© Richard Skelton, 2014

Published by Richard Skelton

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.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-9930020-4-5

Book layout and cover design by Clare Brayshaw

INTRODUCTION

This series of books is, in some respects, a love letter to motorcycling. It has certainly been written from the heart. I started riding powered two-wheelers in the mid 1970s, on a fabulous little 50cc ‘popsicle purple’ Yamaha FS1-E, and straight away I felt that riding set me free in a way that was not only instantly joyful, but also meaningful and somehow magically transcendental.

I was also aware I was stepping into a great, flowing river of history, and I was deeply glad of it. I quickly became as interested in motorcycling’s past as its present; hungry to find out about the fascinating machines and singular people that made motorcycling what it was, and had been. And I began to explore what it was that set motorcyclists apart from the majority and made biking so uniquely enjoyable. As an avid rider and reader, I became a student of ‘the sport’.

Those thoughts and feelings have endured for nearly 40 years now and while I still find motorcycling in all its aspects as boundlessly fascinating as did my teenage self, it is the period in which I plunged in and joined the flow, the time when I was at my most impressionable and when my mind was at its most absorbent, that still holds the greatest interest for me today. The 1970s. The time when I fell in love with motorcycling.

The first book is a general history, briefly told, of motorcycling in Britain from its beginnings at the very end of the 19th century up to 1969 (interwoven to an extent with two-wheeled goings on in the USA and elsewhere). It charts motorcycling’s pioneering years, skips through two world wars, tells of social acceptability in the 1920s, hard times in the 1930s and growing ostracisation and decline in the 1950s and 1960s. It attempts to make sense of the motorcycling world order, and of motorcycling’s place in society and everyday life, and sets the scene for the larger, more detailed volumes which follow.

Taken together, Books Two, Three and Four form a comprehensive, in-depth history of the bikes and motorcycling trends and events in the 1970s. They tell the story of the arrival of the superbike, the continuing and inexorable rise of the Japanese motorcycle industry and, partly from an insider’s point of view, the wasteful, lingering death of its British equivalent. They tell of the thrilling and extraordinary sporting machines from Italy and of the bulletproof BMW twins designed in Bavaria. They tell of motorcycling culture and of two-wheeled life and lives.

In the 1970s, motorcycling became a leisure activity in a new and exciting way, there were more motorcyclists than ever before, or since, and dozens of new and ever more fabulous and technologically advanced motorcycles crammed the showrooms every year. It was the time of Jarno Saarinen and Giacomo Agostini and of Kenny Roberts and Barry Sheene. The time of Bike magazine, of Motorcycle Sport and Cycle in the USA, of Mark Williams, Dave Minton and LJK Setright in his pomp.

I argue that although the protagonists were largely unaware of it at the time, the 1970s as a whole can now be seen to have been a golden era in the history of the movement, a pivotal decade which represents a high point in the history of motorcycling that is never likely to be matched.

The final book in the series, entitled ‘The Magic of Motorcycling’, takes a sideways look at the 1970s classic motorcycle scene in the second decade of the 21st century and explores what it is that makes motorcycling so special to so many people yet an anathema to a great many more.

And a series of appendices list nostalgic, amusing and sometimes poignant reminders of the life and culture of the 1970s, reminding us of the global goings-on and domestic backdrop underlying the motorcycling scene and, of course, all lesser matters.

Books Two to Five all feature a short chapter containing potted biographies of the interviewees quoted in the text.

Altogether, this gigantic and far reaching but, I hope, always coherent tome, is an attempt to make sense of motorcycling and celebrate its apogee in the 1970s. I have tried to set down a great many facts in a logical yet entertaining way and, as well as aiming to be informative, I have strived to connect with fellow enthusiasts and devotees at an emotional level, and also to convey to non-motorcycling readers something of what is wonderful and fascinating about powered two-wheelers.

CHAPTER ONE

FINAL COUNTDOWN

Although only a grey shadow of its once vital, vibrant pre-war self, Britain at the start of the 1970s was still a formidable industrial and manufacturing country. And the English midlands, with Birmingham at its centre, was its bomb pocked but still beating heart. Birmingham, Britain’s second city since the industrial revolution, and famous for brass buttons and guns, for electroplating and pens, for all types of machinery, for jewellery and for Cadbury’s chocolate, still supported a number of working mills and substantive smokestack manufactories sited along its busy thoroughfares, not least the village-sized BSA works on Armoury Road, Small Heath.

The city’s once essential arterial canals, now still and inactive, lay filthy, foul, stale and stagnant alongside these plants, and Birmingham’s once vibrant railway goods yards no longer screeched and clanged and clashed with life as they once did, both by day and, under mighty arc lights, all through the night. Instead heavy flatbed lorries hauled up to factory gates, bringing raw materials; steel, coal, iron and copper, and strained and crunched away in low gear, laden with BSA motorcycles and other shiny, newly manufactured goods, bound for all corners of the country and for the new container shipyards in Liverpool, Southampton and Felixstowe.

