Chaos theory

It’s doubtful that Sir Norman Hulbert slept much in 1965. As the chairman of Associated Motor Cycles (AMC) he was at the helm of a business whose financial losses had reached £1.5 million. Sales figures had plummeted since the early 1960s, a brutal fact that owed to many things, among them the British motorcycle industry’s preoccupation with larger machines – the appetite for which seemed to have been massively overestimated by manufacturers.

Then, added to this, came the Purchase Tax – one the UK government, in spite of several pleas from the motorcycle industry, refused to relax. Labour shortages were also proving a huge challenge, especially for AMC, and then, as if things weren’t quite bad enough already, in 1962 the UK government opened the floodgates for Japanese imports with the Anglo-Japanese treaty. So, all in all, the industry