Readers’ Letters

Memories of Bonzo

Your Sketchbook piece (May 2022) about Bonzo, the Jarnett, brought back memories. I found this bike in a barn near Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, in a non-running state in either 1970 or 1971, and I bought it for £7-10s-0, so it was obviously pre-decimalisation.

Not being the sort to do serious research, I did what to me was the obvious thing and got it running, and a friend, the late Simon Walton, entered it in a vintage grasstrack race.

Everyone who was involved in VMCC sporting events right up until the 1980s must remember Willie Wiltshire, who’d started racing on a Rudge in around 1926 and was still competing on the same bike; there was a scurrilous rumour that it was still on the same sparking plug… Willie used to say it was handy that his old age pension came on a Thursday, as it paid for his weekend’s