The proportion of manual workers and their families in the British population in 1911 had been 75 percent. By the early 1970s it was little more than one in two, but people still worked with their hands in Birmingham. They made things. They worked in big factories. They worked down side streets in redbrick machine shops and single story workshops beside the canals and under the shadow of flyovers, where every inch of pavement was lined with their colourful parked cars.

In the rebuilt city centre, pioneering white collar workers toiled at their desks in cuboid concrete blocks. Where Hitler’s bombs and 1960s town planners had demolished epic Victorian industrial architecture, another form of brutalism had taken its place. De-industrialisation had begun. The 1970s would see an acceleration of it. The 1980s would see the process all but completed.

Change was overdue. British industry was too craft based; too inefficient and too labour intensive. There was too much machine shop work, too much bench work and not enough modern machinery or method. Machines glistened in oil, handles worn smooth by callused palms. Birmingham workers had quick hands and minds, they were skilled, and mostly hard working, they did their work well and did it better daily, but it was no longer enough.

Britain’s surviving manufacturing concerns, both large and small, were existing on borrowed time. Inky storm clouds were sweeping across British industry. In particular, a presage of doom hung over BSA’s Small Heath plant. Its light was fading, its future bleak. It was on the extreme verge of extinction.

SMALL HEATH

Small Heath comprised: workshops, tool rooms, power driven machinery. Barn-like, shadowy machine shops, yellowy electric light not quite reaching into their gloomy corners. Men at their machines with too much to do and yet able to do it. Urgent young men with luxuriant sideburns, bad teeth and sleek, bryllianteened hair, wearing smart blue cotton boiler suits. Loafing, goofy-toothed apprentices with shiny new steel toecapped boots on their outsize feet and whispy bumfluff and a clamour of acne on their chins. Small, heavily bespectacled, gone to seed, scurfy, grey haired old men in white shop coats, the tips of black or tortoiseshell plastic combs poking out of their top pockets.

At Small Heath too were neat, tweed jacketed, pensive, pipe smoking men from the publicity department and from the drawing offices who drove to work in hydrolastic Austins or Morrises, and primly unapproachable secretaries who click-clacked along endless corridors to deliver files or to take dictation, and gossiping, hair-netted, salt-of-the-earth women who perched on stools painting pinstripes on petrol tanks, and cheery beehived telephonists who took calls from the old empire, and bored-to-tears teenage wages clerks who pored over spoiled clock cards.

There were fearless test riders, there were cocky van drivers, there were packers and checkers and busy post room boys, there were beefy security guards and handy maintenance men, there were white-coated lab technicians, there were pin-striped accountants, there were painters and decorators and lavatory cleaners, there were plumbers and sparks and union conveners.

It was a place with a smithy, with jigs, with general machine tools from the 1920s, with filthy floors and blackened wooden work benches, a place of spinning handles, of filing, of hammering, of slide rules, of setting up and resetting and adjusting, a place of assembly by hand and checking by eye. There was the heat of the forge and the ring of the anvil, the thump of trip-hammers and the clank and smash of presses.

Sparks flew from lathes. Shafts spun in the roof. Men whistled and sang. There were breathtaking shock waves of hot vibrating air. There was a background of rhythmic banging, there was percussive crashing and there were fierce bursts of hammering. There was the low throb of antiquarian electric motors, the urgent beat of compressors, the shriek of cutters, the thrash and slap of belts, the shrill shock of electric wall bells, the punch of clock cards, the clatter and peck of typewriters, the deafening cacophony of the canteen, the monotonous, relentless, synchronous tick of the electric office clock, the hum and pulse of the machine shops, the intermittent hissing of the paint shops, the crackle and snap of welding and the dull roar and crackly futz of brazing.

There was the acrid stench of chemical vats and the acid taste of iron filings and heavy tang of steel were discernible on the tongue. There was blanketing, baking, leaden heat, there was oily mist hanging heavy in the atmosphere and leaving a smeary viscous film on all it touched, there was the clattery rattle of recalcitrant, cumbrous carts heaped high with components, propelled, swivelling by heaving hand or hauled by donkey engined truck, from shop to shop and just in time to the production line. Pat Slinn worked there.

Pat Slinn: Many of the floors were wooden boards, heavily soaked in oil. The ceilings were high and below them ran ducts and heating pipes that always seemed to be leaking hot water or hissing steam. Large enamelled steel light shades hung down on flexes. There were long corridors, the cavernous machine shops were noisy and there always seemed to be oil in the air.

