A lifetime’s adventures with a lightweight BSA: Part one
Over the last year, Alan Graham has put some of his recollections of his early motorcycling life down on paper and we bring you the first part of his gentle and delightful memoir.
Most people can remember the first time they did it and who with. In my case it was in a quiet corner of a farmer’s field backing on to a disused railway line on a balmy summer evening. It was a feeling of sheer exhilaration and from that moment on, I knew I wanted more. All habits and addictions – call them what you will – have to start sometime, somewhere and I can trace mine right back to a group of lads egging me on and telling me to “try it, you’ll love it, we’ve all done it”.
I was very doubtful and stared at the ground feeling very uncomfortable, wishing I was somewhere else. “Just undo the left-hand lever slowly and wind the handlebar grip at the same time!”. I stalled it. The second time I remembered to turn the handlebar grip the way they’d said. The little machine set off more briskly and I remembered to point it in the right direction. No pedalling, this was effortless! I remembered it had gears and tried to balance upright while I looked down for the hook thing somewhere near my right foot. There was a vicious clunk as second gear went in without the use of that lefthand lever I’d forgotten about.
The abused machine surged forwards and, for the hell of it, I aimed for some patches of long grass which it went through as if they weren’t there. Next for some clumps of nettles; it charged through effortlessly. This was fun! Perhaps my older brother and his mates, who messed about with oily motorbikes in our garage every night – and who Dad had dubbed the mad mechanics – weren’t so mad after all. Until then, my push bike had been my most valued possession and I’d had no interest at all in oily, messy motorbikes, but from that moment on I never wanted to pedal anything again. At the time I didn’t know I’d ridden the remains of a Villiers Ambassador. It could have been anything, but the seed was sown and I put the word out that I wanted a field bike of my own; something I wouldn’t have to share.
Finding my first motorcycle
It wasn’t long before someone told me about a non-runner which the owner, just 15 like me, had given up on and was ready to sell. Before it had expired it was said to have “gone like mad”. It was another sunny summer evening when I made my way up a rough track beside a tumbling stream towards the only building in sight, an open-fronted barn just short of the old railway line, from which the abandoned rails had now been removed. Adjusting my eyes to the dim interior, I could just make out the shape of a motorcycle propped up against one of the stone walls, its alloy cases reflecting back at me. Aside from the straw-covered floor, the wooden beams and this machine, there was nothing else in the building. I went home and asked my elder brother to come and take a look.
“I haven’t seen one of these for years,” he enthused. My heart skipped a beat ; perhaps it was something special. “Well, is it worth the two quid I’ve been asked for it?” I asked. This was four weeks’ paper round wages at 10 bob a week. “Definitely,” he replied and so I wheeled it the half mile home.
I hadn’t a clue what I’d bought, but it turned out to be a BSA C11, a 250cc four-stroke single with a rigid frame, teles and a three-speed gearbox … except I’d find that this one had a twospeed ’box because third didn’t work.
Dad had ridden a 1938 Velocette MOV after the war and always remembered it fondly. He’d sold it in 1956 to pay for a bathroom extension when I was born. Now he was casting a sad eye over this two-wheeled wreck, minus mudguards, headlamp, exhaust, silencer, toolbox, and with its seat missing. “You’ll never get that to go, son”, he said, and, with that, the old machine was left forgotten, propped against the garage wall for a few weeks. Then I came home late one night from a school trip and found Dad washing out the oil tank using a mixture of nuts, bolts and paraffin. This was an unexpected surprise and my interest was reawakened. He got it to the point where he felt it ought to run but there was just one thing; it had no fuel in the tank.
No problem, this was quickly sorted as one of the mad mechanics came forward and offered to drain some from his Honda 500/4 and a small crowd of interested onlookers gathered round curiously to see if anything would happen. The first thing that happened was that, with each swing of the kick-starter, the lever would flop to the ground without returning. This was soon fixed with a bungee cord hooked round the pedal and secured to the frame. Suddenly there was a splutter and a bang.
