Depending on who’s counting, there’s so far been anywhere between 1082 and 1221 different makes comprising the vast panoply of the British motorcycle industry down the years since 1896, when Humber unveiled what’s recognised today as the first genuinely practical motorcycle ever built in Great Britain.
That’s probably more than any other country can so far pride itself on, and from A&A to Zephyr, this array of brands ranges from BSA, at one time the largest volume manufacturer in the world, to an expanse of Etceterinis each of whose precarious existence often lasted just a couple of years, before being snuffed out by a combination of market forces and a lack of financial resources, coupled occasionally with sheer bad luck.
But in between those two extremes, there’s any number of small but sustainable brands, whose spell of subsistence is often a surprise in terms of length, and none epitomises this better than the Montgomery marque. The makers of well-regarded, high quality motorcycles of all capacities and performance levels from 1905 to 1940, founder William J. Montgomery and his son Jack, who assumed responsibility for running the firm in the 1920s, survived the First World War, a fire which consumed their factory in 1925, the 1928 Stock Market crash, and the ensuing Great Depression, and were only obliged to call a halt to manufacture when their Coventry factory was totally destroyed by a direct hit from a Luftwaffe bomber in the 1940 Coventry Blitz.
Born in Manchester in 1881, 20 years later Bill