Some of the machinery was unbelievable. There were whole machine shops where most of the production machinery was driven by leather belts from electric motors in the roof! One bank of machines used a common tank that held cutting fluid which was piped to the different machines by a pump driven by leather belt. The floor was always covered in cutting fluid. The heat, noise and the fumes at times in some of these departments was very unpleasant and, of course, it was dangerous.

There did not seem to be any order to the place. Old large copper water geysers heated by gas burners could be found every so often that were used for heating water for the workers to make their tea. BSA M20 engined Lister trucks were forever hauling raw materials or components in various stages of production from machine shop to machine shop. The hardening shops and the chrome plating departments were a long way from the machine shops and the experimental, developmental and competition shops were well away from any of the production areas, right on the other side of the factory.

In some respects this was good, as it was usually reasonably quiet, but when you needed anything from the production stores it entailed an extremely long walk, especially if you had to visit the frame department which was on the top floor. If I remember correctly you had to climb 115 steps to get there. One of the folk stories at Small Heath was that on one occasion 1950s trials and scrambles star Billy Nicholson rode his trials bike up the staircase to collect something, and then back down again.

Small Heath was a violent, hellish place, a tumultuous, cacophonous and chaotic place, a thundering, deafening place. A coarse, manly place. A place of joshing and jokes on the production line, shouted above the din. A hard place. But it was also a purposeful place, a busy place; not a place for slackers. It was toxic and violent but also mellow, warm and familiar. It was a brutal place, but benign too. Somehow homely. Somehow human. To work there was to be part of a family. Pat Slinn had joined the BSA family when he was born, and he started working for the firm in 1958.

Pat Slinn: My father knew how much I wanted to work with bikes, but he decided a good grounding and schooling in engineering was the most important thing so unbeknown to me he had a word with the apprentice supervisor and arranged for me to start work at the BSA guns factory in Birmingham, so my first 14 months as a BSA apprentice was spent in the tool and model rooms at BSA guns.

I was taught to use a variety of machine tools including lathes, milling and shaping machines, drilling machines and a jig borer. I was also taught to braze and weld using oxygen acetylene. I had to attend Hall Green technical college one day and two evenings each week and I started an HNC mechanical engineering course. At that time BSA guns not only produced air rifles and high quality sporting rifles, but also the semi automatic ‘FN’ assault rifle made by the thousand for NATO troops.

After the first year we were allowed to choose a specialisation for the remainder of our apprenticeships and I asked if I could join the experimental and development department of BSA motor cycles at Small Heath. I got my wish but I had to wait another 12 months. I was sent to work in the foundry and forge but first I spent time in the pattern shop, helping to make patterns for prototype parts.

Just after I was moved again to join the press section the BSA management decided to close the pattern shop. They had decided that in future all pattern making would be contracted out. Some of the pattern makers who were there at the time were among the finest craftsman in the country; their skill in making patterns in wood was quite extraordinary. It was the first strange management decision I came across, and many more would follow.

I moved from the foundry to the press section to work in their tool room. They would hand finish press tools and once again I was amazed by the skills of some of the craftsmen. The engineer that I worked with was called Willy Wyatt. Willy could beat or bend a piece of metal into any shape you could imagine and the competition shop used to send their damaged oil and fuel tanks along to him to be repaired. I once saw him beat a single piece of aluminium sheet into a petrol tank. The only equipment he used apart from files and shears was a selection of self made dollies and hammers and some sand filled leather cushions.

The skills those guys had were absolutely outstanding and I learnt such a lot from them. I learnt how to bend steel and alloy and to beat and planish sheet metals to a given shape. Willy even taught me how to gas weld alloy. Many of those rare skills have stayed with me to this day.

Then one day I was told to go for an interview with Bert Perigo, who was BSA’s chief development engineer, and Bill Johnson. Bert had been a highly successful trials rider and was part of BSA pre-war history, and Bill had also been part of the 1930s trials team. They decided I had the necessary calling to work for them and I was appointed as one of two apprentices in the engine development department.

At that time the engine development department was a separate unit in a building that was part of the general experimental and competition shop. We had our own Heenan and Froud DPX dynamometers and I was trained how to use them. In the back of the building was British sidecar champion Chris Vincent’s workshop where he built and developed his A10 racing engines and gearboxes. It was also a repository for long forgotten prototypes, including the MC1 250cc GP racer that Geoff Duke helped develop and had hoped to race.

I worked with senior development engineers on a variety of engines. Some had a lot of money and resources spent on them but never became production models. More fruitfully, one of my first jobs was to work on converting a 350cc B40 motor to a capacity of around 400cc. The motor grew in stages until it was eventually a full 500cc. In 1964 and 1965 Jeff Smith won his two world motocross championships on a 440cc version.

