Putting on the style…
Pete Kelly reveals the life-changing influences that motorcycling had on his life during the bitter-sweet era of the 1960s.
Anyone who grew up in the 1960s will remember the decade as one of previously unimaginable opportunities and freedoms. In the very first year National Service came to an end, so no more call-up papers would be dropping through the door and, with jobs aplenty to choose from, young folk had money in their pockets and couldn’t wait to spend it on whatever they wanted.
Motorcycling in general, and motorcycle sport in particular, was going through a boom period, and with many of us wanting to ape our heroes of the day – whether it was giving our machines sportier looks or buying the best leather gear we could afford – our hobby was all about ‘putting on the style.’
As Mortons’ incomparable motorcycling archive clearly recalls, it was a time when fairings, alloy wheel rims, racing-style petrol tanks, and other ‘go-faster’ accessories were in huge demand, and this led in turn to the specialist manufacture of ready-made café racers boasting all the racing ‘musts,’ mostly with Triumph or Norton parallel twins at their heart.
Whether it was handlebar fairings and leg shields on ride-to-work lightweights, or dolphins and full ‘dustbins’ on larger capacity sportsters, it was the looks that mattered, even if it did mean extending lighting wiring all over the place!
The style factor also extended to riding gear and, although back then taking to the road in single-piece racing leathers was nowhere near as common as it is today, many of us still dreamed of owning a stylishlycut leather jacket, along with proper riding boots and a smart pair of racing gloves. An ACU-approved ‘pudding basin’ helmet was also a must for many riders, even though helmets did not become compulsory until 1973.
My obsession with motorcycling started one teatime when Dad arrived home from work – not on the bicycle he’d set off on, but on a sparkling brand new NSU Quickly N moped. He let his imagination rip as he described the incredible part-exchange deal that French’s bike and moped shop in Earlestown, Lancashire, had given him on the old BSA ‘Star Rider’ bicycle – by my calculations a fiver at most – and despite Mum’s initial misgivings about what the Quickly had cost (about £65 plus hire-purchase charges), even she was pleased that he would no longer have to pedal 12 miles to work and back in all weathers, five days a week.
Until then, our family transport had always been on foot, by bicycle or on the bus, and the two-speed light-grey moped, with its excellent front suspension and comfortable rubberised single seat, was a huge temptation for my younger brother Geoff and me. Dad must have known that we rode it around the back garden when his back was turned, but only once did I hear him mutter: “Next time you decide to go grasstracking, you can pay for some petrol!”
Eventually the Quickly was swapped for a three-speed 60cc
Puch Cheetah scooter, whose stubby dual seat allowed Mum to enjoy an occasional sedate pillion ride. Soon after buying myself a secondhand Norman Nippy, I asked Dad if I could borrow the little red and grey machine, on account of its extra reserve of power (!) in order to visit my grandparents, who were spending their summers in a caravan at Winkup’s Holiday Camp near Rhyl, North Wales, some 50 miles away.
“As long as you fill the tank and don’t come off it,” he said, but several miles before reaching my destination, there was a horrible grating noise and the back wheel locked up when the chain came off inside its fully-enclosed case. I could find no tools, so I had to walk more than four miles with the back end of the scooter lifted clear of the ground, before finally reaching the caravan.
As Grandma poured me a glass of lemon barley water, Grandad (who was never without his tools) had the chaincase off in five minutes. He couldn’t believe how far I’d ridden with a chain so slack that he had to remove links before giving it a good coating of oil and refitting it – but the difference in smoothness on the way home was amazing!
The Cheetah was eventually swapped for a secondhand beigecoloured Vespa, and one morning I was following Dad, with Geoff on his pillion, when the scooter’s front tyre blew out completely and the two of them came off (fortunately without injury) despite Dad’s brief but epic battle for control.
Worse was to follow, though, for after borrowing the Vespa some weeks later, Geoff managed to come off it in teeming rain all on his own, which meant that both side pods were now badly scored.
