Depending on who’s counting, there’s so far been anywhere between 1,082 and 1,221 different makes comprising the vast panoply of the British motorcycle industry down the years since 1896, when Humber unveiled what’s recognized 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 etceteras, 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. None epitomizes 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 World War I, a fire which consumed their factory in 1925, the 1928 Stock Market crash, and the ensuing Great Depression. They 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.
Company roots
Born in Manchester in 1881, 20 years later Bill Montgomery had rather improbably ended up in rural Suffolk by the time of the 1901Manufacturer” in the small town of Bury St. Edmunds, specializing in trailers, forecars, and then the device he’s widely credited with having invented, the motorcycle sidecar. In fact, Montgomery had started off by building lightweight children’s sidecars for attachment to pedal cycles. Then from 1903 onwards, he built motorcycle versions which he successfully patented as a “Side Carriage Attachment” whose designs were progressively improved to include sprung sidecar wheels and substantial coachbuilt bodies. In 1905 he assembled his own first motorcycle with a 5-horsepower V-twin engine built from proprietary parts, complete with wickerwork sidecar that could allegedly be detached in under two minutes. Montgomery produced a wide range of different such designs, including some with a feature he’s also credited with inventing, namely flexible mountings which allowed them to bank into corners long before such designs were adopted for shale or tarmac racing. He even sold a motorcycle fitted with two sidecars, one each side, which was marketed under the slogan of “One for your wife, and one for the children.”