It was during 1964 that the design and development staff from Ariel in Selly Oak was incorporated into the unit at BSA. Sammy Miller was given a bench in the shop where he mainly worked on his famous 500cc Ariel trials bike GOV 132, Clive Bennett, Ariel’s development and competitions chief also found a place, as did Ken Whistance, who I believe had been chief designer at Ariel.

Other outside personnel who were found benches and drawing boards at Small Heath at around the same time included Mick Bowers (Bonkey), who joined from Royal Enfield, and two-stroke wizard George Todd. It was at this time I came to understand a little about company politics and became aware of the bickering, petty jealousies and downright rudeness of certain people in the ‘new’ management structure of the development and design departments.

Slinn started riding at 16 and was soon riding bikes for the company, representing BSA in competition and at exhibitions at home and abroad.

Pat Slinn: My mum and dad bought me a 175cc BSA Bantam for my sixteenth birthday. It was, in fact, an old development shop hack that had been reconditioned. We collected it from the experimental shop and I was planning to go for a ride on it at midnight on the day, but in actual fact I nipped out a few days before my birthday. I soon discovered that it had a four speed gearbox! When the development shop lads had decommissioned it they deliberately left it in! The Bantam was traded back in a few months later and I was given a prototype C15 trials bike.

While I was still an apprentice I was asked by the export sales department if I would take a A65 Lightning and Watsonian Monza sidecar to the BSA owners club rally in Vienna, Austria. In their infinite wisdom, the BSA travel department decided the best way to cross the channel was by air from Southend to Rotterdam. I was presented with the tickets the day before I went so there was not much I could do about it. I drove off the plane in Rotterdam and motored down through Holland and into Germany.

I was pleasantly surprised at the performance of the Lightning. It had a lot of bits and pieces in the sidecar that I was taking to the Austrian importer so it was quite heavy, but it cruised at 80-85 mph all day on the autobahns. I then spent a lovely evening at a small hotel at the side of the river Danube and I thought how fortunate I was to be a BSA apprentice sent to Austria representing the factory.

The following day I decided I would continue on what, from the map, seemed a good mountainous road. I really gave that outfit some ‘wellie’ and abused it on the hairpin corners. But after I had arrived at my hotel in Vienna I found out that both wheels on the Lightning were about to collapse! A lot of the spokes were broken and others were very loose so I had to have the wheels completely rebuilt by the BSA importer before I could ride home.

Another year I was asked to represent the company at a motorcycle show in Brighton. I was part of the team that was sent to fix the machines to the stand and help pack up afterwards. During the show we had to arrive in good time each morning to remove the dust sheets, replace the tank caps, reflectors, control cables footrest rubbers etc that would inevitably have disappeared the day before, and to polish the fingerprints off the bikes ready for the new day. During the daytime I was a member of the stand staff, answering questions from Joe Public and after the show we had to stay behind for an hour or so to act as security guards.

There were three of us in the team, and we stayed in a rather grubby bed and breakfast establishment in a Brighton back street. It was the pits. I later found out that the sales representatives were staying at a somewhat better establishment on the seafront and so it went on upwards from there, with each layer of staff and management staying at better and better places. The company directors stayed at a grand country hotel about ten miles from town. I know this because I had to take some tickets out to the hotel for the BSA/Triumph fashion show and I went there and back on a bike! A lesson learned in discrimination!

Before we set off for London I had been given an amount of cash to cover my meals and expenses, something like £10 a day. I found this to be quite adequate and when I arrived home from the show I filled out an expenses sheet and handed back the money that was left over. Within a very short time I was summoned to see the sales department accountant and told that there was a problem with my expenses. I protested. I told him they were definitely accurate and I had submitted receipts to cover all the money I had spent.

He said that was not the nature of the problem. Surely I had bought a newspaper each day? What about chrome and wax polish? Hadn’t I taken dealers to the bar and bought them food and drinks? (a strange one this, as BSA/Triumph had a free dealers’ hospitality room!). But I soon got the idea. I had not claimed enough! Everybody else had spent a lot more than me and if somebody in authority saw my expense claim and checked it against the others, it could cause a problem. Another lesson learned. How to fiddle your expenses. All part of my apprenticeship training!

By the 1970s the BSA factory was a place redolent of the past rather than looking to a brightly starred future. A place where off-road ace Bill Nicholson rode his bike up the stairs. A place with a showroom, a trophy room, a works canteen, a salaried employees’ dining hall and a management restaurant. A place that had a social club and an annual sports day. A firm that owned the houses on the other side of the street and whose workers lived in them. A firm that paid well and a place where 7,000 people had made motorcycles in the 1950s. A place once proud of its precision engineering. A place now stumbling, bumbling and inept.

