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In the ‘Lightweights with attitude’ feature about Italian motorcycles in last month’s OBM, the small but undescribed Moto Guzzi is a 73cc Cardellino (goldfinch), and as members of the Moto Guzzi Club of Great Britain we own such a machine. Most Guzzis were named after birds, and we bought our example fresh from Milan, where…

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Thanks for another great edition of OBM, which really is a top publication these days. Your front page picture is always interesting, and as an active Cotton enthusiast I found last month’s particularly so. The bike shown is one of the last flat-tank Cottons built in Gloucester, either a 350cc Model 7 or a 500cc…

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It was nice to see October’s front cover picture of the girls on a caravan holiday with their wBSA boat outfit, and I wonder if they knew the girls seen holidaying in the accompanying pictures from an old brochure advertising the Rudge-Whitworth caravan? I have a 1927 500cc TT Sports Rudge combination along with the…

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I have enclosed some photos of bikes I would like to find and possibly buy back, restore and put in my Greeves collection – if they are still out there. Finding the bikes would bring back many memories of when I used to travel all over the UK with my brother Eric Deal to trials…

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I smiled as I watched my two-year-old granddaughter Elsie playing in the sand. With the help of her mum, she was trying to make sandcastles, patiently filling her little red plastic bucket before tipping it upside down and hoping to make perfectly shaped castle turrets just like those she’d made by the seaside a couple…

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Towards the end of the 1950s I decided that I was fed up of riding my bike to meetings, stripping it down for racing and then (hopefully) riding it back home, so I acquired a BSA M21 with a large box sidecar. It was brought around in a van, so all I had to do…

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Before he passed away on August 27, my father Keith Draper asked me to send a little bit about him to OBM. He was born in Dartford, Kent, on May 5, 1929, and his first motorcycle was a BSA Gold Star, which he raced around Brands Hatch and other circuits. However he always wanted to…

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After unearthing these photos of his father Roy, taken in the very early 1950s, Mr M Pitson from Guildford, Surrey, has sent them to OBM for our readers to enjoy. Back then, with petrol rationing still an issue, those who owned motorcycles or sidecar outfits rode them day in, day out, and spent every leisure…

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A ‘mystery’ 1961 Mortons Archive photo that we published recently, showing police Ariel Leaders escorting a column of German tanks at a location that several readers later identified as Pembroke, brought this interesting reply:- During our research tracing our own Ariel Leader police bike, we’ve come across the same picture taken from a different angle.…

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