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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, adapted, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the author.

The rights of Richard Skelton to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

PART ONE –
CLASSIC MOTORCYCLING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

1971 Yamaha 350cc YR5 (Venture Classics)

The 1970s nostalgia scene is growing all the time. Most modern day motorcyclists are in their fifties and sixties. Many started on sports mopeds in the 1970s and moved on to a 250. Some kept on biking without a break, others have returned in recent years as born agains. In the 1970s, bikes were still a cheap way of getting to work, but they were also about fun, freedom, rebellion and being different from the crowd. The 1970s was the beginning of a long period of growth in recreational motorcycling in Britain. For the first time, bikes were being used first and foremost for the sheer joy of motorcycling.

Now, in the second decade of the 21^st century, most large modern motorcycles are sold to middle aged and older males. They are mid-life crisis machines. Youngsters today might ride a scooter for a year, but really want a Citroen Saxo lit up underneath and set pulsing and throbbing by an iPod or iPhone plugged into its dash. Rather than ride motorcycles, teenagers get virtual thrills on their X-Boxes and PS3s.

Time signatures (Made in Italy)

To them Nuts and Hello are more interesting than motorcycle magazines and two minutes on the lavatory can be the only time they hold print media in their hands. Lads are just not getting into bikes at all. There is next to no new blood. New bikes are sold to the same old bikers every year and design changes come in ripples rather than waves. Despite this, most motorcycles today have reached a level of specification that defies criticism. There are no terrible bikes, but there are certainly a lot of unremarkable ones.

It’s subjective to say 1970s motorcycles were attractive and beautiful and today’s machines are ugly by comparison, but most 1970s bikes have a pleasing simplicity and pureness of line. Today’s bikes are just not as attractive. Or is it like pop music? Like the fact most modern music is dross to older ears? Each generation is imprinted with the musical tastes, fashions and styles of its youth and grows up resenting change. And it is in teenage years the heaviest impressions are made; when views are set for a lifetime. Certainly, and classic machines from past eras all give off different time signatures.

Old men’s playthings. 1970s sports mopeds

And as today’s older bikers become too decrepit to ride and then drop off the perch altogether, where does that leave motorcycling? Is biking on the way out? There won’t be another sales boom like in the 1970s. Motorcycling has been marginalised by prohibitive legislation and the industry, that which remains, lacks the teeth to fight back. There are few votes or jobs tied up with a dangerous recreational pursuit with antisocial overtones.

Motorcycling still sometimes comes under attack from the establishment, but this is rare. Biking has largely shaken off its bad boy image. It has been absorbed and moved back into the mainstream of society where it was in the 1920s and 1930s. But this is not because motorcycling is central to the life of the nation as it was then. It is because bikes are now boys’ toys. More accurately, they are old men’s playthings. To society as a whole, they are an irrelevance.

Mark Williams: What changed during the 1970s was bikes went from being something you needed for transport to something you bought for fun and prestige and consequently there was a decline in motorcycling as cheap transport. Then in the 1980s there was an ever increasing focus on speed as the major buying factor and the market for commuter bikes all but completely disappeared.

I don’t think the industry realised it at first, but the mainstream motorcycle market became more rich and middle class and the industry abandoned other aspects of the market at its peril. The manufacturers should not have been willing to lose the commuter market so readily and abandon the sixteener market as it was once called, the new riders. The industry, such as it remains an industry, has now settled for steadily diminishing overall sales but at hiked retail prices across the board to try to keep its margins.

Gerald Davison: A few years ago I had a conversation with the chap who was running the bike division at Honda UK and I said, do you have any idea what’s happening with ownership? As an industry you focus on the number of people who’ve got bike licences and the number of bikes that are taxed for the road but what you’ve got to take on board is that more and more motorcyclists own several bikes so the number of bikes registered doesn’t tell us anything about the number of owners out there. There’s a smaller number of us riding bikes and multiple ownership is almost the norm.