BSA had become a business run by accountants not motorcyclists. People in the company with a love of motorcycles were largely not listened to. According to Dave Minton at the time, motorcyclists in Roland Jofeh’s management team were seen by the BSA big boss as dirty-fingernailed inexperts and enthusiastic amateurs who had no right to administer the running of a motorcycle company. Many of these motorcycle men left the company.

Veteran engineer Bert Hopwood, whose career had started at Ariel long before the war, stayed. He had long wanted to design a new range of bikes around a modular concept. Instead, an Ariel badged 50cc shopping scooter went into development. It would be a total disaster. And a new five speed 350cc twin, Edward Turner’s last hurrah, was announced as part of a huge new range for 1971.

Turner’s double overhead camshaft twin design was expected to be refined and brought to production by Hopwood (the role he had played for his old boss on many occasions since the 1930s) and also by Doug Hele. The sporty new middleweight would be built as both a Triumph (Bandit) and a BSA (Fury). The rest of the range was mainly the work of the group’s crop of bright young designers based at Umberslade Hall and would mainly comprise revampings of existing models.

The 1971 BSA/Triumph range had been announced the previous year with great fanfare and much expensive publicity both in Britain and in the USA. In October 1970 there were extravagant dealer and press launches in top London venues and expensive advertising campaigns were set in motion. Altogether there would be 16 bikes (more if counted differently) including Turner’s twin.

Dealers were impressed. Big orders were placed. But it was all bluff and rather silly empty hope without substance. There was much tooling up at great expense, the advertising campaigns continued to run and parts books were drawn up and printed, but the twin never went into production and the factory was so badly organised and run it could only meet a fraction of the orders it received for its redesigned machines. The debacle cost the ailing group around a million pounds.

Pat Slinn: Sometime during 1970, BSA Triumph announced all their new models at a very expensive dealer convention held at the London West End night club called the Talk of the Town. It seemed to me, and indeed to many other BSA Triumph people, that it was all totally over the top. There were free bars, a large buffet and a cabaret, and they hired a very well known comedian, whose name I have forgotten! However, they did not have nearly enough machines to supply to the dealer network because of production problems. And of course the Bandit and Fury never made it past the prototype stage.

The problem was not, as was claimed, due to unprecedented and unanticipated dealer demand; it was because BSA/Triumph senior management was in disarray. From the top downwards there was constant vacillation and frequent changes of mind, administration was muddled and middle management indulged in intense and bitter political infighting. Communication with factory workers was appalling. As a result of this chaos, supply shortages stopped the production lines and production schedules were a shambles.

Pat Slinn: The management said they had a dealer demand problem. They said they had such a full order book they did not have the capacity to produce and supply enough bikes, but I believe the real problems were severe production difficulties. For example, I was led to understand that the production line at Meriden was stopped for a long period whilst frames were redesigned. There were also parts shortages and specific quality control problems which caused production to be halted. And due to the age and unreliability of a lot of the production machinery, there were frequent problems maintaining quality. This had been the case for some time.

I once discovered a problem with crank assemblies tightening up was down to the fact that the drive side and timing side bearing houses in the crankcases were not in line. The machine that line-reamed the cases was worn out and the jig that the crankcase was put into for machining was not in line. The machine shop fitter, whom I knew from my apprentice days, used to place pieces of shim steel under one side of the machining jig to try make sure that it was parallel because the jig and/or the machine bed was so worn out it was no longer square, but this obviously did not work all the time! I can’t remember how many crankcases were affected or how many were scrapped. Other tricks like this were used, and the poor worn condition and poor accuracy of some of the machinery was unbelievable.

On another model the hole that was bored in the cylinder heads for the exhaust valve guide was persistently a degree or so out, so the valve did not seat and seal correctly. We reported these problems to the quality control department but they said they did not regularly check for particular problems like that, but relied instead on the engine production line people to tell them of any manufacturing errors. The flawed logic there was that the assembly workers were on piece work, and it was not in their financial interests to draw attention to any problems like that. The cylinder head problem was solved by re-boring the valve guide hole to a larger diameter and making a slightly larger diameter valve guide. However this later caused problems for the service department and the parts department.

And there was an old guy who had looked after the steel stores for years and was approaching retirement age. He did not want to go but he was forced to retire. Then it came to light this guy had developed his own method of marking some of the various types of steel in his store. He had ignored the normal British Standard coloured paint identification and used his own! I heard that a lot of gearbox shafts were once made out of the wrong specification steel but that was hearsay.

MODERNISATION

Pat Slinn: BSA did attempt to modernise the Small Heath plant and they invested in some modern sophisticated production machinery but, I guess it was too little too late. I remember concrete plinths being cast for some of the machinery. Some of the capstan type lathes and grinding machines were quite sophisticated and carried out multiple operations with a high standard of accuracy.