“I’ll fix it,” he told Dad, and got to work smoothing down and filling both pods – but when it came to the repainting, he decided to brush paint them in an incongruous
(to say the least) metallic blue Hammerite!
The next two steps, mentioned a couple of issues ago, were major indeed; a 500cc Matchless G9 outfit with a classic Watsonian child/adult sidecar, followed by a lovely black and cream BSA A10 hitched to a Busmar double-adult chair.
By then I’d become hooked on motorcycling, and couldn’t wait for the weekly magazines to arrive at the newsagent’s. I’d read every page, advertisements included, and although I lived a good 200 miles north of the capital, I soon became familiar with the addresses of all the big London dealers.
The inside pages of The Motor Cycle, which abbreviated its title to Motor Cycle along with a big typographical and design makeover in 1962, always featured: Claude Rye Ltd of Fulham Road, Fulham SW6; Pride & Clarke Ltd of Stockwell Road, Brixton SW9; Whitby’s of 263273 The Vale, Acton W3; Geo Clarke of Brixton Hill SW2; Raymond Way of Willesden Lane NW6; Lewis Leathers Ltd of Great Portland Street
W1; Rowland Smith of Hampstead High Street NW3; Godfrey’s (who in 1962 had branches in West Croydon, South Croydon, Great Portland Street, Forest Gate, East Ham and Leytonstone); E. S. Motors of 319-325 High Road, Chiswick W4; George Grose Ltd of 832-834 High Road, Finchley N12 and Elite of 953-965 Garratt Lane, Tooting SW7, who often advertised “up to 1000 bargains!”
Noting how many addresses embraced whole blocks of street numbers suggested rapid growth for many London businesses over the years, and these, along with large dealerships outside London – including Comerford’s Ltd of Thames Ditton, Surrey; Pink’s of Harrow, Middlesex and Camden Motorcycles of Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire – dominated page after page of display and semidisplay advertisements, whereas regular big-time advertisers from further out, including King’s of New Road, Oxford and H&L of Stroud, Gloucestershire (with branches in Birmingham, Ross-on-Wye and Evesham) remained relatively thin on the ground.
We’d love to hear some stories from OBM readers who were familiar with them. For instance, what kind of characters worked behind the counters or on the sales floors, and what kind of secondhand bargains were to be had?
I often wondered why Motor
Cycle and Motor Cycling, which had nationwide circulations, put such a massive emphasis on these famous South-Eastern dealerships, and concluded that the London dealers – especially Pride & Clarke – were much keener than most to send motorcycles, accessories and clothing by rail and road to mail order customers all over the UK.
The only time when dealer ads appeared on a country-wide basis was when the announcements of an important new model prompted special advertising promotions offering small fixed-rate semidisplay boxes.
In the June 21, 1962, issue of Motor Cycle, for instance, a twopage BSA-themed spread attracted dealerships from Birmingham, Walsall, Chester, Cornwall, Nottingham, Lincoln, Worcester, Southport, Manchester, Rugby, Bristol, Canterbury, Leicester, Liverpool, and other such far-flung places.
Back home, I bought one unlikely machine after another until, by 1964, I had a well-thrashed 250cc Ariel Arrow which I was seriously considering stripping down and having tuned for a bit of club road racing. But before that happened, I spotted an advertisement for a junior staffman’s post at Motor Cycling, whose editorial premises were at Red Lion Court 161-166 Fleet Street, London EC4 – an address that would stick in my memory forever.
By some miracle I got the job, so one Saturday lunchtime in the spring of 1965, having never lived away from home, I arrived at Bank Quay station, Warrington, with a large grip bag containing basic clothing for the next five days, and boarded a train for London.
The magnitude of what I’d done hit me only when I found myself in a very small room at the YMCA hostel in Tottenham Court Road (now a YMCA Club) with no TV or other such home comforts, and I’d never felt so lonely in my life. To make matters worse, there’d be little to do next day until the start of Motor Cycling’s Sunday night shift began at around 5pm.
