Mighty Atlas
I first saw and heard a Norton Atlas on the stage of Her Majesty’s Theatre in London’s Haymarket, in 1961. ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ was a loose take on an Elvis-figure in a small Ohio town, about to enter the US Army. As a teen musical it wasn’t a patch on ‘West Side Story’, which I’d also seen previously at Her Majesty’s. But rock star ‘Birdie’ did roar in on a high-handlebar Norton Atlas, a model just released for the US market’s 1962 model year. So cool.
Atlas in classical mythology had been strong enough to hold the world on his shoulders, but the Norton name more likely drawn from the 1957-on rocket, America’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. Both the missile name and the musical presence indicated that this Norton had been aimed squarely at the USA.
The Atlas story
The 750cc twin had been developed by Doug Hele at Bracebridge Street, before he left to join the Norton twin’s original designer, Bert Hopwood, at Triumph. Norton’s Plumstead-based parent AMC company was already in financial decline, and, having made a mess of their wholly-owned US export operation, appreciated their current US importers, the Berliner brothers’, willingness to pay for machines as they left the production line. But that, along with the rapid contraction of the UK
