We all have our crosses to bear, and for many years, while I lived near Coventry, mine was to be a Sky Blues supporter. Coventry City was the perennial last chance survivor in the lower reaches of English football’s old Division One, invariably only staying up by the skin of its teeth on the final day of each season, to play for yet another year against the far more illustrious Man United, Liverpool and Arsenal.
The club maintained that record as a founder member of the Premier League in 1992, and for an amazing 34 consecutive years between 1967 and 2001, this minnow of England’s football pond swam in the shark-infested waters of football’s upper echelons without ever quite actually drowning. In fact, in 1987 the Sky Blues won the FA Cup, by beating the infinitely more eminent Spurs, a club several times bigger but on that Wembley afternoon second best to the small town heroes who scraped a 3-2 victory.
But when my sporty youngest son Chris began playing schoolboy rugby at a high level, I couldn’t be in two places at once on a wintry Saturday afternoon, so it was farewell to Highfield Road, Coventry’s city centre stadium where the Sky Blues played.
Had I but known it back then, the flat expanse of derelict concrete near there on Swan Lane, that I usually parked my car on for Coventry City’s home matches, apparently acted as a shroud for the Omega motorcycle factory which once stood there, one of over 120 different manufacturers which this birthplace of the British bicycle and motorcycle industries formerly housed. The catalyst for this was Humber, THE pioneer make in British motorcycling, after Thomas Humber began producing some of the earliest commercially available bicycles from 1868 onwards at his Beeston works just outside Nottingham. In 1886 he opened a larger factory 50 miles further south in Coventry, closer