Motorcycle enthusiasts today. Getting older and mainly looking backwards

And we’re all getting older and mainly looking backwards. None of us are interested in today’s bikes. My bike doesn’t have upside down forks or wavy brake discs and I say so what? But this was the magazines’ obsession until recently. They told us we had to have all these things that don’t actually enhance the experience at all. During the summer I do a lot of biking and I meet a lot of riders who are influenced by this but the number of people who are obsessed with this year’s bike is starting to dwindle quite fast and the manufacturers are doing nothing to address this.

I never thought motorcycling was safe in the hands of the Japanese. They’re just interested in running their factories and producing high volumes and at the moment motorcycling to them represents the production of tens of millions of very small engined bikes they sell in Vietnam and Thailand, Indonesia, India. Oh, they still sell a few big bikes in Europe and North America but that’s not big business now. Not any more.

Sammy Miller Museum, New Milton, Hampshire

Most of us have got cars and motorcycling is nothing to do with transport any more. The garage is my toy box and in it I’ve got a touring bike that’s very practical and very fast to ride over distance. It can carry luggage and I can put my wife on the back. But if I just want to go out for a really enjoyable afternoon with one of my pals I’ll take my CBX 1000, a classic bike that still gives me the most enormous buzz and puts a big smile on my face. Or I might take my little 500cc single because down little roads I can run it flat out all day long and it’s an absolute joy.

So what is there that I can buy from a dealer today that would add to my enjoyment or experience with these bikes? Zero. I go into my local dealer for odd bits but I never stop to look at the bikes. I’d rather go and look at classic bikes somewhere because they interest me more. I spend a lot of time at Sammy Miller’s museum down at New Milton. My past is in there I can walk around and enjoy looking at the bikes again.

Mark Williams: The classic bike scene is very healthy because people who grew up with the sort of machines we grew up with are now in their fifties and sixties and they can’t be doing with modern motorcycles, but they haven’t lost their appetite for motorcycling so they’re returning to the motorcycles of their youth. It’s not rocket science, it happens with classic cars and that’s always been the case.

People either can’t afford to buy the latest sports bikes or, frankly, they’re scared shitless by them because of the focus on ultimate speed and ultimate performance. It’s just too daunting. You can’t use them on public roads, and very few people want to use their bikes on track days. That’s one of the reasons why the classic scene has developed as well as it has. I think people get a great deal of satisfaction from owning and riding and tinkering with older bikes, and this is reflected in the classic bike magazines and the trade that supports them.

The showroom at Made in Italy Motorcycles. Motorcycling’s past has got more future than its present (Made in Italy)

The other thing is that because the industry is so weak we don’t have a body representing the trade and the interests of motorcyclists and we’re not able to counter prohibitive legislation. I feel very strongly the industry now lacks the teeth or the finances to fight onerous and restrictive regulation. It’s a reflection of the fact the industry is not worth much money any more. It can’t afford to employ lobbyists or mount effective campaigns and I feel it’s become a case of fiddling while Rome burns. The NERC Act decimated trail riding in this country at a stroke and little has been done to fight or offset prohibitive insurance costs or the other obstacles to newcomers coming into the game.

The overall consequence is the only people who can afford to go motorcycling are the old and the affluent. This is incredibly stupid because I am afraid to say a huge chunk of the market will soon die or is already dying and the fickle rich who have taken it up later in life or rediscovered it will lose interest, either because they scare themselves too much or because their attention is attracted to something else like sailing or skiing or power boating or collecting art, I don’t know. I fear for the future of motorcycling. Well, I more than fear for it, I just don’t think it’s got one.

Dave Minton: I think the future of motorcycling is pretty bleak because motorcycles have become toys. And the more crowded the roads become, I think the more legislation is going to be introduced and this is going to make it increasingly difficult for motorcyclists to use their machines. Whether through insurance or taxation or impractical safety demands, motorcycles are eventually going to be squeezed out of use. And the same is going to happen to some cars as well until in the end we’re all driving little electric bubble cars around.

Ready for home. Roger Bennett’s wife, Christine and ‘Sputnik’, the couple’s much travelled BMW R75/5 (Roger Bennett)

After the 1970s ended, Roger Bennett continued to ride every day, and he has done so ever since. And his wife is right behind him on the pillion, or sitting alongside in the sidecar.

