RADICAL RECYCLING

I first saw one of these machines howling up Sunrising Hill during the VMCC Banbury Run. It wore a BSA logo on the tank but the engine looked and sounded like an eardrum breaking four-cylinder two-stroke. I spotted it next at the Rose of the Shires Run but once again this elusive machine and its rider escaped me. Fortune favours the persistent and I finally made contact with rider builder Roy at a Northampton VMCC event. And so it was that he and I sat outside the canal museum in Stoke Bruerne, drinking coffee and talking about his remarkable trio of motorcycles. Roy was brought up a family steeped in the lore of the BSA Bantam. His grandfather was a bookie's runner and rode around the nearby villages on a 125 Bantam, accompanied by his terrier - which rode pillion. Roy's father Maurice worked at British Timken and used his Bantam to commute. So it comes as no surprise that Roy and his three brothers had a Bantam field bike in the mid-1960s. After the Bantam, Mr Davis senior acquired a 197cc DOT for his boys, followed by a Greeves Challenger with its leading link forks. Compared to the Bantams and DOT, the Greeves was a fearsome beast which 'frightened the hell out of us' and Roy recalls that there were times he hoped it wouldn't start. 'It was a ball of fire!' After that his father found a 'sparkling' Ariel Arrow being sold by a colleague