WoolerFlatFour
Missed opportunity? Ego trip? Waste of time and effort? Right thing, wrong time? All these and more have been levelled at the four-cylinder Wooler.
We Brits are pretty good at thinking outside the box and inventing things, but much less good at commercialising them. From the jet engine to the internet, from penicillin to the steam railway, from television to the hovercraft, from something as simple as the rubber band to an item as complicated as the digital audio player, there are literally hundreds of British inventions which either those in other countries have brought to the marketplace and profited from, or else have disappeared into the whatmight-have-been rubbish bin of history owing to lack of financial support. And motorcycle designers aren’t exempt from that.
How else to explain the fact that in shell-shocked, bombed-out post-Second World War Britain, with massive shortages of metal, rubber and other essential commodities, a 500cc ultra-lightweight four-cylinder motorcycle was conceived which was completely practical, literally unique, incorporated many intelligent features, and delivered a level of performance and comfort years ahead of its time. But not for the first time, precisely because of that, the 500cc Wooler Flat Four never reached production, despite its design being offered to Britain’s existing manufacturers, then enjoying a postwar boom in sales both at home and abroad.
Why so? Because its father and son creators lacked the resources to do it themselves, and those same manufacturers much preferred to keep on building as many of their existing models as they could, mostly with designs rooted in the past, but safe in the knowledge they could sell every one they produced. Time, and the arrival of the Japanese the following decade, would prove how short-sighted that was – so instead the 500cc
Wooler Flat Four has become another fascinating footnote to the motorcycle history book.
John Wooler was born in 1883 in Chiswick, West London, and was actually christened Jonathan, but preferred to shorten that to John. After spells as a Merchant seaman, then as a mechanic in an industrial laundry, in the early 20th century he worked as a fitter at the nearby Clément-Talbot car factory at Ladbroke Grove. From there he moved to Napier, close by in Acton, the builders of the fastest and most powerful cars then available for purchase – prized employment which cemented his love of motorised performance, albeit in his case particularly on two wheels rather than four.
Wooler had already built his first motorcycle in
1902 by purchasing one of the DIY kits then available to create a powered pedal-cycle, followed by his own design of three-wheeler in 1904, with a forecar seating arrangement. But Wooler’s dream was to build his own motorcycles, so in 1909 he gave up his day job at Napier’s in favour of working the night shift at the neighbouring Du Cros Company, builders and operators of London taxis with a fleet of over 1000 vehicles, bankrolled by the wealthy Harvey du Cros, founder of the Dunlop Tyre Company. This allowed Wooler the time to work on his motorcycles during the day, and in 1911 the first of these made its debut at the London Olympia Show, the Wooler Two Stroke – also christened the Rocket, after its then unique styling.
This saw the torpedo-shaped fuel tank protruding forward beyond the steering stem, a feature carried through on all future Wooler models, same as the full tubular steel cradle frame with – amazingly for the time – plunger suspension front and rear. Equally avantgarde was the Wooler’s variable ratio final drive via expanding pulleys inspired by the Zenith Gradua’s transmission, while the 230cc two-stroke engine entirely designed by Wooler himself, was truly innovative, with the single horizontal cylinder closed at both ends, and turned into a charging pump to force induction without crankcase compression.
The gudgeon pin protruded through slots in the side of the barrel, with a conrod on each side, while transfer of the compressed charge came via a pipe running above the cylinder, with timing controlled via springloaded automatic poppet valves. Depression opened the inlet valve, and compression closed it, while also opening the transfer valve. Oil was carried in the sump and pressure fed to bearings via a throttle-controlled pump, thus allowing the engine to run on straight petrol. No wonder the Olympia press reports stamped the Rocket as ‘the most conspicuously novel model on display, with a grand number of innovative features.’
Wooler established a small factory at Alperton, near Wembley, then on the outskirts of London, and began satisfying the several orders he’d received.
But, in a recurrent theme throughout his life, he was grossly undercapitalised, so later in 1912 he arranged with the Wilkinson Sword company in Acton to take over producing the bike with a 344cc version of the two-stroke engine. This lasted less than a year, before Wilkinson decided to stop making bikes to concentrate on building its Deemster car, leaving Wooler and his brother Charles to go it alone once more via a workshop in Acton. Around 100 examples of the
Wooler Two Stroke were built before 1915, when the company switched to war work, making munitions for the newly-formed RAF – aviation was another of John Wooler’s interests.
