An act of kindness

The first thing I read in May’s Old

Bike Mart was the editorial and it reminded me of an act of kindness that happened to me.

I lived in Gaunt Street in Lincoln at the time. I was, I think, 17, so it would be 1957. An elderly neighbour approached me in the street and asked me if I wanted a motorbike. He said it was in a pig sty at the back of Wests Garage. It belonged to his son who was in the RAF and had been posted to Germany and Wests wanted the bike out of the pig sty as they wanted to repurpose the building. He gave me the logbook and a charged battery and I went off to look at the bike.

It was buried under a couple of tons of coke so I dragged it out and pushed it home. There was a drop of petrol in the tank so I turned the petrol tap on, tickled the carb, gave it one kick and it started. It ticked over like a steam engine but that is all it would do. I remember the neighbours said that there was something wrong with the timing.

The whole bike was showing signs of rust so I stripped it down and repainted it. According to the logbook it was a 250cc BSA, it had three gears, hand change and girder forks.

Before I replaced the engine in the frame I took the head off. It was a side valve and me and my dad decided that the inlet valve was opening too soon, so I turned the camshaft back a couple of teeth and when it was back in the frame it ran perfectly. I didn’t know anything about timing marks in those days.

I ran the bike for a couple of years, it was utterly reliable. It was parked outside in all weathers and never failed to start, usually first kick. Eventually I managed to seize the engine so I fitted a 250cc Rudge Rapid engine into it and rode it for a few months until I bought a crashed 350cc Triumph single. The front forks and wheels were missing so I fitted the BSA forks and wheels. My next bike was a restored Matchless G80. Since then I think I have had about 50 bikes; my favourite bike was a 1947 S7 Sunbeam that I paid £5 for in about 1965 and rode it home.

Wests Garage was quite big. It had a large showroom on the corner of

High Street and Gaunt Street and extended down the street behind the row of houses where I lived and came out halfway down the street through the motorcycle workshop where Geoff Dickinson, the trials rider, worked. The friendly neighbour, by the way, was a Mr Fry.