With my mind full of anxious thoughts such as what the work would be like, how I’d get on with the editorial team or even where
I’d stay the next evening, I opted for an early night, wondering what the morrow would bring. My fears were quashed the minute I walked along the short Red Lion Court alleyway and up into the office, where a warm hand of friendship was extended right from the start.
Unlike the local newspaper office I’d left behind, everyone was a keen motorcyclist just like myself, and like them, I could identify with the heroes of two and three-wheeled sport who figured in every report we handled.
The copy typists had been at work for much of the day, taking phonedin reports and racing results from all over the country, so a pile of material was already awaiting our attention. For any OBM readers brought up in the internet age, it’s worth mentioning that, although the world’s very first email would not be sent until six years later, in 1971, common usage of such electronic communication still remained decades over the horizon.
So, with email a totally unknown word, our courier would be dispatched to the city’s main line stations to pick up parcels from north, south, east and west containing undeveloped films from our regular freelance photographers.
Back at the office, the films were taken straight down to the photographic lab, where contact proofs would be printed off and sent up so we could mark up the best few frames to be developed into individual prints for publication.
Despite my anxieties, that first Sunday night shift proved pleasurable from start to finish
– and early next morning I’d be joining our editor, Norman Sharpe, at Liverpool Street station for Monday’s regular return trip to Colchester, where the night shift at QB Printers, having received our hand-delivered sub-edited stories along with photos, captions and rough page designs at about 1am, would already have the first batch of pages for us to check and make final alterations before passing them for publication.
That Sunday evening I stayed at the Mount Pleasant Hotel next to the huge sorting office. It was one of the cheapest in town and served me for a fortnight until a respected member of Motor Cycling’s editorial team, Arthur Long, found me a room in an old Victorian flat on Hampstead’s Parliament Hill where one of his younger relatives was living. From the top of the hill I could look down over a vast area of London, and in the midst of the Cold War, just three years after the nail-biting Cuba missile crisis, and with the Vietnam War becoming another huge international worry, I remember thinking more than once that everything I beheld could be wiped out in a single blinding flash!
From Tuesdays until Thursdays we’d put together the road-test reports, sporting interviews, readers’ letters, maintenance articles and special features, along with previews of big events such as the Scottish Six Days’ Trial and Isle of Man TT.
During the week I might be sent by train to pick up a test machine and ride it back to London, or travel to interview personalities such as Ray Pickrell, Dave Bickers, Andy Lee or Derek Woodman.
On Thursday evenings, unless I had to remain in London to cover a specific event, I’d head home to Lancashire on whichever staff bike was available, ranging from an 80cc two-stroke Yamaha to a 500cc Velocette Venom Clubman, but each return journey contributed more than 400 miles towards the 1000mile test reports, and finally I got a staff bike of my own – a Velocette Venom Special.
I’d feel 10ft tall as I recounted my experiences to my motorcycling pals at the Noggin Inn at Risley (which sadly closed in April 2018 to be converted into office space – what a sad sign of the times) and even taller if I turned up on something special like a Matchless 750CSR café racer. We’d tear through the villages to an expresso café at Leigh and if the rear suspension went down before I engaged first gear, I’d know there was a young lady on the back. After checking that such impromptu passengers were wearing a helmet, I’d shout, “Hold on tight!” and thereafter my entire impression of whoever she was would depend solely on whether she leaned with me on the bends! Such were the joys of being 20 or 21 years old in the mid-1960s.
In London, the chance came at last to explore some of the big motorcycle dealerships I’d read so much about, and one Saturday morning, after walking past what looked like several still-undeveloped bomb sites on my way to Stockwell Road, I found not just the one large shop I’d expected, but what appeared to be a whole street full of dark red-painted shop fronts that were all part of the massive Pride & Clarke empire.
