MAC is back
With the Second World War finally at an end, the Velocette works at York Road in Birmingham was keen to get back into motorcycle production. Government orders received early in the conflict had resulted in a couple of thousand bikes being built for the war effort, but that was it. Claiming a need for consistency, the War Office soon turned to the big boys, and Norton, Matchless and BSA ultimately provided the bulk of their two-wheeled requirements. Small Heath alone built over 125,000. Velocette completed numerous other specialist manufacturing tasks during the war, but now able to put the demand for Beaufighter exhausts and Wellington bomb hoists firmly behind them, and as conscripted staff began to return from various corners of the empire, the factory wanted to get back to what they were good at. They wanted to build bikes.
A return to production wasn’t immediate, but by April 1946 the factory was busy fulfilling orders, building the same models offered in 1939. One of these commissions came from Excelsior-Henderson, the main dealer in Denmark. I suspect this was one of the earliest, because at least one 350cc MAC arrived in Copenhagen with the frame from a MAF, that rather rare war issue variant devised by Bob Burgess and Phil Irving in 1941. This may have been a special order of course, from someone after an ‘off-road’ frame, but my guess is that Velocette, keen to get cracking, were simply using up what was to hand. And the
