I have loved motorcycles all my life, or at least as far back as I can remember, which was about 16 when I used to go to the church youth group where there were older boys who had motorcycles .
It was at the youth group that I became exposed to motorcycles because the older boys there rode them there were three or four who rode motorcycles one had a BSA Gold Star a friend of mine Tim Bones graduated from mopeds through to a DKW 175 German 2 stroke motorcycle which was a great bike and I can't remember what all the others were but there were three or four different brands and I would spend most of my time outside in the car park admiring them and offering to clean them or do anything else that let me touch them . They would give me rides on the pillion, I so wanted a motorcycle they just haunted me they were everything I wanted but my father took a very dim view of them when I asked him about motorcycles.
He would say things like pay no attention to them Michael they are dangerous machines but I later learned that the reason for my father's dislike of motorcycles was that one was the result of his ending up in a German prisoner of war camp.
He was at Dunkirk when they were retreating, Dad was a gunner and the Gunners were supposed to hold the line as long as possible and then find what they could to get back to the beaches and my father took a dispatch riders motorcycle but didn't know how to ride it got thrown off and the next thing he knew was being picked up by Germans.
Also to add to the temptation the boy across the street Michael Chaplin also rode a 350 Royal Enfield which he'd gone touring on in Europe after he graduated from high school and was quite the local hero for that I'm not sure whether it was because he went touring or because he did it on a Royal Enfield and they had an old shed full of motorcycles because their father had raced them in his youth and there were lots of rusty old relics and eventually I persuaded them to sell me said relics or one of them which was a 1936 Coventry Eagle with a 150CC Villiers engine.
Actually had I known what I know now I would have restored it and ridden it with great pride because it was a beautiful old machine it had a hand gear change on the tank which went through linkages to the Albion gearbox which I remember because later on I discovered that Royal Enfield used the same gearbox a very rudimentary 3 speed but still it was my introduction to how gearboxes worked - well at least how to take them apart not so much put them back together.
Another boy from the youth group called Nicholas Crowhurst who was definitely a bad influence sold me for 5 pounds a Mosquito which was a 50CC cycle motor that you bolt onto a bicycle and it drives the rear wheel via serrated metal roller. A beautifully made a little thing that was aluminum castings like an egg shell really a gorgeous piece of work as far as the castings went Italian castings were way ahead of everybody else at the time though the electrics were Italian and I could never get the damn thing to run for more than a few fits and starts so I took it apart a lot and put it back together but that was as far as it went.
Another interesting relic I got hold of was the flying wheel now that was another 50CC cycle motor that fitted into a rear wheel you had to buy the rear wheel but the thing was circular like a hub and it fitted inside that and you bolted that into your bicycle and you had an engine and gearbox ready to go it was surprisingly powerful or at least so it seemed to me running down our back lane at 30 miles an hour being shaken to my teeth because obviously a bicycle has no sprung suspension and our back lane was a a cinder track with potholes and ruts and you know it was very bumpy it was something that you drove down extremely slowly.
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