Bonnie BY DESIGN
In the early 1970s I was hurtling round England on a nearly-new 1969 Triumph Bonneville. Ah, how I loved that bike. The performance, the power, the glamour, the shameful lack of maintenance. Ah, how I abused it. It was my dad’s bike, you see…
Clearly worried that I would get a P45 for nonappearances after a trail of broken-down motorcycles, PopH loaned me his shiny T120. Never give an eighteen year-old a fast bike, they’ll do just what I did; hoon around on/over the redline. I was commuting to Leicester. One day I made the thirty-mile trip in 28 minutes. Outside built-up areas I was rarely under the ton. Why not? The tyres became mysteriously bald, the oil was never changed, maintenance was skimped or non-existent. Instead of a new chain, I took links out: It was as tight as a guitar string. Still, it soon loosened…
The two-year-old motorcycle had 600 careful miles under it when dad loaned it to his errant son. In eleven months, I did nearly 10,000 miles. Frequently I took the long way home, making thirty miles into a hundred. When Pop traded it, the salesman said ‘I can’t allow you much for that, it’s shagged!’. He swapped it for a CZ175 which somehow didn’t appeal to me. Pa may have been cleverer than I thought.
In 1994 I saw a 1970 Bonnie T120R, the export model, advertised by Wilf Churchill Motorcycles at £2970. Gosh, it looked tidy, super shiny, like new! Better than dad’s even, and made at Meriden only a few weeks after his. I made the typical ‘newbie to classics’ mistake, captivated by the gleaming machine. The speedo showed a low mileage which ‘must’ be genuine. It had been discovered at the docks as HM Customs randomly
