Letters

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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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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