Flames shot between the front forks from the open exhaust port, reminiscent of the old paraffin blowlamp that Dad used to use. Simultaneously a tremendous noise exploded from the engine, accompanied by much blipping of the throttle and a gleeful chorus of cheers from those looking on. But now they were laughing at me because, alarmed by the flames and the noise, I’d taken refuge inside the porch door. One thing was certain; the thing ran, it went!
Getting it going was one thing, finding parts to replace the missing bits was quite another. Apart from being on a schoolboy budget, this was 1971 and long before the internet, auction sites and OBM, so the spares columns in the weekly motorcycle press were the recognised routes for finding bits. The most urgent need was for a seat and this came conveniently in the form of a sprung saddle from a bloke in our village who hoarded parts from various old bikes that he and his brother had amassed over the years. The saddle had no cover but a sheet of foam tied over it sufficed.
Two become one
The farmer, whose field had been the source of my original ride on the Villiers, was a friendly chap and didn’t mind me using the BSA around it. The first time I set off on my very own bike was one of the most exciting moments of my life. First gear, second gear, then nothing. So second gear it was. A friend told me about a partly dismantled C11G similar to mine which was available at a hamlet called Pepper Arden about six miles away. There wasn’t much left of the bike but, crucially, it had the bits I needed, like mudguards and tinware. Another two pounds secured it. Looking back, it could have been restored but at the time, its value was as spares.
It was about this time that I escaped the confines of the farmer’s field and started using the abandoned railway track to go further. It was a bit bumpy in places where the sleepers had been removed but the gearbox from the donor machine had three gears and they all worked so now I could really get going! A bit further on were the remains of an old abbey with a steep single track leading to the village above. How would the BSA cope with that, I wondered? Part way up the dirt became tarmac which was lovely and smooth and I reached the top feeling pretty pleased with myself. But even at 9am on a sunny Saturday morning in a tiny village with half a dozen houses I’d been spotted. Easing towards me in a new white panda car was a copper. A very officious one. Out came his notebook. Was the motorcycle insured? Did it have an MoT? Did I have a licence? Answering no to each question, I couldn’t believe my bad luck. When he asked what make of motorcycle I was riding I began to explain that I’d made it out of two bikes. He didn’t wait for me to finish. “Nondescript”, he entered triumphantly in his book.
This incident really upset me;
I’d never been in trouble with the law before and didn’t expect to be. That afternoon I went to watch Darlington in a Division 4 match but my mind was elsewhere and I felt I’d let my parents down. That evening I went out on my pushbike just to see who was about – the sort of thing you did at that age in our bit of Yorkshire. I soon met up with a few mates and I didn’t notice the white car that drew up alongside. However, I did recognise the officious voice asking me why there were no lights on my bicycle. I looked down, they’d been a bit feeble when I set out but now the batteries had given out both front and back. Out came the notebook. “Oh, not you again,” came the muttered remark, and so I was reported for riding a motorbike on public roads without documents and for riding a bicycle without lights at night by the same policeman on the same day. It just couldn’t get worse.
The outcome was that I was summoned to see Sergeant Settler at 6pm on a Tuesday evening at Richmond police station. My mother made me wear a suit and my dad took me in his Mini. Sergeant Settler was a decent sort of bloke, rather elderly but smart in his navy blue uniform. He spoke to me about what might have happened if I’d hit someone and broken their leg without insurance and that sort of thing, but basically told me not to do it again and let me go. This was a great relief and I vowed to follow his advice.
From now on, things would have to be done legally, and they were.
I take to the road
The months went by and Dad, who had learnt his trade as an electrician during the war in RAF Bomber Command, rewired the BSA and fettled up the dynamo and regulator. I watched, fascinated, as he showed me how the dynamo could be made to spin like a motor and be ‘flashed’ if its residual magnetism disappeared. I was learning fast from Dad’s tuition and by reading as much as I could from my brother’s pile of 1960s Motorcycle Mechanics magazines, the ones with step-bystep pictures in which a man in a white coat disassembled engines from bikes you couldn’t afford and showed you how to put them together again. Gradually the little BSA began to look more like a proper motorcycle and less like the wreck I’d bought, and in due course I sent away for a provisional licence.
It was during one of my regular lie-ins on Sunday morning that I was rudely awakened by my dad striding into my bedroom and telling me to get up. “If you’re going to ride a motorbike on the roads, son, you’re going to learn to do it properly.
