on the bike, so it was always a bit quicker on acceleration than Rob’s C11 (much to his frustration!).

My soft schoolboy hands were soon sore and blistered from hours of grinding in new valve seats on our back garden shed. But it was well worth it in that it taught me a lot about engines and what made them tick. Sadly, Rob and I lost touch many years ago, I don’t know if his love of motorcycles continued but mine certainly has.

I now own a couple of vintage machines, including a 1934 P&M Red Panther 250cc which has been fully restored and, in between times, have owned several more modern Japanese machines, but I guess I will always be firmly wedded to the ‘old Brit’ machines of my early youth.

Harry Watkins, Felixstowe, Suffolk