The oldie easy riders
Country roads are crammed with OAP bikers, says Peter Mckay, a ton-up boy for 60 years
We ride motorcycles for the same reason dogs stick their heads out of car windows: to enjoy the wind on our faces. During a recent warm spell, I noticed many middle-aged and older motorcyclists surfing the balmy Cotswolds breezes.
At a petrol station outside Chipping Norton, half a dozen young bikers – including two women in leathers – sprawled together on the grass verge, enjoying soft drinks and cigarettes while their Japanese ‘crotch rocket’ machines leaned at rest.
Separately, two gents whom I took to be in their 60s or 70s were perched on new-looking Britishbuilt Triumphs nearby. Neither group acknowledged the other.
Movie star George Clooney, 59, now resident in Sonning, Berkshire, is another enthusiast: ‘I enjoy going on motorcycle trips and stopping in small towns and enjoying drinks with the locals.’
Most bikers tend to be young or middle-aged; some will remain in thrall to motorcycles much longer, returning to two wheels in retirement after their mortgages (or wives) have been paid off.
T E Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) would likely have continued to ride his 100mph-plus Brough Superior into his dotage if he hadn’t had to swerve to avoid two boys on bicycles in a Dorset lane, killing himself at the age of 46, in 1935.
He enthused about his SS100 bike he called George VII: ‘He ambles at 45 and, when roaring his utmost, surpasses the hundred. A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed, untiring smoothness.’
In his 70s, the theatrical knight Ralph Richardson rode a 750cc BMW twin around London, occasionally with a
p parrot on his shoulder (as you do). ‘An old man can do as he pleases,’ he explained.
David Macpherson, the 2nd Baron Strathcarron, remained obsessed with motorcycles after being chairman of the All-party Parliamentary Motorcycling Group. He helped create the basic training system for learner riders, introduced in 1990.
Strathcarron often rode across Europe with his wife Diana on the pillion, sometimes at night. Wasn’t he concerned she might fall asleep? I once asked. ‘No, I always tie a rope around us before we start off in case she nods off,’ he assured me. Gallant Strathcarron died aged 82 in 2006, seven weeks after colliding with a dustbin lorry. His Telegraph obituary said he was ‘an engaging amalgam of Mr Punch, Bertie Wooster and Mr Toad’.
In his 1974 bestseller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – a dense, meaning-of-life essay based on a US road trip he made with his troubled son, Chris, on the pillion – Robert Pirsig says that in cars, ‘Everything we see is just more. On motorcycles, you’re in the scene, not just watching it any more.’
Motorbikes are dangerous; no doubt about it. More so than cars. That’s why some like them. Hunter S Thompson, the late author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, once borrowed a superfast Ducati superbike from the Italian makers. Cracking open the throttle, he said, was akin to diving off a high board ‘and then realising the pool was empty’.
My own interest in motorbikes was sparked when I was ten by a straw-haired teenager who’d ride through our Moray village to show off his 1950s Triumph Thunderbird. Sometimes he’d let me twist the throttle to hear its scary roar. After he left, we could hear the T’bird going up and down through the gears when it was in the hills two miles away.
One day, my pals and I found a rusting old Rudge, covered with rubbish, lying in one of the farm buildings. We cleaned it, pumped up its tyres, put in fresh fuel, got a new spark plug and tried to get it going by taking turns on the kick-start.
When that didn’t work, we ran it down a hill in neutral and I jumped on, kicking the bike into gear. That worked finally and I shot up the farm road. But the clutch was bust. Getting back into neutral was difficult. So I shut the throttle, steered it off the road and jumped off before it hit the fence. Our oil-covered gang learned how to operate the gears without the clutch by simultaneously opening and closing the throttle.
When I got to London in the early 1960s, I bought a 750cc Norton Commando. Later I rode to the South of France with my teenage pal Dave on the pillion. We fell off after lunching too well in a restaurant on the Route Napoléon; we skidded on the seafront at St Tropez, sustaining bruised arms, legs and egos.
To mark my 70th birthday, I rode my 800c Honda VFR to St Tropez to join friends for dinner. Leaving London at breakfast time, I got there just as their starter was being served at around 8pm. I’d have been there on time if I hadn’t taken the wrong autoroute exit on nearing the coast.