Roger Bennett: We’ve been up to the North Cape, we used to go to all the FIM rallies, in a different country every year. I think I’ve done about twelve and the wife’s done 10 because I did two before we got married. We met through motorcycling. A mutual friend had bikes. When she met me she thought to herself, ‘Wow, look at that smart 75/5!’ She was really into it. She’s always been into bikes and later she had a little Moto Guzzi V50 Monza of her own.

We used to go to the FIM rally as our fortnight’s summer holiday. We went to Spain, Germany, Austria, Finland, Switzerland and visited all sorts of places getting there and back but the FIM became more expensive and they started doing things on the rally such as visiting monasteries and churches and we’re not into that so we stopped doing FIM rallies and did our own thing.

Three-up on a cold day in Scotland (Roger Bennett)

The lad with the Honda 500 we took to Imola in 1972 bought a house in Portugal and we used to go on the bike to his place every year. Dover to Calais and then just ride down. We love it on the continent. No matter what roads you take you don’t go bang-bang into a pothole like in England. Everywhere from Calais downwards, I can’t remember bad roads anywhere.

We went to Portugal a few times on the 75/5 and a couple of times on an R1100. We kept the R1100 for ten years but then I sold it because it says on the fairing ‘electronic engine management’ and if it broke down I’d have to ring someone and that’s just not me. I need to get my spanners out. It never hiccoughed once but in the back of my mind, as I get older, I’m always thinking that if I’m stopped at the side of the road somewhere I won’t be able to mend it.

Home again, jiggity-jig (Roger Bennett)

I’ve still got my R75/5. It’s called Sputnik. It’s named after the Russian satellite because it means fellow traveller in Russian so it somehow seemed right. Without that bike we wouldn’t have been all over Europe. It’s done about a quarter of a million miles but it’s been doing less and less in recent years because I’ve been riding sidecars more. You can’t ride them both.

But I’m never going to part with the R75/5. It’s not a living thing, It’s a lump of metal and I’m not sentimental in that way, but we used to laugh when we’d got back home from our long trips away and say: ‘Thank you Sputnik,’ because a Bee Emm will always get you back home. No matter what goes wrong with a Bee Emm it’ll always get you back home.

He loves motorcycling, but in many respects, not least in riding every day, Roger Bennett is not a typical motorcyclist. For most bikers, motorcycling is now a hobby, a sport, a pastime rather than transportation, and as motorcycling shrinks, classic bike ownership grows within it as old men start to live in the past. Riding a classic motorcycle is about reliving youth or tasting life as it used to be for our fathers or grandfathers.

Classic motorcycles take us to another world, a bygone time where things were very different, and often rather more agreeable

Living in a broken society running on crumbling roads, it is often more comfortable to look backwards rather than forwards, and for many, classic motorcycles are the closest things we have to a time machine. They take us to another world, a bygone time where things were very different, and often rather more agreeable. People are nostalgic because motorcycles and motorcycling once made them happy. They represent joy and an effortless lightness of mind that is no longer part of their everyday life. Through the ownership of an old motorbike, can it be again?

Many motorcyclists are stuck in the past and it could be argued that is unhealthy, but paradoxically a motorcycle is a really good way of becoming unstuck from a negative mindset. It sets one right with oneself. Riding a motorcycle is a therapeutic activity, and the very purchase of a classic machine can bring peace of mind. It can be the belated acquisition of something hopelessly out of reach in young adulthood, just as a chopper bicycle, a space hopper or a hand-made wooden sledge can be objects acquired by men ostensibly for their children and grandchildren but which are really bought to satisfy, finally, the long denied yearnings of their youthful selves.

Breathing life back into an old bike can also breathe life back into its restorer, and people who ride great bikes once again can renew themselves because since they last rode them they have changed. If a bike still has purpose, it still has life and a classic bike and its rider can keep each other going.

