A scooter for British motorcyclists?

Scooters, with their lightness and their front shield and flat floorpan allowing them to be ridden in skirts, were always aimed at women as much as men.

So it was appropriate that an enthusiast for the ones BSA/Triumph offered in the late 1950s should be a young lady, Angela Cotton. Based on the Isle of Wight, she’s known at the Stigwood organisation there, where she’s the company secretary, as the ‘Swiss Army Knife’. She’s certainly proved versatile and hardy in pursuit of these unique small-wheelers, with their decidedly mixed reputation, as well as being unflappable on a long cold test day.

With her classic car enthusiast partner Graham Stretch (“He helps me a lot if I get stuck”) they’ve revived both a 1959 four-stroke BSA Sunbeam 250cc twin and a 1960 Triumph Tigress variant, with their much rarer 175cc two-stroke single, its 172cc engine based on the D5 Bantam, still a work in progress. She’s putting together a website for fellow enthusiasts (www.bsascooters.co.uk)and of the 80-odd owners she’s in touch with, only five have 175s. The whole range was the BSA Group’s first and only example of literal badge-engineering, with the colour schemes and badges the only difference between the two ranges.

The BSA Sunbeam/Triumph Tigress story

Scooters in the 1950s had been approached with suspicion by British manufacturers. But in 1957, post-Suez, while 75,000 new motorcycles were sold, the figure