I’m taking you to Darlington this morning to a proper training course.” I wasn’t convinced. However, it became clear that he and my mum had discussed the concept of now having two sons risking life and limb on dangerous motorbikes and their minds were made up. Off we went in the Mini as the BSA wasn’t road legal.
At that time in the early 1970s, the RAC and the Auto Cycle Union ran a gold standard learner scheme which was operated by volunteers with the blessing of the local borough council that allowed them to use the buildings and roads within its depot, marked out with traffic signals, give way signs and the like. They even supplied bikes to train on if you didn’t have your own; pale green
BSA Bantams which were road legal even with their lights missing. The first hour each week was spent on maintenance and theory, followed by an hour of roadcraft spent practising setting off, hand signals, hill starts and so on. There were even brightly painted cutaway engines supplied by the British motorcycle industry, where you could turn the crankshaft by hand and watch the piston rise and fall, see the camshaft move and watch the valves open and close. We learned everything from the dark art of carburettor tuning and ignition timing, through to chain maintenance and head bearing adjustment. After a few weeks of this we graduated to the roads outside and I was followed on a little Bantam through the town centre by one of the trainers, a dour, no-nonsense sort of bloke riding a Tiger Cub.
I knew it hadn’t gone well and back at the depot there were no words of encouragement. “Well, that was a shambles!”, he barked, striding off to put the wind up his next novice.
There was no doubt that I hadn’t much road sense. While I could ride, and had learned to maintain a machine, I would invariably be the wrong distance from the kerb, be in the wrong lane, or take up the wrong position on the road. However, by the end of the course, I’d improved sufficiently to pass the RAC’s stringent practical and theory test and show the independent examiners that I’d learned everything the volunteers had taught me. They’d even arranged the ministry test for me three days later and lent me a Bantam to take it on. I promptly failed the test.
Not long afterwards I left school and began a temporary job working as an assistant drayman for a brewery while I awaited the start date of an office job that Mam had found for me. This had the advantage that I now had the money to put the finishing touches to the BSA to get it ready for an MoT test. On the dray wagon it was fun delivering beer around the Yorkshire Dales and there was always a free drink at every pub. There was also a free beer allowance and my mum became more and more unhappy as her fridge grew full of Magnet bottles, though Dad didn’t seem to mind!
Anyway, I digress. The biggest problem with the BSA was that it had come without number plates and documents so I had no idea of its registration mark. I naïvely wrote to BSA quoting the engine and frame numbers and despite BSA being in the throes of administration, I received a rather nice reply explaining that it had never kept records of individual number plates but could confirm that the machine had been supplied to White Bros of High Northgate, Darlington on May 28, 1951. I still have the letter.
However, the trail went cold as Messrs White Brothers were quite disinterested, having not kept records for years. I tried another tack, contacting each previous owner of the BSA by word of mouth until I struck lucky; a chap in Richmond had kept a notebook containing frame, engine and registration numbers of all the machines he’d owned. There it was, OHN 940, and that was enough to get me the logbook. I arranged an MoT test and stuck on some L plates.
Time for an MoT – and a rebuild!
Getting the bike through an MoT test was quite easy, and an exciting passport to the open road and wherever I wanted to go. But it also exposed the little BSA’s weaknesses and these soon became apparent. Every so often it would come to a stop, usually miles from home, and the plug would have whiskered up like a two-stroke. The advice from my big brother and the mad mechanics was unequivocal: “You need a rebore, Alan”, and they explained what this entailed and where it could be done. But it was when the barrel was removed that pieces of piston ring fell out and ominous noises from the con rod were apparent. A new big end was needed, too.
All the repairs were entrusted to George Dawkins and Son of Bedale. From then on, the C11 assumed a degree of reliability but the issues didn’t stop. One hot afternoon a loud clatter broke out on the way back from watching a scramble at Boltby on the edge of the North Yorks moors. Although I reached home, none of the mad mechanics could fathom why the engine was now twice as loud. Only George Dawkins got it right, which he did just by listening. “You need a new camshaft,” he said. My heart sank. “Will that mean stripping it all down again?” I asked dejectedly. “No, you can just take the timing cover off and get in through the side,” he replied, and that’s what we did.
