The life of Brian
Today, Brian is an 85-year-old retired Detective Sergeant and then insurance investigator, specialising in vehicle identification. Tall and fit (he’s still a keen cyclist), Brian’s tenacious brain is also still active.
He wrote the definitive reference work on car and motorcycle VIN details, as well as a couple of books of light-hearted but enlightening recollections (see page 56 for more details).
But more recently a talk he gave on motorcycles to his local University of the Third Age led to a two-volume work giving a brief description of more than 5000 marques worldwide!
Motorcycles run like a thread through Brian’s life – and he was not always on the right side of the law.
Poacher turned gamekeeper
Brian grew up on his father’s farm outside Leighton Buzzard. In 1949, his oldest brother Philip had a 500cc Matchless, his next brother Roger a B31, and both the family’s lodgers rode – Mike Hennessy also on a 500cc Matchless and John Chapman, an older man with a local motorbike shop, favoured a DOT scrambler. Joined by two others, including ‘Desperate’ Dan Dunlop on another BSA single, this group of tearaways roared round an impromptu ‘scrambles’ course on the farm with a 30-foot ‘bomb hole’, and were a neighbourhood nuisance. Side activities included Philip riding his Matchless round the farm’s woods at night with Roger standing on the pillion footrests, picking off rabbits with a 12 bore – both pest control and useful ration supplement for the family.
Turning 16 in 1949, Brian had missed his last three years of school due to serious illness, and describes himself then as “the original village idiot”. But he knew he wanted to be part of the motorcycle gang. Unaware of the