Of course, all this investment in plant was necessary for BSA try to compete with the Japanese threat. A device was developed to build a spoked wheel automatically. I saw it during the development stage and it was certainly very sophisticated. Spokes were fed into the hub, the hub was then moved into the vertical position and then the spokes were then fed into the rim and the nipples were added and tightened. Finally the wheel was trued. I am not sure if it ever worked properly. And another piece of equipment that they bought, and modified, was the device for twisting the three cylinder crankshafts. It was the first machine to do this.

Bert Hopwood had experienced problems with crankshaft breakages with the spheroidal graphite iron cranks used on the BSA/Triumph triple. They had 120 degree crank pin spacings which were unforgeable but somebody came up with a clever solution. The cranks were forged flat, with 180 degree spacing, but then the journals were heated and the crankshaft was twisted until the spacing was at 120 degrees. This was done with the cranks in a raw forged state and they were machined afterwards. This method maintained strength and facilitated the use of steel It also allowed for smaller dimensions and lower weight.

Pat Slinn: During the 1960s a computer was brought in. I can remember the computer room being built and the computer being installed and after it was put in the few people that were allowed in there had to wear covers over their shoes. There were huge problems getting the computer to work correctly. One of my friends worked with it and he told me it was going to take years for them to get it to do what it was supposed to do. Certainly the stock control department, essentially rooms full of girls sitting at rows and rows of desks flicking through card file indexes, was still there many years after the computer was installed. The computer systems in the group did not work very well. They produced piles of paper that that did not seem to mean much to anybody. Most people carried on using their slide rules. I did and I still have mine.

At the end of the sixties a computerised system was introduced that was supposed to facilitate the transport of finished components from their various departments to the main motor cycle assembly production line. In principle this was a good idea, although it was very early days for this type of thing and it was incredibly ambitious. It suffered from a lot of problems.

There were a great number of overhead conveyors that carried baskets full of components – frames, tanks, mudguards etc – that were supposed to arrive at the side of the production lines just as the motorcycles that were being built needed those particular parts. To install this system, walls were knocked down and new areas were created for loading the baskets and stores and whole departments were moved. I believe they finally got it working properly just as Small Heath closed!

And apart from the modern machinery and plant, a lot of work went on to modernise the Small Heath factory itself. A new boiler house and boiler system was installed, including what must have been miles of new water and heating pipes, Some of the old oil soaked wooden floorboards were replaced with new ones, departments were re-decorated, and new windows were fitted in a attempt to brighten the place up.

All the window frames along the wall of the ‘new building’ were replaced with plastic ones. The new building was so called because it was rebuilt after wartime bombing! All this work must have been costing a fortune, so somebody must have thought the Small Heath plant had a future. However, it was closed a very short time after the windows and frames were replaced. Very odd!

CONFUSION

Producing so many new models for the 1971 selling season was just too much of a strain for the Small Heath factory and the group as a whole. There were standstills while faulty designs were modified at Umberslade Hall and shortages of some vital components while the group’s computer systems ordered mountains of other parts that were already adequately stocked. Bought in components declined in quality as parts suppliers got screwed down too hard on price and cut corners and some suppliers stopped delivering at all.

Industrial disputes, prevalent in British industry as a whole at the time, were also a problem. Over ambitious production targets imposed by over zealous managers added to the confusion, provoked unrest and affected quality control.

Pat Slinn: I was working abroad at the BSA/Triumph importers in Germany during 1971. We had a warehouse full of BSA and Triumph models that we did not want and could not sell but we could not get any of the bikes we actually wanted such as BSA Spitfires and Lightnings and Triumph Bonnevilles. The factories seemed to send us anything they wanted to get rid of. At one time it was impossible to use a fork lift truck in the warehouse because it was so full of wooden crates. And at the same time we also had dealers crying out for parts that we could not supply.

Hemorrhaging cash, the BSA Group hiked prices by 30 percent which put their bikes in line with the Japanese competition. But by now it was becoming clear the British product was greatly inferior. Restyled versions of Triumph’s 650cc twins featured an innovative new oil-bearing frame, but the Umberslade-designed chassis made the bikes too tall for smaller riders. A fundamental error and press criticism affected sales.

In an attempt to take advantage of the American off-road riding boom, the 1971 range also included trail and motocross machines, but unlike the Japanese factories’ zippy new lightweight two-strokes, BSA/Triumph’s efforts were powered by the factory’s existing and old fashioned leaky four-stroke lumps.

Turner’s 350 appeared in campaign advertising and in brochures. It looked smart and modern and its design was imaginative, but in engineering terms it was coarse and unfinished and requiring of a great deal more development. The engine never really ran properly and the bike needed a new frame. In fact, there was not much right with it. Only a few test and show machines were built, several of which survive.