Together with an ex-Napier colleague, John Hull, during the war years John Wooler designed his first four-stroke engine, a 350cc fore-and-aft inlet-overexhaust flat twin, originally with belt final drive, later with a chain. This was eventually reputed to produce 18bhp at 7800rpm, a remarkable figure for the time, and was installed in a beefed-up version of his Two Stroke frame design. This was surmounted by the trademark Wooler torpedo tank painted a bright yellow and black, which led motorcycle guru Graham Walker to christen it ‘The Flying Banana’ when it appeared in the 1921 IoM Junior TT, in which it was ridden by Frank Longman to a creditable 34th place finish. The name stuck…
John Wooler had launched the Flat Twin (as the model was properly named) literally as the war ended in November 1918, and this time was ready for series production thanks to the Wooler Motor Cycle Company (1919)’s £200,000 flotation. Sufficient shares were subscribed for construction of a purpose-built factory in Ealing Road, Alperton – with the entrance surmounted by John Wooler’s personal motto: ‘Industry Without
Art Is Brutality’! However, the February 1919 debut of the Wooler Mule cyclecar, powered by a 1098cc Flat Twin motor, failed to gain traction, and just a handful of examples were built – eating up precious capital in doing so. John Wooler’s son Ronald was born in
1921, and Flat Twin sales were initially good, helped by success on the race track at Brooklands, where in 1920 F.A. McNab set no less than 20 new British records on his Wooler Flat Twin, ranging from the 350cc class’s 350-mile mark at 42.86mph up to the 500-mile record for 1000cc bikes at 40.62mph, including stops. As the Wooler success advert duly noted: “The performance is made further noteworthy owing to Mr McNab being
6ft 4in. [1.93m] and weighing 14st 8lb [93kg] in riding kit.” Indeed so – but no less a feat was the 311 miles covered on a single gallon of fuel by the Wooler Flat Twin in another certified test.
However, despite these achievements sales weren’t good enough to keep the company in the black, and in
1922 the Wooler Company was recapitalised by railway magnate William Dederich. This funded development of an improved overhead-camshaft 350cc Flat Twin and a 500cc version, but like many other such concerns, industrial conflict during the early 1920s slump hit production at the Dederich Wooler Company, which was wound up in 1923. Wooler tried again, this time with a
511cc face-cam single which only existed in prototype form, and in 1926, the year of the General Strike, John Wooler’s involvement in motorcycle manufacture came to an end. He turned his back on bikes, to work as a freelance design engineer on swash plate motors, diesel aero engines and especially automatic transmissions for cars.
In 1936 he also spent some weeks in Denmark, designing a series of mopeds for the former Wooler importer there, the 160-year old Cykelfabrikken Jydena firm, which remained in production until well after the Second World War. But otherwise as war neared
John Wooler kept busy on consultancy work for defence contractors.
Until, that is, his son Ron – who’d become a passionate motorcycle rider as he grew up, racing Velocette and Douglas models in scrambles and grasstrack – persuaded his dad to pay proper attention to an all-new motorcycle he’d been working on in his spare time ever since returning from Denmark in 1936. This was something quite different from anything he’d conceived before – an ultra-lightweight horizontallyopposed 350cc flat-four rocking beam engine, with shaft final drive and unit construction. By now father and
“The 500cc Wooler Flat Four has become another fascinating footnote in British motorcycling history.”
son were living together in West End Road, Ruislip, with their Willow Bungalow home also their design studio, with a well-equipped workshop out back to construct a prototype. So in 1943 with the tide of war turning in favour of the Allies, John Wooler revealed his plans for such a device, and in 1945, soon after VE Day, photos were published of the prototype version, now in 500cc form. Despite the massive disruption to metalwork industries occasioned by war, on February 16, 1948 the Woolers unveiled their prototype Light Four in running order to the press, prior to its display at the Earls Court Show later that year.
Claimed to weigh 238lb/108kg, this device saw the opposed pairs of cylinders stacked one above the other, and while tall the engine measured less than 20in/510mm in width, and weighed just 75lb/34kg complete with its unit construction four-speed gearbox, with shaft final drive. Instead of two crankshafts as on the prototype 1938 Brough Superior Golden Dream of similar architecture, the upper and lower pairs of short conrods pivoted on a centrally-mounted T-shaped beam, termed by John Wooler ‘a harmonic trunnion.’
