Gentlemen’s express

It’s become a cliché to describe MV Agusta as the Ferrari of two wheels, with each marque dominant in its own form of Grand Prix racing, and presided over by an autocratic despot. Likewise its Benelli rival as the Maserati of motorcycles, each the product of the impecunious but passionate endeavour of a band of brothers. But in Britain there’s a couple of comparable analogies, with Triumph so very much motorcycling’s equivalent of its close neighbour Jaguar, thanks to its sporty Speed Twin and later Bonneville derivatives, while the fast, luxurious Ariel Square Four – of which this year is the 90th anniversary of its showroom debut in 1931 – is perhaps a two-wheeled Aston Martin. Moreover, there’s a further connection between these two legendary models in that a single man was responsible for creating each of them: Edward Turner.

Turner would later become the most powerful figure in the British motorcycle industry, but in 1927 during the peak of motorcycling’s post-First World War boom years, he was an impoverished 26-year old former merchant seaman who’d become a Velocette dealer in Peckham, South East London and, without any formal engineering training, had designed a 348cc single-cylinder OHC engine.

He went through various means of driving its camshaft, but ended up with a vertical shaft and bevel gears for an engine powering a motorcycle of his own construction, the Turner Special. Though Turner advertised it for sale through his small Chepstow Motors shop, the £75 asking price was pretty steep, and it’s unlikely he found any buyers – certainly, no such bike has survived the passage of time. This was despite several articles about the design having appeared in print, and it was as a result of one of these that in March 1927 the Birmingham-based Ariel marque’s dynamic sales and promotions manager, Vic Mole, visited Turner’s shop to discuss it with him. He left unimpressed by