VINTAGE MORRIS: Tall Tales but True from a Lifetime in Motorcycling, Volume 2

By Lester O. Morris

Lester Morris is Australia's longest-serving, and probably the most published, specialist motorcycle writer in the country, with most of his peers considering him to be 'iconic', or even 'legendary'.

His first articles, on simple maintenance and safety, were published in REVS Motorcycle News (paper) in 1968; followed for the next 50 years

• Language: English
• Publisher: L & L Morris
• Release date: Oct 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648961918

Lester O. Morris

Lester Morris is the longest serving, and probably the most published, specialist motorcycle writer in Australia, with most of his peers considering him to be 'iconic', or even 'legendary'. His articles, on simple maintenance and safety, were first published in REVS Motorcycle News (paper) in 1968; followed for the next 50 years by test reports of new models, classic motorcycles, race reports, and a series of humorous columns published in 18 of Australia's top selling motorcycle magazines. From 1948 he spent over twenty years in the trade; his first book, Motorcycling in Australia, published by McMillan in 1976. Lester is also a noted race commentator, often featuring as an expert motorcycle compere on Torque, a 1970s National TV Motoring programme. His books, Vintage Morris: Tall Tales but True from a Lifetime in Motorcycling, volumes 1 and 2, are just that, memoirs of his 'many-and-various' - often hilarious - experiences in the fascinating motorcycle industry.

Book preview

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Contents

Foreword: Yesterday Revisited

Introduction

The photographers

1969

Barry Ryan’s Motorcycles: Excelsior

1972–1973

Lester Morris Motorcycles

1973–1976

Ron Angel’s Motorcycles

1978–1979

Little Honda

Short Legs v Kawasaki K1300

Daytona Speed Week

1979–1981

Triumph two-way trip

Two-way trip revisited

Ariel Trike

Galvin

A piece of string

Motorcycle engines

Steam powered motorcycles

1981–1983

BART in USA

Ever Onward

Motorcycle seatbelts (?)

1986–1990

Motor Museum

Condoms

1990-2010

Baby on Board

Looking back at Bathurst, Day One

Fly’s eyes

Cruiser – Praise TV commercial

2010–2014

Whangerei, New Zealand

Broadford

2014–2016

Maxi-scooters

Mini-bikes

Big bloke – Old days

The Postie

Queen’s Coronation

Well-known facts

Flies, fleas, ants

The Newby lecture

Superbikes – Revisited

Le Mans, France

2018–2020

Training Scheme

Motorcycle stands

Motorcycle stands again!

Henderson brochure 1921

Air suspension

Harley v BSA Bantam

Triumph twins

Harley exhaust

Semi-trailer

Safety gear

Modern motorcyclists

Goodwood

Yaris v Harley: Driving the family

Slow reactors

Canopied ute

Licence tests

Foreword: Yesterday Revisited

Lester Morris and the humour of history

You’re lucky to have bought this book, and if you don’t own its companion (volume 1) I suggest you buy that as well. Not just because Lester is an extraordinary and very funny storyteller but also because the books take you through a slice of Australian history that would be difficult to find any other way.

Instead of focusing on the grand happenings of official history, Lester describes the small facts that bring history to life. Take the way that the very few women who were employed in motorcycle shops were treated. As Lester points out, they were carefully placed to be visible from the showroom – the purpose being to ensure a certain amount of decorum from other employees and customers which would otherwise mostly be missing. Different days, different manners and how else would you ever have discovered this?

But Lester’s writing is not about the manners and mores of the fifties and later times. Those things are inevitably shown in the background of his stories, but the point is always the humour that abounds in the world, no matter where or when. You could put him anywhere and anytime, and he would see the funny side of things. And not only see it, but manage to get it across to others in his inimitable way.

Lester’s turns of phrase might seem arcane at first, but there’s always a point to what he does. With a comic talent honed by endless stage appearances – and there’s no better place to sharpen your wit than on the stage, where your audience will quickly let you know if you’ve got it right – Lester always knows when and how to insert the punchline.

Lester’s humour is always gentle but by no means mild. When I saw our new trams in Sydney, I remembered one of his tales of selling newspapers on the old ones, and I’m afraid I guffawed out loud. The woman standing next to me at the traffic light was not impressed with my, to her mind unprovoked, outburst.

You don’t need to have any interest in motorcycles to enjoy this book, although it will help you to understand some of the events Lester describes. You’ll find yourself immersed in a different and very funny time, and – let’s face it – we can all do with some of that.