The rocking leg of this T-beam operated a normal crankshaft and flywheel assembly with a single conrod, all sourced from a 150cc New Imperial, mounted beneath the cylinders. The advantages of this engine format were held to be light weight, reduced vibration, the narrower width of the opposed cylinders, continuous power delivery and decreased friction, with minimal side thrust to the cylinders. Bevel gears at the front of the crank drove a vertical camshaft to operate the valves, with two stacked pairs of forward facing exhaust ports. Top speed was claimed to be 90mph, although no power output was quoted, and the flat car-type combustion chambers in which the valves sat parallel to each other didn’t hint at that level of performance from a 500cc motor.
This unorthodox engine was housed in a duplex cradle frame whose lower frame tubes actually doubled as the exhaust pipes. As with Wooler’s previous designs, plunger suspension was featured at both ends, but this time there were two spring boxes on either side, including the girder-type front fork, making a total of eight altogether.
John Wooler’s trademark torpedo-shaped fuel tank carried a Lucas headlight blended into its front, surmounted by a mascot comprising a flying silver spanner bearing the company slogan – ‘Accessibility.’ This denoted the claim that just a single double-ended spanner was needed to work on the bike, as well as a 14mm plug spanner! Together with a screwdriver, this was carried in the small toolbox cast into the gearbox housing, while a tyre pump was fitted inside the rear chassis cross-member. Similarly, the seat’s springs were hidden in the vertical frame tubes, while the two legs of the centrestand could be operated independently to act as prop stands on either side.
The objective of this engine format was to reduce vibration as well as weight, but the problems in bringing such a novel design to production were many and varied, not least constant breakages of the trunnion itself and related links, as well as difficulty in establishing the correct valve timing. Mentions of the Wooler project became fewer and further between in a British motorcycle press that had been initially so supportive of what was seen as a good news story in the gloom of postwar Britain, and it seemed the ambitious project had died a death. But then, in October 1952 it was announced that an all-new Wooler model, the 500cc Flat Four, would enter production the next April – and while this ambitious target was predictably missed, in August 1953 it was unveiled to the press.
In November the following year it was finally displayed in public to great acclaim at the 1954 Earls Court Show – though a stripped-down prototype had appeared on track at a Silverstone race meeting in August that year ridden by Arnold Jones, without troubling the trophy chasers.
The all-new OHV wet-sump engine had been designed by Ron Wooler, who was evidently more pragmatic than his dad, and less given to flights of technical fancy, with the result that the beam engine format had been dropped in favour of a more conventional albeit still distinctive layout.
While still a horizontally opposed flat four, the pairs of RR56 cast aluminium cylinders on either side each measuring a heavily undersquare 50x63.5mm for a capacity of 499cc and fitted with cast iron liners, were now mounted side by side as on the 1930s Zündapp K800, rather than stacked as before. The forged aluminium conrods had plain bearing big ends with Vandervell thinwall shells. The one-piece cylinder heads each contained two hemispherical combustion chambers, in which the valves sat at an included angle of 70 degrees, later reduced to 55 degrees. These were operated via aluminium pushrods and forged light-alloy rockers by twin longitudinal camshafts running below the forged three-bearing crankshaft, which were driven by a long, 8mm duplex chain, carried at the front of the engine, running off the crank. This chain also drove the distributor, with its cover also housing the Lucas ‘pancake’ generator mounted on the end of the crank, while twin car-type Solex 22mm DH carbs – chosen because the Amals originally fitted required several different spanners to dismantle them! – were mounted high up, inboard of the cylinders. They fed these via branched manifolds, with the ports for the separate twointo-one exhausts either side now positioned on the underside of the cylinders.
The same four-speed gearbox with a seven-inch single-plate dry clutch as fitted to the beam engine remained, still with the cast-in toolbox with its lid resembling a butter dish cover, while the previously unshrouded shaft final drive complete with a car-type Hardy-Spicer UJ, now ran within a sturdy-looking swingarm leg, to the rear hub’s crown wheel and spiral bevel pinion. Accessibility was still the Wooler watchword, with the engine claimed to be capable of removal from the frame inside 10 minutes, using just a single double ended spanner, with the rear wheel out in three.
This good-looking engine sat in a Sifbronze-welded tubular steel duplex frame initially fitted with a plunger rear end – now with just a single spring box either side – and a single undamped plunger spring unit at the end of each leg of a tuning-fork front end. This delivered a compact 54.5in/1385mm wheelbase, with a leading-axle mount for the 19inch front wheel housing a seven-inch/178mm SLS drum brake, all of which was interchangeable with the rear – though since one wheel carried a ribbed tyre and the other a block tread one, the advantages of this weren’t apparent. The trademark Wooler 3.5 gall/16lt torpedo tank surmounted the frame, with an uprated Lucas headlamp blended into the front, while the rear one of the two shapely mudguards was flared to include the numberplate. Dry weight was a claimed 355lb/161kg.
