I did not know my father owned a motorcycle until I took my mother for a ride to her 80th birthday party. On the ride she told me that my father once owned a motorcycle but she would not get on it. She finally decided that since she lived a good life it was time to feel the wind in her face. She has since been on a couple of rides and was known at the nursing home as Motorcycle Mama before she passed away.
Good for her! Apparently my Opa had a bike, during the time him and my Oma ran a gas station and garage in post WW2 in Germany. He used to take Oma for rides, in full gear (which at the time was a dress and a scarf around her hair...)Originally Posted by Big Paw
My Oma isn't sure but she thinks the bike was a BMW. I am still hunting for pictures.
No one else rode in my family until the fall of 2008, my husband and brother took a MSF course. Naturally I had to give it a go the following spring, and, the rest is history....
I have a picture someplace of my grandfather on a Douglas of some flavour or other, probably pre world war one. There were no other motorcycles that I know of in our family until I came along some 50 years later.
No family history regarding motorcycles, but my mom (a Brit) told me that BSA stood for Bloody Sore Arse!
Good one. Were it true, most bikes would be a BSA then...
I didn’t meet my Uncle Fred until he had retired from racing motorcycles. Freddie Frith rode in his first race on the Isle of Man when he was just twenty. I was just being born at that time, half a world away in India. My Dad’s regiment did guard duty on the Khyber Pass between India and Afghanistan, and spent about 28 years scanning the same rocky horizon for tribesmen with home-made guns. The Brits had launched the first idiotic attempt at controlling Afghanistan since Alexander the Great. The Russians and, more lately, the “coalition” forces have had about the same success since.
I heard my mother mention more than once her brother Fred who “messed about with motorcycles”. I didn’t give it much attention. My mother was in those days a member of the enemy: she had married that military maniac who put me into that Nazi boarding school at the age of 7, where they taught us religion, boxing, Victorian morality, and how to take cold showers to counteract lascivious thoughts.. Mother had a nestfull of faceless relatives back home. For all that I knew or cared, there might have been a couple of circus performers and one or two in jail.
India (and Pakistan) got their own governments in 1947. Terms of that handover were that all white faces should get back to from where they came, and quick. I was among the tattered tribe of returnees to Britain, although I had never been there before. As a last gesture to my father with whom I shared a mutual dislike, I joined his army. It was great to be away from home again. A couple of years in Korea seemed like a good idea, and was, particularly since it involved riding my first motorcycle. I was a professional deliverer of dispatches at the age of nineteen. They didn’t pay much but I got medals and promotion, and I was burning their petrol. Plus riding a few unscheduled trips.
The Korean War was disappointingly short. Some troops stayed in Japan as occupation forces, but my own bunch of Royal Engineers was sailed back to the damp and dismal islands , far too thickly populated and rife with racism, dull food and class distinction. I hung in there for only three years, afraid that I would get as thick between the ears as the dunderheads I was meeting every day. (Canada and its huge promise was just a decision away.)
It was about then that I made the acquaintance of my mother’s brother, Freddie Frith. To be more exact, I bought a BSA motorcycle from him. And then, shortly after., he sold me another, an older KSS Velocette. That Velo was one of the most lithe and lively bikes I ever owned.
Fred was by that time through with his contracts with Velocette and Norton. He had raced for one or the other for most of twenty years. He had won on the Isle of Man no fewer than five times, and had become the 350 cc World Champion in !949. (He won on the Island in 1939, ten years before, but there was a big lapse in international racing while the cultured nations of Europe killed each other in huge numbers.)
I knew him as an unremarkable sort of a middle-aged guy. He was stubby and well-muscled from having been a stonemason in his youth, and at about fifty he carried no fat. He had been awarded the OBE by the Queen. He trotted out the old joke: OBE stands for "Other buggers' Efforts''. MBE merans "My bloody efforts".
We had some cups of tea in the hole-in-the-wall teashop across from his dealership at the foot of Victoria Street in Grimsby. And he told me about the only time he’d had a disabling injury. He was bump-starting a bike in the pits just before a practice session on race day. His road speed was about three miles an hour and he had fallen over backwards and fractured a collarbone. His boss at Norton, Joe Craig, was quite understandably ****ed off but didn‘t dare to be too unbritish to his star rider.
Fred was also the first guy I ever saw do a wheelie. He wound up this single-cylinder Norton in the courtyard of his shop. Revving nicely, he dropped the clutch and aimed the thing at a stone wall maybe twenty feet in front of him. The front wheel was off the ground probably four feet and time was running short. Then he whacked on the anchors and brought the bike to a stop with about two feet to spare. Then he grinned, “You want to buy this bike?
Great read, Ancient Priest. You obviously have a skill for telling a story, too. The TT is my favourite race to watch, that's where the truly brave(crazy) riders race! Did you inherit that gene from your uncle, have you raced also?
Nope. I tried my chances with riding half-mile dirt for a while. I almost destroyed the baseball diamond on the infield at Peterboro' Fairgrounds. The orthopedic guy who put the broken leg back together said he couldn't guarantee a fix if I did that again.
Have been into motorcycles since 2 yrs old when I was given a leg powered plastic one that even had a great motor sound when you 'gave it the gas'. One my fave childhood memories. Had a couple aunts and uncles in-law who said they used to ride and missed it. Got to ride a few beaters while working on farms and having to head out to check on the livestock; I always took the 'long way'. Had planned on purchasing a real bike at 16, but the parental units forbade it. Then my first wife forbade it. Twelve years later, and my new wife insisted that I not deny myself any longer, so at 39 I wrote and passed the learner's permit, signed up for a motorcycle training course, and purchased 'Monty', a 1985 Suzuki Madura 700. Within a month I knew that I'd like a bigger bike, but waited until the start of last season and got BOB, a 2003 Honda VTX 1300, orange (Big Orange Beast).
"Most motorcycle problems are caused by the nut that connects the handlebars to the saddle."
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