THE SHED

Every time I amble out to The Shed and remove the cover (waterproof; essential) from the Sunbeam, I need to stand back and stare at it. It is simply so strange – and bear in mind that I’ve owned this one for over two decades and must have ridden at least a dozen of the things down the years. What, I ask myself, did Mr Worthy-Punter think when BSA unveiled their remarkable answer to the unasked question way back in 1946. And of course the question – that question – had in fact been asked.

Through the latter years of WW2, BSA, owners of Sunbeam by then, ran questionnaires asking readers of the weekly magazines what they expected – nay, demanded – to see in a new range of postwar motorcycles. The story goes that if Noble Reader failed to demand with great unanimity that their lives would be devoid of meaning unless BSA offered them a machine so utterly unconventional (in British bike terms) that most home mechanics would tremble, then BSA would simply ignore them and build the bikes anyway. This is entirely normal: the machine was designed, tested and tooled for production before the surveys were done. And I bet that the tooling wasn’t cheap, given how few components were shared with anything else produced by the giants of Small Heath.

But it is possible to imagine the mounting interest and possibly excitement. At least, I can easily imagine it, personally speaking, as back in 1984 after I’d seen