Vintage & VERERAN
Years ago in RC136, I compared two Sunbeam sidevalve machines. This wasn’t really fair on either machine, since one was a 350 made before the Great War and is the second oldest Sunbeam known to exist and get used regularly, and the other was a 500 sportsman machine made ten years later. That comparison looked at the developments made over ten years, just when WW1 restricted such developments. The economic situation after the war meant that procuring materials and men to make motorcycles was difficult.
The 1913 machine was the first motorcycle Sunbeam made, apart from an early attempt to evaluate a Motosacoche-engined Sunbeam bicycle in about 1903 on which an employee had a fatal accident. John Marston, the owner of Sunbeam, then forbade further development of dangerous vehicles such as motorised bicycles. By the late 1910s, it became obvious that motorcycles were more than just a passing fad. Marston employed one John Greenwood, previously of Rover and JAP, to develop a 2¾hp-rated engine that had been designed for Sunbeam by Harry Stevens of AJS. Greenwood adjusted the location of the magneto, which Stevens had situated in front of
