Promise unfulfilled
Love him or loathe him (and there were plenty who did each), Dr. Josef Ehrlich was a true original. Volatile but inventive, constantly coming up with new ideas and innovative designs right up until his death in September 2003 at the age of 88, the sprightly, dapper engineer universally known as ‘Dr. Joe’ was involved with motorcycles all his life, ever since the early 1930s when, in between earning his Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering in Austria, he competed in sand track and road races on a 250 Puch two-stroke and a ohv 500 Sunbeam.
Like so many people forming part of that vast tide of refugees from political and religious oppression which has poured into Great Britain over the past century, Joe Ehrlich was an ultra-Brit, passionately committed to keeping the Union Jack flying. Born in Vienna during the First World War, he left in 1936 after the Nazi takeover of Austria brought inevitable persecution and the likelihood of a one-way trip to a concentration camp for those of Jewish extraction such as himself. ‘I didn’t like it there anymore,’ he once told me, with masterly understatement. ‘So I took up an offer to come to Britain to design a diesel engine, and I enjoyed it so much I stayed.’
Once in Britain, Dr. Joe served his adopted country during WW2 by working on several unusual projects, including an unmanned flying bomb powered by a reed-valve 2-stroke engine that the Air Ministry rejected as being contrary to the Geneva Agreement – yet, six months later the Nazis began launching their similar V-1! Not quite cricket, old chap…
Ehrlich also designed a machine gun and various auxiliary engines, but his greatest invention was a little airborne car that he drove up the steps of the War Ministry in Whitehall to demonstrate its abilities. Designed for use by paratroopers, it came too late to enter production before the war ended.
In 1946 Ehrlich decided to set up as a motorcycle manufacturer under the EMC / Ehrlich Motor Company label, firstly in a tiny factory at Twyford Abbey
