From childhood crashes to the first welded production motorcycle frame, Len Vale-Onslow’s story is one of invention, risk-taking and what might have been.
The name of Len Vale-Onslow needs little introduction.
Born Leslie Vale-Onslow in 1900, he was introduced to motorcycles in 1908 when he rode a machine built by his brothers. A police constable spotted him riding on the road and issued a summons against his father, who, for some reason, thought the incident would be good publicity for his transport business.
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The same year, Len spent several days in a coma while again testing one of his brothers’ inventions — this time an aeroplane which did indeed get off the ground, before promptly crashing.
A born engineer
After the First World War, Len and his brother Cecil managed a branch of the family business in Hallow, Worcestershire, where Len also repaired and built motorcycles using cycle parts.
By 1927, there was growing local demand for his machines, but there was one major problem: he had no access to a mains gas supply with which to braze frames together in the conventional manner.
He made a few frames using electric welding, but these were prone to cracking. Then, at West Midlands steel manufacturer Accles and Pollock, he came across a weldable tubing that would be ideal.
There was a catch. The special chrome-molybdenum tubular steel was only supplied to the Air Ministry.
The first welded production frame
Undaunted, Len called upon the Air Ministry and somehow managed to obtain permission to use the precious material.
So was born the first welded production motorcycle frame — a development that would become, and remains, the industry standard.
With that problem solved, the Super Onslow Special, or SOS, was born in 1927.
The first models used a variety of engines, from JAP and Rudge Python units to several different capacity two-stroke Villiers motors. As was common at the time, Len took part in reliability trials in order to prove and publicise his machines.
So Obviously Superior
In 1930, he settled upon Villiers as the sole engine supplier for the SOS.
Around this time, he designed and built a prototype water-cooled head and barrel conversion for the air-cooled Villiers engine. Villiers was so impressed that it immediately took up the idea, giving the SOS factory a one-year exclusive supply of the new unit.
By now, the quality and engineering of the SOS machines was such that the acronym was modified to stand for ‘So Obviously Superior’.
From Worcestershire to Birmingham
In around 1932, realising that his rural location was a hindrance to obtaining both supplies and customers, Vale-Onslow moved production north-east to Birmingham.
It was there that he realised he could make a lot more money by selling other companies’ motorcycles rather than making them himself.
He opened Vale-Onslow Motorcycles and, just a few months after one of his new water-cooled 249cc machines had joined the range, he sold the manufacturing rights for the SOS to TG ‘Tommy’ Meeten.
Enter Tommy Meeten
Meeten was a noted TT and trials rider who had set several records at Brooklands and won several Silver and Gold Medals in the ISDT.
In addition, in 1929, Meeten was one of the founders of the British Two-Stroke Club, which was first based at his motorcycle shop in Dorking, Surrey, and subsequently at Meeten’s Motor Mecca at Shannon Corner on the Kingston bypass in New Malden. He was also the club’s president from 1956 to 1974.
Meeten continued not only to build SOS machines, but also to use them in competition. He also added dynamic names such as the Magnetic and the Thunderbolt — almost three decades before the latter would grace a BSA — to the model range.
The SOS Brooklands Special
In 2013, one of Meeten’s own machines came up for sale in the Banbury Run auction.
It was first registered in January 1935 to Meeten himself and recorded as an ‘SOS Brooklands Special’. It is quite likely to have been one of the first SOS motorcycles built under Meeten’s command.
In 1935, some 10 different models were listed, and SOS would also build bespoke machines for competition riders.
War, bombing and the end of SOS
With the outbreak of the Second World War, production was suspended, although Meeten had every intention of resuming manufacture of the SOS in peacetime.
The Luftwaffe had other ideas.
The SOS factory was badly damaged by bombing and the remaining stock was either destroyed or looted. Instead, Meeten’s Motorcycle Mecca became a Villiers specialist until the 1960s, when its premises were supplanted by a new flyover.
The Vale-Onslow Bantam that never was
Len Vale-Onslow, after quitting motorcycle manufacture in the early 1930s, almost returned to that market in 1962 when the BSA Group decided to discontinue the Bantam.
Vale-Onslow offered £75,000 for the name, production tooling and all the spares. He had financial backing from dealers, as well as manufacturing space in the recently vacant Royal Enfield factory in Redditch, and was ready to roll with the Vale-Onslow Bantam.
However, he then found that the essential tooling had been scrapped and the project came to nothing. What might have been.
The end of an era
After Len Vale-Onslow’s death in 2004 — by then 103 years of age and an MBE — the property in Stratford Road in which the business was housed fell into increasing disrepair.
Visitors in the early years of this century will remember the permanent scaffolding around the end of the row of shops which the business by then occupied.
Vale-Onslow’s moved to Saltley, Birmingham, in 2017. The original shop in the corner building was demolished shortly afterwards and, the following January, the row of shops was destroyed in a fire.
