Features

Words: Roy Poynting Photographs: Terry Joslin This is actually from a year before the James model name ‘Comet’ was coined, but is in all essence the same model. I’ve had great affection for James’ motorcycles since I took to the roads on an old Comet as a teenager, and while I’ve since had several other…

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Words: TIM BRITTON Photographs: GARY CHAPMAN The label ‘classic’ is applied to all sorts of things from music to architecture through films and furniture – the Gold Star is a motorcycle for which the word could have been invented. As I wait by the side of the road for photographer Gary Chapman and Tony Clarke…

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At the Stalybridge Speed Trials, Jack Cunliffe launches his Brough-Superior JAP Photography: MORTONS ARCHIVE On last month’s news pages, we used a picture from the Brooklands Then and Now show, of a pair of Brough Superior SS100s, one of which was finished in a striking lilac-and-nickel finish. This was (and is) the Cunliffe Brough. Seeing…

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With a cheery wave, a well-buttoned cardigan and a pair of stout shoes, this go-anywhere granny was headed for the hills. Seated astride her motorcycle is 75-year-old Molly Pendleton, of Arundel Place, Brighton. The grandmother of four apparently “thinks nothing of a 200-mile ride on her motorcycle rounded off by some high-dives in the nearest…

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By 1929, the Scottish Six Days Trial (SSDT) had become a fixture in the British motorcycling calendar. Entrants, teams, officials and spectators fondly referred to it, then as now, as their annual ‘holiday in the Highlands.’ For most factories it was also essential to yearly development and marketing plans. Minding the pennies during the cash-strapped…

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With a tragic accident during Friday practice and then a hugely disappointing crowd, enthusiasm was dampened further by race day morning rain. But, gradually, the sun came out and the racing was actually rather good. There was a dark shadow cast over the late July meeting at Aintree in 1956 as in Friday practice, New…

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This freshly restored 350cc JAP-engined Coventry-Eagle has returned to the road for the first time in more than half a century. If you hear somebody talking about a Coventry-Eagle, it’s a fair bet you’ll immediately think of either the firm’s Villiers-engined lightweights with pressed steel frames, or the rare and prestigious V-twin Flying Eight. But Coventry-Eagle was…

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This oil-in-frame 650cc T120 Bonneville emerged from the confusion of the Meriden blockade. Today it pulls like a train – but is a bit of a mystery… When I visited Moto Corsa, Italian bike specialists supreme, there was a cuckoo in the nest – an oil-in-frame Triumph T120 Bonneville, a 650 twin. Spiffed up for…

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The BSA C11 was a solid, workmanlike motorcycle, possessing many of the attributes of its bigger brethren, presented in a pint-sized package. Mike Tottey’s first bike was a BSA C11 rather like the one he’s just restored, but this is no tale of an epic mission to recreate a long-lost first love. “No,” he admits,…

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A big, overweight, wobbly sidecar tug, right? Well, no, that’s not what the late Matchless Model X is at all. When the Matchless Model X was significantly redesigned for the 1937 season, it gained a new name too – the Sports Tourist. Despite the fact that by the fashion of the day, a side-valve V-twin…

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