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Rider returns to England after a long trip through Canada and the US.

Avril Yockney disembarks on her return to terra firma, having completed a 20,000 mile trip through Canada and America, aboard her 197cc James.

Though publishing Ms Yockney’s photograph, in its July 22, 1954 edition,

The Motor Cycle’s Nitor deigned to give her little other mention other than that ‘Perhaps she took a leaf out of Peggy Thomas’s book which is reviewed on this page…’ and that review starts witheringly too; “It is a failing of tourists that they often feel impelled to write the story of their travels. That is usually hard luck on the reading public…” and on it goes, though actually the mention of A Ride in the Sun (Ms Thomas’s book) when it gets to it, is overwhelmingly positive. It’s just lots of other wannabee travel writers Nitor seems unimpressed by…

There’s no more about Ms Yockney and her James – lets hope she didn’t write an account and send it to Nitor – while her James is sans front numberplate too, so we can’t even tell if it was British registered, though it’s been possible to glean that Avril was from Yorkshire. What became of her and an account of her journey, however, remains elusive.

As for the young lady’s James – it’s a 197cc Villiers powered machine, named a Captain, which had joined the Comet (98cc) and Cadet (122cc) in the Greet, Birmingham, based company’s lineup. Part of the AMC stable, James had ploughed its own furrow (much like Ms Yockney) early on, but by the post Second World War era, increasingly its motorcycles took on a familial resemblance to its Francis-Barnett (another proud old name, famous for its individualism) stablemate, so that by the 1960s, the two were identical, save for the name on the petrol tank.

James production ended in 1966.