Fab Four?

We Brits are pretty good at thinking outside the box and inventing things, but much less good at commercialising them. From the jet engine to the internet, from penicillin to the steam railway, from television to the hovercraft, from something as simple as the rubber band to an item as complicated as the digital audio player, there are literally hundreds of British inventions which either those in other countries have brought to the marketplace and profited from, or else have disappeared into the what-might-have-been rubbish bin of history owing to lack of financial support. And motorcycle designers aren’t exempt from that.

How else to explain the fact that in shell-shocked, bombed-out post-Second World War Britain, with massive shortages of metal, rubber and other essential commodities, a 500cc ultra-lightweight four-cylinder motorcycle was conceived which was completely practical, literally unique, incorporated many intelligent features, and delivered a level of performance and comfort years ahead of its time. But not for the first time, precisely because of that, the 500cc Wooler Flat Four never reached production, despite its design being offered to Britain’s existing manufacturers, then enjoying a postwar boom in sales both at home and abroad.

Why so? Because its father and son creators lacked the resources to do it themselves, and those same manufacturers much preferred to keep on building as many of their existing models as they could, mostly with designs rooted in the past, but safe in the knowledge they could sell every one they produced. Time, and the arrival of the Japanese the following decade, would prove how short-sighted that was – so instead the 500cc Wooler Flat Four has become another fascinating footnote to the motorcycle history book.

John Wooler was born in 1883 in Chiswick, West London, and was actually christened Jonathan, but preferred to shorten that to John. After spells as a Merchant seaman, then as a mechanic in an industrial laundry, in the early 20th century he worked as a fitter at the nearby Clément-Talbot car factory at Ladbroke Grove. From there he moved to Napier, close by in Acton, the builders of the fastest and most powerful cars then available for purchase – prized employment which cemented his love of motorised performance, albeit in his case particularly on two wheels rather than four.

Wooler had already built his first motorcycle in 1902 by purchasing one of the DIY kits then available to create a powered pedal-cycle, followed by his own design of three-wheeler in 1904, with a forecar seating arrangement. But Wooler’s dream was to build his own motorcycles, so in 1909 he gave up his day job at Napier’s in