On another occasion I hit a pothole at the bottom of a dip and, though the bike continued running, I was horrified to see smoke curling up between my legs where the tank met the seat. The jolt had bottomed the springs of the saddle and the underside had hit the top of the Lucas MCR2 voltage regulator, causing a short.
It was on another mild, sunny evening as I trundled through the little village of Morton-on-Swale that the BSA coasted to another impromptu stop. The little machine had had enough once more, and no amount of blipping the throttle could revive it. One glance was enough to see that the lead to the points had snapped off cleanly at the distributor. I was outside quite a posh house and, boots crunching on the gravel drive, I made my way to the front door, climbed the steps and rang the bell. An anxious looking lady poked her head round the side of the partly opened door and I explained my predicament and pointed to the bike which was now gently dropping spots of oil on her paving stones. Did she have any tools perhaps, I enquired? A pair of pliers, a wire stripping tool? She returned with a set of nutcrackers and a pair of scissors and went back indoors.
Ah well, it was enough to hack some insulation from the broken wire and, with careful use of the nutcrackers beside the hot exhaust pipe, I was able to undo the little nut on the side of the distributor, wind the newly exposed cable round it and tighten up. I returned the ‘tools’ to the lady of the house through the partly opened door, the BSA sprang back to life and my bodge got me home where a proper repair could be made.
This set me thinking, I should be better prepared and so, better late than never, I wrapped some tools, spanners, some tyre levers and a puncture repair kit inside a plastic bag and fastened them up in the toolbox. I rode off into the wide blue yonder, happy in the knowledge that next time I came to an involuntary stop I had everything I would need.
Thus it was that coming home from work on a single-track lane through some woods, the BSA began to weave alarmingly from the rear. One look at the flat back tyre told its story. This time there was only a single timberframed house in the vicinity and, once again, I knocked on a stranger’s door, explained I’d got a puncture and could I use their garden to fix it? Permission granted, I set to work with my newly assembled toolkit. One good thing, I thought to myself as I gently prised the back wheel away from the forks, the BSA always seemed to break down on warm, sunny evenings. I’d picked up a nail and soon mended the tube, put the tyre back on and popped the wheel back in the frame. Chain adjusted, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself and ready to go. Or was I?
It had never occurred to me that I’d need to carry something to pump a tyre up with, and the occupant of the house didn’t have anything either. There was nothing for it but to begin a seven-mile trudge home. Mum would be worrying by now because I hadn’t returned for tea. On the off-chance, I carried my helmet as a sign of trouble, just in case… I hadn’t taken more than seven or eight steps beyond the gate when a rider on a CZ250 went by, slowed, stopped and asked if I needed a lift! What were the chances of that, stuck in the middle of nowhere as I was! Does that sort of thing still happen now, I wonder? Anyway, he took me all the way home, and after tea Dad and I blew up the tyre and I followed him home.
“What the hell's that!”
I’d acquired a Triumph Herald by now and passed my test in it though the BSA was my preferred transport. In learning to drive, I’d had a good instructor and had finally learned some road sense which rubbed off on to my riding ability. So, on a nice Tuesday afternoon in 1975, I took a half day off and trundled up to Darlington to take my bike test. I’d been feeling pretty confident until the wait in the functional facilities of the testing centre began to feel like something akin to a dentist’s waiting room. The tester was a thin-faced man, dressed in an overcoat and trilby, armed with the ubiquitous clipboard, and only served to add to my last-minute nerves. He was a man of few words. “Lead the way to your machine, Mr Graham”, were his only words.
Until he saw the BSA, that is.
“What the hell’s that?”, he demanded. Indignation replaced nerves in an instant, giving way to steely determination. “That”, I replied, wounded, “is my machine!”.
Even by 1975 standards the C11 was antiquated and I suppose, by then, most people were turning up on Japanese machinery for their tests. However, I found the process simple, as it was in those days, and it was easy to ride beside him at walking pace without putting a foot down. I sailed through, and it was amazing to think I was now qualified to ride a Kawasaki Z1. If only…
NEXT MONTH: Off to the TT on the C11!