Pat Slinn: The 350cc OHC twin cylinder BSA Bandit and Triumph Fury designed by Edward Turner was not actually very good. It looked nice enough, but in reality it was a bit of an engineering disaster. The original prototypes certainly were. The frames twisted, the crankshafts broke and the valve gear was unreliable. The frames were strengthened but without a very extensive and expensive re-design the engines would have remained noisy and very unreliable.

I know that some BSA design and engineering staff deliberately steered well clear of the project. I spoke to one fairly senior design and development engineer who told me that Turner was an old dinosaur who needed to ‘roll over and die!’ Everybody admired the bikes he had designed in the past and what he had achieved but not these new designs. I did actually ride one of the prototypes and I was not impressed.

Pat Slinn: The reaction of factory testers and other people who first rode the new oil in frame BSA and Triumph 650cc twins was that the riding position was too high by as much as three inches. I rode one home one night and had problems reaching the ground sitting in the normal riding position. I submitted a report stating this and I know that there was the same complaint from all the testers and many other people that had ridden it, including some press people. Everybody was ignored. Also the greyish dirty white colour that the BSA frames were painted was not at all liked.

I rode a 650cc Spitfire scrambler to the Elephant rally at the Nurburgring in West Germany where the West German importers had an exhibition stand and then carried on afterwards to visit the Swiss, Belgian and Dutch importers and show them the bike. I was joined by a guy from the test team who took a 650cc Lightning.

Most members of the public who sat on the bikes commented on the riding height and did not like the colour of the frame on the Spitfire, and I received the same criticisms from all the importers. On a positive note, the best part of that 2,500 mile trip was it was the most enjoyable long-distance burn up I ever had. Both bikes were ridden very hard and performed perfectly. They were totally trouble free.

American sales were prioritised absolutely, but such was the chaos at Small Heath, the factory’s US agents still did not get their orders. And in Britain, many models were completely unobtainable. The BSA/Triumph group was an empire in retreat and teetering on the edge of collapse. It was selling its subsidiaries. It was on borrowed time. It carried on only because it always had done. It was like Berlin in the last days of the war. Waiting for the inevitable.

UMBERSLADE HALL

Originally built in the 1690s and Grade II listed in 1952, Umberslade Hall is an imposing, colonnaded country house that featured in the Warwickshire volume of Nilolaus Pevsner’s definitive reference work, The Buildings of England. By 1971 this historic and stately pile had been home to BSA/Triumph’s design department for several years but fine statuary remained standing in its wooded grounds and peacocks still trailed their finery on its lawns.

Pat Slinn: The BSA design and development team was moved away from Small Heath and located to a 17^th century mansion called Umberslade Hall in the leafy Warwickshire village of Tamworth in Arden. It soon became known as Slumberglade! In late 1967 I was asked if I would join a new department there run by an ex art school graduate, as their engineering project engineer. This department was to be known as the ‘styling studio’!

The development and design departments from Triumph were supposed to move across to Umberslade too, but only a small section did. Doug Hele and Henry Vale refused to move their staff and some Triumph drawing office personnel also refused to move. If I remember correctly the Triumph people wanted a wage increase to move there and if they had been given it they would have been on a lot more money than the BSA people. They were not granted the rise and stayed where they were. I believe that in the end the establishment was content with this arrangement as it saved them a lot of money and kept the trade unions out of Umberslade.

When I was moved to Umberslade I was given a desk and drawing board in this so called ‘styling studio’. An arty type of guy called Stephen Mettam had been employed as chief stylist. I believe that before working there he worked for a company which designed furniture and television cabinets. We regularly received calls on the internal phone system asking for hairdressing appointments and one day I arrived at the ‘studio’ to find some prankster had plonked a hairdressing chair and a ladies’ hair dryer right in the middle of the floor. Just a small example of the contempt people had for Umberslade Hall.

Within a month Mettam had wangled himself a trip to the BSA and Triumph importers in Los Angeles. I decided I could not stand any of this and quickly got myself moved down into the basement next to the ‘procurement’ department. Umberslade’s reputation at Small Heath and Meriden was as the place that would pull the whole group down. Everybody there seemed busy, but nothing ever seemed to get done. I was quite fortunate because I moved about between Small Heath and Meriden and also BSA Redditch, and I was sometimes away visiting the West German importers as well.

There was a period at Umberslade when people were being hired and given weird titles and told to do obscure jobs. They all seemed to be on huge salaries and a lot of them had company cars. A number of these people were living permanently in a hotel in Meriden village until they bought themselves a house and moved their families. Most of these new engineers were from the aircraft industry. Many of them had never even ridden a motor cycle. One quite senior engineer asked me one day if the B50 enduro engine that I was working on had a synchromesh gearbox!

