It’s pretty ironic that the Rickman brothers, Derek and Don, who achieved off-road dominance in the 1960s with their stiff, light, good-handling Métisse frames powered by British twin and single-cylinder four-stroke motors, should have gone on to become Britain’s largest road motorcycle manufacturer after the demise of NVT, via the thousands of foreign-engined two-stroke singles to exit their factory at New Milton, Hampshire.
For after becoming commercially successful via their Métisse off-road frame kits, into which either they or their customers the world over installed a plethora of different engines, the Rickmans built their first tarmac Métisse frame in March 1966, the first of exactly 999 such chassis they made altogether for twins and singles.
The first complete road legal Rickman Street Métisse was then created in November 1966, built with a Triumph T120 motor for delivery to their Austrian importer. Rickmans always sold well abroad, and a certain Giacomo Agostini even bought a 650 Triumph-powered Métisse café racer in April 1968, to ride on the streets back home in Bergamo.
But these were essentially all one-off creations constructed to order, not series production models built to attract customers by adorning the showroom floors of appointed dealers. Despite this, the Rickmans’ US importer John Steen, based in Alhambra, California south of Pasadena, was continually ramping up his orders, as the American appetite for recreational motorcycles – meaning primarily for off-road use – intensified during the late 1960s.
However, Steen’s location meant that he focused on selling Métisse bikes in his home state, leaving the rest of the huge country open for European manufacturers like Maico, CZ and especially Husqvarna to profit from the swelling demand for dirtbikes – the Japanese manufacturers had not yet discovered dirtbiking. Derek and Don Rickman visited America several times in the 1960s to try to persuade Steen to expand his operation, as a result of which it was decided that the Rickmans would transform their business into a series production manufacturer, with an assembly line producing bikes in bulk. Marketplace research indicated there’d be sufficient
