Blog

Hello to the editorial team, and it was very interesting to read about all the covered bikes built in the UK in the last issue. In 1934 the Victoria factory in Nurnberg (1886-1958) built a covered bike called the KR8 Fahrmeister (Driving Master), and this was one of the first such bikes to be built…

Continue reading »

I thoroughly enjoyed Triumph Tiger Cub and Terrier expert Mike Estall’s fascinating letter ‘Police evaluation Terriers recalled’ (OBM September). With typical attention to detail, Mike describes the Metropolitan Police’s evaluation in summer 1955 of competing lightweight motorcycles for beat patrol work. By the mid-1950s the Met was facing a manpower shortage, and the prospect of…

Continue reading »

The recent OBM article about the Ariel FH Sports took me back to my days as an apprentice compositor at McCorquodales (Printers) in Euston. I left school at the age of 15 on Thursday, July 24, 1958 and began a six-year apprenticeship the next day, so there was no holiday that year! In 1959 a…

Continue reading »

I’ve managed to rustle up all the old photos I have of my Villiers 2T-engined Dayton Albatross scooter from the 1960s. I know there’s not much of the scooter to see, because the purpose was to picture my late wife Maureen on holiday in France and at Calella, near Barcelona in Spain. I repeated the…

Continue reading »

I wonder if someone could throw some light on the mystery Matchless G45 rider in the accompanying photo which came with the paperwork when I bought the machine. Can anyone identify the period, the event, or better still the rider clutching his helmet and posing on the bike? Obviously he was very well known at…

Continue reading »

My dad, Jim Mundy, raced with Archie Goddard in scrambles in the early-to-mid 1950s, and they were pretty good friends for a while, but then lost touch with each other after Dad gave up scrambling and moved over to trials. Archie, and his father Dick, had a motorcycle shop in Desborough Road, High Wycombe, in…

Continue reading »

The letter from John Lines on page 38 of OBM (August) was of interest to me as I run the Tiger Cub and Terrier ‘Register of Survivors’, and was interested to see if any of the machines he mentions were listed in it. The Register currently lists roughly 11,500 surviving bikes, frames and engines, but…

Continue reading »