I remember sitting in an engineering project meeting at Umberslade Hall about the new Bandit and Fury. Dr Stefan Bauer, who went by the title of director of engineering was there. He was at great pains to point out to us that he was the director of engineering, and NOT the engineering director! People said that he was a doctor of physics, but he appeared more like a doctor of philosophy, or music and he certainly used to play the strangest music in his car. I also remember he once said to us: ‘Just wait until the Japanese know as much about motorcycles as we do!’ Well, we all just looked at each other in amazement.

I was most unhappy at Umberslade. Projects would be cancelled and nothing ever seemed to get finished. One afternoon in the spring of 1970 I was summoned back to Small Heath for a meeting with general works manager Alistair Cave. He was starting a new department that would take responsibility for motorcycle build quality, the preparation of press machines, and special projects. Would I like to join it? Would I!

ARIEL 3

Unlike Edward Turner’s 350cc twin, the shopping tricycle chosen for development ahead of Bert Hopwood’s idea for a modular range of machines, did make it to market. But the curious Ariel 3, which was released in mid 1970, was another catastrophic engineering and financial failure, and the bike contributed an estimated £2 million to BSA/Triumph’s now colossal and fast growing losses.

The Ariel 3 was the latest in a long line of utility bike disasters for the group. Several horrid faired-in and unreliable creations, built to win commuters to the motorcycling cause had been disappointments in preceding decades.

The BSA winged wheel in the 1950s was supposed to see off the NSU Quickly, but it was too slow, too expensive and old before its time. The BSA Dandy at the beginning of the 1960s was a better effort but poor quality let it down. It didn’t take off. The Beagle and the Pixie followed but were too expensive. The Tigress scooter, a 250cc twin, was fast but not what scooterists wanted. A Bantam version was a failure. Finally came the Tina. It had a belt drive design not dissimilar to that fitted to the twist and go scooters that would proliferate 30 years later, but although it was in this respect ahead of its time, it proved hopelessly unreliable and flopped.

The Ariel 3 designed by a chap called Wallace, presumably before Gromit’s time, was a total, utter and very expensive disaster. It was a poorly conceived product but its lack of success was also a failure of marketing and it suffered from the compounding consequences of its manufacturer’s poor reputation and the inadequacies of its previous products.

Pat Slinn: The BSA Beagle may have been a disaster sales-wise, but I actually quite liked it. It was a 75cc four-stroke in a pressed steel frame. I did quite a lot of work on this model and as part of its marketing, together with a couple of other guys, one being Peter Perrigo, the son of Bert, BSA’s chief development engineer at the time, I was asked to ride one in the Lands End trial.

We all had good reliable rides and finished with awards. And after the trial we rode them back from St Ives in Cornwall to Birmingham in just about four hours. They were capable of cruising all day at 60mph. Not bad for a 75cc motor. It was even suggested I ride one in the Scottish Six Days trial but it did not happen and I rode my B40 instead.

I had a Beagle as a ‘going home’ development bike and it was always reliable. One weekend as a publicity stunt I rode it to Namure in Belgium to watch Jeff Smith race in the Belgian motocross Grand Prix. I thrashed it all the way there and all the way back with no hint of any problem. Its biggest problem was that the front and rear suspension had no damping at all, and of course the dealers did not like this.

Girling produced a pair of damped rear units that improved the handling and ride but fitting damping to the front end proved to be a problem. A complete re-design was needed for the pressed steel front forks and although they were, I believe, on the drawing board, as usual everything moved too slowly and they never reached production.

The Ariel three-wheeled moped, which seemed to exhaust much of the artistic and creative resources at Umberslade, had an automatic clutch and was powered by a two-stroke engine made by Dutch company, Anker. It was started by pedalling, its three 12” wheels were interchangeable, it was hinged in the middle and banked around corners.

Sadly, it was a flawed contraption that was unstable, overheated and failed to meet design requirements in all but two export countries. BSA tooled up and bought enough engines to make thousands, but only sold hundreds. The debacle cost a fortune. It was just too wacky and BSA’s cause was not helped by the Daily Mirror’s innovative new colour magazine being abandoned after only one issue, BSA/Triumph having planned to run a big advertising campaign within it.

Gerald Davison: BSA/Triumph should have been concentrating on building better motorcycles rather than trying new things. We used to send samples of every new model to Japan, every new thing that came out, and we grabbed hold of one of the first of the little BSA three-wheelers, the Ariel and when we shipped it out I remember saying to someone I can almost hear the Japanese laughing now when they uncrate it. But it was most unusual; we didn’t get any comments back on it at all. I can only think they were so horrified, so shocked, that they didn’t know what to say.