BROUGH Rider

IT IS NOT EVERY motorcycle marque that can claim as its most famous customer a man who died while riding its product. On a rainy Sunday morning in May of 1935, Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence CB DSO swerved his Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle (see box ‘By George!’) to miss two boys on bicycles and crashed, suffering severe head injuries to which he succumbed six days later. If the marque had not been there before, this was enough to write its name into the history books. Do the bikes, and George Brough their builder, deserve the kudos that has been heaped upon them? Not everyone is sure about that. Paul D’Orléans, one of my favourite commentators on matters of classic bikes, writing in the

Motorcycle

Arts Foundation production ‘The

Vintagent’, concedes that Brough Superior motorcycles are “at the top of the money tree today, as evidenced by filling 2 of our ‘World’s

Most Expensive Motorcycles‘ spots. It’s a status George Brough would have