With the engine claimed to produce 32bhp at 6000rpm on an 8:1 compression ratio, still with relatively mild valve timing with 38 degree of overlap, this time it seemed the Woolers had really struck gold, with press tests confirming that the claimed 90mph top speed of the two prototype bikes built was a reality, albeit with ‘somewhat intrusive’ vibration. While British dealers were hesitant to commit to orders for a 500cc Flat Four, which at £292 including 20 tax was priced the same as the 1000cc
Ariel Square Four, foreign buyers were not so recalcitrant.
After Ron Wooler demonstrated the bike to the Spanish police, he received an order for 500 bikes, while with motorcycle imports banned in Argentina under General Perón, the Woolers had an offer to build the
Flat Four there under licence, as Italy’s Gilera began doing in 1953. But with testing going well, their problem was how to gear up to put the bike into production, with an overall target of 3000 units thought to be feasible, as, according to Ron Wooler, the positive reception had left him with orders for 850 bikes.
The search for an industrial partner led the Woolers to the Electrical Equipment Co. (EEC) in Leicester, a 50-year old firm building powered electrical generators which initially agreed to handle the machining of engine components, and then in the winter of 1953/54 agreed to assemble complete bikes in partnership with the Woolers. But the huge number of parts needed for an all-new machine, and the large volume required by each supplier to make the price affordable, sorely taxed the partners’ cashflow, such as the minimum 80 crankshaft assemblies supplied by tractor maker David
Brown, then also owner of Aston Martin. Remember that the Woolers had not yet begun taking cash deposits from prospective customers for what was still a prototype model.
But in 1954 Ron Wooler seemed to have hit on a source of income by winning a UK Government commission to supply a bored-out 600cc version of the Flat Twin engine producing 46bhp to ML Aviation at Maidenhead, to power a foldaway light aircraft for both civilian and military use. The Wooler engine passed its prototype tests and began endurance testing – but then the Government cancelled the project in a fit of cost-cutting, and this essentially ended the Wooler motorcycle project.
EEC bailed out, and the thousands of components it was holding ready for production were sold for scrap – though its project leader Bernard Fowler was able to acquire sufficient parts to build himself a Wooler Flat Four, even if he never quite succeeded in getting it running. John Wooler passed away in June 1954, without ever seeing the final creation bearing his name receive the acclamation it obtained at that year’s Earls Court Show – but he was however spared the sadness of its inevitable demise.
Still, in October 1955 Ron Wooler revealed to the press he’d converted both prototype machines to swinging arm rear suspension by adding two vertical chassis struts to support the swinging arm pivot, with a pair of Girling shocks providing rear suspension, while the front fork now featured hydraulic damping. This resulted in a slightly longer wheelbase of 55.75in/1416mm, but while the start of production in 1956 was still spoken of, it was too little, too late. Moreover, what now had the potential to be a highly desirable range-topping model for any brand was spurned by all Britain’s mainstream manufacturers whom Ron Wooler contacted to suggest their taking over the project. Some didn’t even bother returning his calls. When he passed away in 1980 at the young age of 59, it must have been with an understandable degree of lingering frustration.
A total of five Wooler Flat Twins are believed to have been built, two prototypes by the Woolers themselves and three pre-production models by EEC – plus Fowler’s own machine. It appears that, for whatever reason, the theoretically identical EEC bikes were never able to match the performance of the Wooler prototypes, with 75-80mph their top speed, and acceleration also less sprightly. While keeping one for himself, which is now to be seen in the UK’s National Motorcycle Museum, Ron Wooler passed the other of the two originals on to family friend Laurie Fenton, and this bike is today displayed in the Hockenheim Museum in Germany, alongside a ‘Flying Banana’ Flat Twin.
The only other known survivor is almost inevitably to be found in that repository of rarities, the Sammy Miller Museum on England’s South Coast www.sammymiller. co.uk and was discovered by Sammy in the late 1980s, then restored by him and his now retired right-hand man Bob Stanley, the Miller Museum’s mechanical magician. In July 2000 it was acquired by the British Motorcycle Charitable Trust www.bmct.org but remains on display in the Museum on long-term loan. With its swinging arm frame, it seems likely to be the Bernard Fowler project bike.
“Before researching this feature I’d assumed that John Wooler had been on a massive ego trip but there are so few photos of him pictured with his motorcycles it’s hard to regard him as a self-publicist.”