The USA can surely contain no more dedicated an Anglophile motorcyclist than my American mate Jeff Craig – a fellow bike freak whom I teamed up with to share a flat when he moved to London at the end of the Swinging 60s, Beatles era and all. Jeff toured Europe several times on a BMW R69S, German reliability and shaft final drive having won him over. He did validate that decision by getting a burnt valve on one cylinder replaced off their parts shelf by the Portuguese police motor workshop in downtown Lisbon, after being led there by a traffic cop aboard a similar bike, who was concerned by the amount of smoke pouring out of the British registered BMW’s right exhaust! A former dirt oval flat-tracker back home in the USA, Jeff also road raced in the UK with Bemsee, and bought an unrestored Brough Superior SS100, on which he later covered several thousand miles, both in the UK and after he shipped it back home to Pennsylvania.
Even before that, Craig was an avid enthusiast of British motorcycle engineering, and of Nortons and Velocettes in particular. He now has an enviable collection of British bikes, housed in the picturesque setting of an 18th century house in the Cotswolds-like Bucks County scenery north of Philadelphia, all of which are regularly exercised either on local roads, or at ralliesand Virginia.