Peter The Bear Thoeming

Editor Emeritus,

Australian MOTORCYCLIST Magazine

Introduction

It was never my intention to collate enough material to have two (2) volumes of Vintage Morris: Tall Tales but True from a Lifetime in Motorcycling printed – nor, initially, the first volume, which I was talked into self-publishing – but there proved to be too much of my published material for just one volume; hence volume 2. We could have published the entire Tall Tales material as one large volume in the first place, of course, which I had threatened to do, but it would have been far more expensive to have done that, and the book might well have ended up as a ‘coffee table’ volume, which would have been far too difficult to be able to read in bed (?), or might have been too heavy to carry about to read elsewhere at leisure.

There was also no intention to finish the first book as far back as 1969 (naturally, some of those columns included information from much later years) but the dictates of the printing company to add no fewer than sixteen extra pages at a time instead of, say, four or even eight additional pages, made it too difficult. Besides this, if all the material were contained in just one volume, it would have been all of 360 x A4 pages in length: an absolute epic, if ever there was one! That’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m sticking to it!

It was in many ways the ideal time to finish, for there was a sort of hiatus of just on three years of my ‘stagnation’ in motorcycling at the time, for I was establishing/pursuing a career as a full-time (whatever ‘full-time’ may mean), professional actor/singer/stage director. ‘Part-time actor’ may better describe the acting profession! I might add that, during that ‘quiet’ period, I operated a motorcycle store that bore my name for too short a time during 1972 – but more of that anon.

In passing, it has been said that, unless one is employed long-term as a soap opera star (?), or a contracted player in a major theatrical company, almost every professional actor on the planet, no matter how well-known or successful that actor may be, is in fact a part-time actor, whether they would like to be referred to in that manner or not. Truer words were probably never spoken!

I would have liked to include many more photos in that first volume of Vintage Morris but it was suggested to me that the book’s format as a collation of much earlier columns published over many years in a variety of specialist motorcycle magazines didn’t really need to have the text interrupted by a series of photographs. I bowed to the judgement of others; not for the first time, I might add, and probably not for the last time, either.

This volume, as in the first book, consists of what the legendary Peter ‘The Bear’ Thoeming refers to as a series of ‘short stories’, or ‘fireside yarns’, which indeed they are, although this was, again, never my intention, for the short stories were originally written only as humorous columns. There are many more photographs included in this volume and they are, of necessity, a bit of a mixed bunch, for some were taken forty years and more ago, and were not all that great even then and they have not improved much over time!

My columns in various media were whimsically referred to as ‘Small Bore’, ‘Chain Chatter’, ‘Short Torque’, and, somewhat haughtily, ‘Lester We Forget’.

There were no digital cameras in those days, so nobody knew what the shots were going to be like until the films were processed up to a week or more later – by then the various machines may have been returned to their owners, or importers, and sometimes couldn’t be located and loaned to us again.

I am, and I think I have always been, vertically challenged at just on 5’3" (1.6 meters) in height – I almost said ‘tall’, which would have been grammatically correct, while being a misnomer at the same time – which meant that my various columns glorified in Mast Head titles which were quite descriptive as well as being far too accurate.

My column in Australian Motorcycle Rider and Mechanic in 1969 was whimsically referred to as ‘Small Bore’, my column in Sydney’s Daily Mirror newspaper in the early seventies was called ‘Chain Chatter’; a later column in Classic Motorcycles was laughingly referred to as ‘Short Torque’; Classic Bike, in the same era, haughtily named my column, ‘Lester We Forget’. It didn’t end there, for, in The Bear’s popular magazine Australian Road Rider – which featured my column for fifteen years from 1998 to 2013 – he shamelessly decided to call the ‘new’ column ‘The Wild Half’.

Why the Wild Half? Thoeming claimed that I always wanted to be a ‘Wild One’ but was far too short: thus, I became a Wild Half, and a quite successful one at that!

Happily, in his later Australian Motorcyclist magazine – after ‘The Bear’ had decided to leave his Road Rider to the mercy of others – he called my column, which ran monthly from 2013 to 2018 ‘Classic Morris’. And now, as the semi-retired Editor Emeritus of AMM he has left most of the daily running of his magazine to the mercy of others, hence my sudden retirement from that publication.

As you can see, volume 2 of Vintage Morris: Tall Tales but True from a Lifetime in Motorcycling is now ‘out there’ in two forms: as an ebook available internationally through a number of retail outlets, or as a Print-on-Demand where and when required. The ebook format of volume 1 is of course still available from Amazon.com as ISBN 978-0-6482885-1-0, the original ‘volume 1 in soft cover can also be ordered from a larger print run. My Australian email address is [e-mail] if a First Edition, self-published, personally signed, printed copy is of interest.

The photographers

‘Every picture tells a story’ is a tired old cliché – which is too true to be good – and so is ‘a picture’s worth a thousand words ’ so we must never forget our small band of intrepid photographers, even if they seem never to be satisfied. If, for example, I had ground away a machine’s footrest on a high-speed assault of a great corner, and come back to receive the congratulations which I may – or may not – richly deserve, I hear another shutter-bug shout ‘Just one more, mate,’ I shall probably run over him.

