FROM PIGS TO PIT STOP
Garageman’s collection of vintage motorcycles amassed over 45 years becomes museum for enthusiasts
Dick Craven busy with a Velocette 350 from 1948 in the workshop at his motorcycle museum in Stockton on the Forest. Mr Craven runs one of the country’s most individual museums in an old pig farm.
THE THROATY roar emanating from the old pig farm at Stockton on the Forest has a different ring these days.
The 270 beasts currently in captivity on the one-acre site between York and the Howardian Hills owe their sound not to nature but to the internal combustion engine. And where the troughs once stood now lie the boundaries of one of the country’s most individual museums.
Dick Craven, an old garageman, began buying vintage motorcycles because he was afraid no one else wanted them.
That was 45 years ago, before they became “collectable”.
Now, other enthusiasts flock from far and wide to see the haul he has amassed.
“I’d ridden motorbikes since I was 15. I used to go to work on a 1930s BSA, to a farm at Seaton Ross in the East Riding, and at night I lived in a barn, messing about with the bike,” said Mr Craven, who later ran a garage a few miles up the road from his present premises.
“There was something about the machines that fascinated me.
“Maybe it was the cheap speed – in those days you could race them and be competitive with something that didn’t cost a lot.
“And on the open roads away from the towns there were no speed limits.”
He made a name for himself as a racer, winning the Yorkshire grass track championship for several years running, and taking bikes and sidecars around drag racing tracks.
But he worried that his love for the machines was not universally shared.
“I felt they were all disappearing so I started buying them up,” he said.
“You could get them cheaply back then.
“I bought the engine in my sprint bike for £25 in the 1960s. Now it would cost £25,000 to £30,000.
“That was because people stopped buying British bikes.
“As soon as the Japanese models arrived, they were all anyone wanted.”
He acquired the land at Stockton on the Forest 40 years ago when the pig farm went out of business.
Beneath the corrugated metal roof, he set about lining the walls and filling almost every foot of floor space with old road signs and other artefacts of a bygone age of motoring, and now charges visitors £5 a time, from April to October.
“It doesn’t earn me a living – it’s just an out-of-control hobby,” he said.
But he does make a little on the side from hiring out his old bikes and accompanying ephemera to TV and film productions.
Heartbeat, filmed nearby and set in the 1960s, was a regular taker.
“Whatever vehicle they wanted, I would get,” he said.
“If I didn’t have it I’d go out and buy it.”
His current project – having finally ended his racing career two years ago, when he turned 75 – is restoring a BSA Lightning Clubman bike, originally built in Birmingham in the mid-1960s. It competed with Triumph Bonneville and it is now said to be in high demand.
“It just wants the proper bits putting bits putting on it,” he said.
“But those are the parts you struggle to get. I’ve sometimes bought complete bikes just to get my hands on a few parts.”
It doesn’t earn me a living – it’s just an out-ofcontrol hobby. Motorbike collector Dick Craven.