MUSEUM PIECES DREAMING THE DREAM
We’ve all dreamed the dream! And if we’d had a quid or a buck or a euro for every drawing of a motorcycle we concocted in class at school, instead of listening to the teacher droning on about algebra equations or some long-dead monarch, we might all have been able to afford our first motorbike a good deal sooner…
More than a century ago British schoolboy John Wallace went one better. He turned his bike doodles into metal, and actually built the motorcycle he probably dreamed up the design of during some of the more boring lessons at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Grammar School in north London.
Born in 1896, Wallace never enjoyed any formal training as an engineer, but was determined nonetheless to be one – even if his dad intended he should join the family clothing firm making military uniforms, a prosperous business as Great Britain geared up for World War 1. Instead, after visiting a motorcycle exhibition in 1910, young John decided to build his very own motorbike. He bought a set of un-machined engine castings with his pocket money, then proceeded to build a shed in his family’s back garden, and equipped it with basic tools. However, John soon realised he had neither the skill nor the equipment to machine the castings correctly, so Plan B consisted of buying a frame and wheels from a local bicycle maker, plus a secondhand engine, to produce the first Wallace motorcycle – which he promptly sold. Hmm, he probably thought, this might work – until the local council made his Dad tear down the workshop he’d erected, on the grounds that it had no planning permission for a commercial engineering concern! Some things never change…
Undaunted, John left school the following year, and at age 15 began an apprenticeship with Collier & Sons in Woolwich, S.E. London, makers of the acclaimed Matchless motorcycles. Charlie Collier had won the inaugural 1907 Isle of Man TT Singles race five years earlier on a Matchless, while his brother Harry was victorious in 1909, before Charlie won
