Norton today is widely recognised as Britain’s most historic living motorcycle marque, and certainly the most illustrious in sporting terms, boasting an even more prestigious competition heritage than its Triumph and BSA rivals.
This dates back 121 years to 1902, when James Lansdowne Norton, better known as ‘Jas.L’ to his friends, produced his first complete motorcycle, which he christened the Energette.
Norton was an enthusiastic early motorcycle racer, as well as a clever engineer who pioneered the use of overhead-valve engines. He even designed a desmodromic cylinder head, but this sadly never reached production before his death from cancer in April 1925, at the age of 56.
Born in January 1869 to a devout well-to-do Birmingham family, Norton’s life encompassed Christianity, ill-health and a fascination with mechanical engineering.
The son of a cabinet maker, at the age of 12 young James built a stationary working steam engine from scratch which he’d fire-up outside his parents’ house to display to passers-by. On leaving school at 14, he became an apprentice toolmaker in Birmingham’s extensive Jewellery Quarter, but five years later contracted rheumatic fever so severely that in 1888, by way of convalescence, his parents sent him on a sea voyage to New York and back on a Cunard transatlantic liner. As short-term recuperation, it worked, but Norton was to suffer from continued ill health throughout his life, resulting in his prematurely aged white-haired appearance, which earned him the nickname of ‘Pa’.
Norton later joined his local Salvation Army Citadel, where he met his future wife Sarah, whom he married there in 1898 – the same year he founded his eponymous Birmingham-based company to earn a living from his growing passion for two-wheeled transportation.
The Norton Manufacturing Co. originally made only frames and chains for local bicycle makers, then various other cycle components, and in due course complete bicycles. Norton’s customer roster included a wealthy local businessman, Charles Garrard, who early in 1902 became the UK importer for the French engine manufacturer Clément. This company produced small-capacity 160cc four-stroke motors which, in tipping the scales at just 21lb (9.5kg), were very suitable for attaching to bicycles. Garrard thus commissioned Norton to build strengthened pedal cycle frames in which to insert these motors. The resultant motorised bicycles, weighing just 75lb (34kg), were sold under the Clément-Garrard label, and