A classic bike and its rider can keep each other going (Venture Classics)

And despite modern day electronic interconnectivity and the dumb babble of communications conducted via the internet, there is, sadly, a growing lack of real human connection between people. There is a lack of validity, a lack of meaning. A great nothingness. A hobby such as classic motorcycling can fill the void.

Classic runs and shows present a congenial environment where people come together who have shared tastes, interests and views. A real community rather than a virtual one can give an empty life sense and meaning. Better to fill an empty life with an obsession with motorcycles than with drink, drugs or fantasy. Better to avoid becoming cretinised by exposure to the insidious awfulness that is modern television by getting out and riding and by meeting other people.

Exciting, charismatic objects

Against this is the cynical and disdainful view of outsiders that a keen interest in something is not cool. That enthusiasm in general is not cool. That it is cool instead to be cynical. That nostalgia is pathetic. Laughable. Collectors have autism. Those who celebrate the past are mad misfits.

Motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson has declared riding classic motorcycles baffling, irrational and incomprehensible. A motorcycle is a poor substitute for a car to start with so why ride an inferior one? The answer is that it is a romantic act. An emotional experience. Motorcycles are a celebration of life. They are made passionately. They evoke passion. They are exciting, charismatic objects.

To dedicated motorcyclists, even the most ordinary classic bike can be an objet d’art. A bike’s line from a particular angle, the shape of its petrol tank, the glorious basso profundo bark of a 1970s Italian V-twin engine, the plaintive wail of an early Japanese four cylinder superbike on song. These are the sights and sounds of another time, another place and a different state of mind.

All bikes have a life, meaning and existence beyond a breakdown of their component parts. A gestalt thing goes on when a motorcyclist sees one. We understand the present by comparing it with the past, by thinking, by considering time and perspective, by adding more layers. Then our angle on it changes.

A living memory and a form of self-definition

We see with memory associations. We can’t properly see a classic bike unless we’ve seen it before and know something of its original place and if a person doesn’t have a question in mind to start with, there’s far too much to look at. Of course, obscured by reverence and by the evoking of rose tinted memories, objectivity is impossible. We are looking at a memory. It is subjective and two people don’t see exactly the same thing. A classic motorcycle is therefore a form of self definition.

Many motorcyclists can consider themselves fortune’s favourites because through motorcycling they find a secret door to another dimension. It is a magical doorway to a sense of fulfilment and a feeling of joy and transcendence that some are privileged enough to discover through their work or via musical or artistic expression, but it is an opening which millions search for without success throughout their whole lives.

For many returnee motorcyclists this route to heavenly happiness is something they discovered unwittingly as teenagers and which they now hope remains accessible while they are physically still able to ride. For others there is a desire to keep hold of the past, to romanticise it and make it better than it ever was.

‘A sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happy things’

For those wistfully nostalgic about their childhoods; their teddy bear, their Subbuteo Table Soccer set, their Airfix model kits and their H0/00 (1/72 scale) soldiers, a motorbike from their late adolescence aids them in their quest to keep alight the flickering, fading light of their youth. The light of their essential selves which burned brightly then and which is now all but extinguished. And for some there is an appeal in owning once more a machine from their motorcycling heyday, from their twenties when they were at the height of virility and physical manliness and optimistic in outlook.

In all these cases owning a classic motorcycle is about stepping back in time, but in the last two instances there is an accompanying sense of loss. A poignant sense of our mortality. Alfred Tennyson wrote: ‘A sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happy things.’ It can be a mistake to rely too much on our memories to create happiness.

Why do some motorcyclists amass vast collections of classic machines? In Motorcycle Sport magazine back in 1964 it was written: ‘One noticeable difference between the male and female of the species...there are others...is that the male is wont to collect old motorcycles, cars, clocks and what have you and spend countless hours restoring them to their former glory: and the female by and large doesn’t. Collectors who have tried to conceal priceless specimens under the bed and on top of the wardrobe will have found that the female attitude can be quite hostile.’

Art (Made in Italy)

APPENDIX FOUR – ADVERTISING SLOGANS

PART ONE – CLASSIC MOTORCYCLING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

PART ONE –
CLASSIC MOTORCYCLING IN THE 21ST CENTURY