In fact, the title of the late, great Bill Meyer’s book is called exactly that: Just one More which I am here to tell you all is, again, too true to be good. Way back in 1977, Bill and I published some ten or so copies of a monthly newspaper we called Australian Motorcycling. I was the paper’s editor and wrote all the copy for the first two issues and carried out all the road test reports as well. We usually had two full reports in each issue, with Bill taking photos of me on an odd assortment of quite high-performance machines. If he shouted out ‘just one more’ two or three times – or, for a change, ‘one more for Kodak’ – he must have done so about ten or more times at every photo shoot during the various test reports.

Meyer was by no means the only photographer to have done so, for they all did it, and they are still at it, even in these ‘easier’ days of digital and/or Smart Phone cameras, when various shots can be checked instantly. It should be said, however, that in the days before digitals, there may have been a half-fast excuse for going on and on, then on and on again, because no-one could be sure of the viability of any photo which could not be viewed until about a week or more when the ‘proofs’ would become available. By that time, the motorcycle(s) in question may have been returned to an anxious owner, or to an importer’s warehouse, and may not have been readily available (if available at all) thereafter.

Other first-rate photographers I have had the privilege to work with were the late Ray Ryan, who left us far too early, and his great friend, the legendary Bill Forsyth, who seems to be everywhere these days. This includes England’s Goodwood ‘Festival of Speed’, for him an almost annual event. His great book on Goodwood, an absolute truck-load of great colour photos of cars, bikes, aircraft and almost everything else, with many captions and great text as well, should be in every bookcase world-wide.

The bustling, even-tempered Graham Munro, with whom I have worked much more than any other, was flown to Melbourne with me almost forty years ago by Two Wheels magazine to carry out a series of road tests of several Classic motorcycles, all of which were subsequently published in the magazine, and, I might add, in on one two others as well. I can hear him shouting ‘just one more’ even now!

The ebullient Rob Lewis from Melbourne, who always seemed to suddenly appear, camera in hand, every time more than about three or four motorcycles were assembled anywhere on earth, is another top-flight professional. His work appears regularly, and can be found almost everywhere. There were several others, whom I only encountered for a day or so, and briefly at that, but who were either not introduced to me, or whose names I have forgotten. I apologise to those ‘nameless’ professionals, whose work is not forgotten, for their artistic pictures will live forever somewhere, while always enhancing, indeed enriching, the written word in what will forever remain an essential partnership.

This Bill Forsyth photo of the Norton ‘International’ I was road testing many years ago provides a great example of pre-digital, SLR photography. A fast action shot, with prop-stand on the deck, the centre stand not far behind, but with the rear vision mirror totally obscuring my face! It was accidental, of course, and it couldn’t be used, but nobody could have known that at the time the photo was taken.

1969

Barry Ryan’s Motorcycles: Excelsior

Way back in 1896 a company in England manufactured what was arguably the first motorcycle to be built in the nation, which meant that the new motorcycle, the ‘Excelsior’, was certainly amongst the first powered bicycles ever to be built anywhere on earth. It was in fact referred to at the time as a motor bicycle (and probably a flimsy one at that!) for that was certainly all the machine could have been in those days.

The company was founded in 1874 and had previously built several hundred of those strange, unwieldy penny-farthing bicycles, as well as a very few even stranger three-wheelers which featured a pair of huge penny front wheels with a bench seat between them and a trailing farthing to provide a form of hit-and-miss, erratic steering. The manpower delivered by the large pedals the rider was forced to use was transmitted to one of the pennies by an odd series of large gears, to provide what the manufacturers gleefully advertised as ‘chainless transmission’. On second thoughts, ‘brainless transmission’ might have been a more apt description; for if the unwieldy device itself appeared to be more than a little brainless, then the other makers of these strange three-wheeled – and occasionally four-wheeled – contraptions like the Excelsior, clearly exhibited some very strange thinking indeed.

There were also American and German manufacturers of bicycles and motorcycles which bore the Excelsior name, but neither of them was in any way related to the British concern: or to each other. The British factory, which in the late fifties was later taken over by another company, manufactured a great number of very competitive machines during its incumbency, the Excelsior name stretching all the way from 1896 to its quite sad demise in 1965: a very long time, by anyone’s reckoning.