Founded in 1920, the family-run firm sold everything from leather coats, helmets, boots and gloves to bicycles, mopeds, scooters, sidecars, motorcycles large and small, bubble cars, three-wheelers, cars and every motorcycle accessory or spare part imaginable.
If it was stylish biking gear you wanted, it had everything, from sheepskin-lined flying jackets and black or brown leather riding jackets and jeans to leather look-a-like PVC clothing for those on a budget.
Customers could ride away on a 49cc Super de Luxe Mobylette moped for just under £59 or could buy it over three years for a deposit of £4. In 1962, Pride & Clarke was offering brand new 350cc overheadvalve Ajay or Matchless singles for just £165 10s against what they claimed was a list price of £220.
You could even trade in your old sidecar outfit against a new ‘baby Austin’ A35 van costing a mere £368 or put down a deposit of something over £70 and take the ‘never-never’ option.
Pre-war advertisements show that Pride & Clarke was importing a full range of German-built Opel cars at prices ranging from £135 to £265, and a wonderful ad in the August 5, 1937, issue of The Motor Cycle showed a brand new 600cc sidevalve Aero Douglas complete with lovely-looking ‘boat’-style sports sidecar for the unbelievable price – even then – of £39 7s 6d! P&C also sold huge numbers of Red Panthers during this period.
As the business grew, more and more adjacent properties were bought up, and each had a purpose of its own: a packed showroom for brand new motorcycles; an outfitter’s; a spares and accessories department; a finance office and so on. I’m so glad I managed to see it in its heyday! By contrast, when an Underground ride brought me within easy walking distance of the legendary Lewis Leathers in Great Portland Street, the old shop was nothing like as huge as I’d expected, although I’ll never forget the fantastic smell of almost exclusively black new leather the moment I walked inside.
Still dreaming of racing, I bought a pair of lovely riding gloves, but when I finally bought a secondhand 250cc Cotton Telstar to race (from the compensation I was granted after a horrendous bike crash involving a car that made a U-turn right in front of me), I left Motor Cycling and moved back to Lancashire so I would have my weekends free to enjoy it. This meant it was the legendary Frank Barker of St Helens, and not Lewis Leathers, who finally measured me up for my one-piece racing suit.
By 1965, the business of D
Lewis, which had started off as a gentlemen’s outfitters, was already 73 years old. During the early years of the 20th century, it started making specialist motoring and aviation clothing and, by the Second World War it was not only providing flying gear for RAF fighter pilots but also selling much of it on to motorcyclists.
During the post-war boom years for motorcycling, bike gear became more and more sought-after, and four years after producing the Bronx jacket (inspired by the rebellious Marlon Brando film
The Wild One), the company registered the name Lewis
Leathers and wasted no time in expanding its riding jacket range to include the ‘Dominator,’ ‘Cyclone’ and ‘Corsair.’
Famous racing motorcyclists associated with Lewis Leathers included Derek Minter, Colin Seeley, Mike Hailwood, Giacomo Agostini, Bill Ivy, John Cooper and many more, and the firm still thrives to this day, albeit in new premises, and having been run by successive new managements.
In 1982 the Lewis Leathers business was sold to the Newbold Brothers, and four years later to Richard Lyon. With specialist knowledge of the burgeoning Japanese market for Lewis Leathers jackets, especially in the styles worn by members of punk and rock bands, Derek Harris researched and recreated the classic Lewis Leathers designs in 1991.
A small retro range of Lewis Leathers was duly launched in the eventful year of 1993, which also saw the Great Portland shop closing after more than a century of trading, and Derek finally took over the company after Richard Lyon announced his retirement.
Today, Lewis Leathers occupies a smart new shop at 3-5 Whitfield Street, Fitzrovia, London W1T 2SA (020
7636 4314) and remains an internationally-recognised company with a continuing demand for its quality products both at home and abroad, with strong exports to the USA and
Japan in particular.