A bike for a fiver!

Reading various experiences of bikes bought in the 1960s in the last issue of

OBM, there was a time when there was an abundance of old machines for not much money (although they probably seemed not so cheap at the time). I bought a few over perhaps five years to ride around the fields. That was between the age of 11 years old and when I left school at 15. I started so early because when I was a child, my dad, through no fault of his own, suffered with bad nerves and couldn’t face getting on a bus. We didn’t have a car in those days and so we didn’t go anywhere.

I decided to help on a local-ish farm – I’d heard that if you got stuck in, they let you drive the tractor. Very little health and safety in those days, and risk assessments were unheard of. It was about two miles away so I bought my first bike, a running 98cc Excelsior Autocycle, for £3 off an older lad at school. Then a family in the village bought their first car, an Austin A35, so there was a gentle knock on their front door and a BSA A7 with double adult sidecar was ours (a friend called Richard Clamp was with me), all for £5. Within the hour the sidecar was removed and dumped – sacrilege!

Two other bikes followed a year or two later, a BSA Bantam D1 rigid for £5 again, and a Velocette LE for £8. At the time it didn’t seem important to keep them for too long, but to enjoy them. But I never abused them either as I have always had mechanical sympathy and still have to this day.

John Bellamy