The World War II years saw Excelsior make an odd, folding motorcycle (?) called the Welbike. These were dropped in containers in their hundreds – there were in fact almost 4000 of them made all told – to be used as personal transport by truly desperate paratroopers. It has been said that the odd little device could be unpacked and unfolded in a ‘best time’ of just on 11 seconds, but no one seems to have recorded how bad the little shocker must have been to ride, or how hopeless it would be on anything but the smoothest of roads. The poor little thing employed a 98cc Villiers two-stroke engine, skinny, eight-inch wheels, only a tiny rear brake, no lights, no mudguards, no suspension, a pseudo clutch, no kick-starter and only one gear. Its pressurised fuel tank carried just over a gallon of pre-mix petrol and oil (petroil), which would need to be re-pressurised often by a small hand-pump. The bike allowed a hapless paratrooper to cover some 140km if he was unlucky enough to have grabbed one which worked, or none at all if one was fortunate enough to snaffle a bike which couldn’t be push-started. He was probably better off walking, anyway!

D-Day landing on Normandy in 1944, with two soldiers (centre) about to carry a tiny, ‘assembled’ Welbike to the shore.

The Welbike re-appeared in the desperate times of the immediate post-WWII era disguised as the folding Corgi, the more ‘civilised’ version fitted with Excelsior’s own 98cc ‘Spryte’ engine, a kick-starter – and later a ‘proper’ clutch and two-speed gearbox – the later, 1950s model with slim telescopic front forks, thin mudguards and a set of tiny, dimly glowing lights. It had very little to recommend it in the handling department, for there didn’t seem to be any of that at all, and it was even less impressive in terms of its performance, for there didn’t seem to be any of that, either! It was perhaps the most unimpressive machine I have ever ridden, and that is really saying something. But it should be noted there were an amazing 27,500 of the strange devices made – and sold? – in the immediate post-war years from 1946 to 1954! They were variously labelled ‘Brockhouse’, Corgi or the Indian ‘Papoose’!

The trim little ‘fold-up’ Excelsior ‘Welbike’, dropped by parachute to waiting paratroopers or, on other occasions, transported by landing barges for the use of infantrymen who had arrived at beachfronts and other landing areas. It could be unfolded and ridden away in seconds.

The tiny, post-WWII machine, with Excelsior’s own 98cc ‘Spryte’ two-stroke engine, was sold under a variety of names, and could be registered for road use if one was desperate enough. A mobile chicane, at best it was very cheap transport and was something of a novelty at the time. Over 27,000 of the tiny bikes were built.

However, Excelsior managed to manufacture a series of very acceptable Villiers-engine machines at war’s end – following this with the much more acceptable 250cc ‘Talisman’ two-stroke twin in the late forties, the machine fitted with the company’s own engine. It was a handy little performer, even if its plunger rear suspension wasn’t quite up to scratch. The company followed this with its more sporting 350cc twin, an odd engine size which was never popular in Australia. But an exciting new 500cc three-cylinder Excelsior engine found its way into the tiny, 245kg Berkeley sports car, where it proved to be quite an eager performer.

The 492cc Excelsior two-stroke ‘triple’ produced 34BHP, about the same as a 350cc Gold Star BSA. The Excelsior/Berkeley was a flyer, but for some strange reason the engine never saw service in an Excelsior frame. A shame, for it would have been a very swift machine indeed!

The all-new, 500cc donk imbued the little Berkeley sports car with a top speed in excess of 150km/hour. World Midget Car Champion Bill Reynolds drove a bright-red, 32 BHP five-hundred Berkeley at Bathurst in 1958, where it flew through the top of the Mountain like a miniature rocket and recorded just over 100 Imperial mph down Conrod Straight; a most impressive performance at the time.

Please don’t ask me, or anyone else, why that triple-carburettor, 500cc Excelsior engine, which was built in a motorcycle factory, remember, was never fitted into a motorcycle frame by Excelsior, but it certainly helped the Japanese in the design of the first Kawasaki Mach 3, which stirred us all up just on ten years later. There was, however, a ‘one-off’ motorcycle built by an English enthusiast who fitted a three-cylinder Excelsior ‘car’ engine into a modified EMC frame. If only the company had followed suit? Oh, yes, if only!

You may not have the opportunity to view one of them these days, because the machines are on the rare side, but if you ever spot a small two-stroke Excelsior motorcycle sitting forlornly at the roadside then have a good look at the transfer/decals it should display on its fuel tank and toolbox.

If it is an original Excelsior logo, you would see a bloke standing on a large box while wearing a set of knee-length plus-four trousers, a short, bum-freezer jacket and small peaked cap. He carries above his head a large, fluttering banner which bears the legend ‘Excelsior’, with a much larger Excelsior name printed heavily in front of him and right across his loins as if to up-stage him. You may look at this logo and fondly imagine who the heck this bloke was and what the hell he was doing.

The bloke depicted in the logo may have been a member of the mythical Excelsior Explorers’ Club which was once said to be renowned for lumping large packs of groceries and heavy clothing into vastly inaccessible places. For some odd reason, their banner was said to have the group’s name emblazoned upon it and reputedly carried with them everywhere, the explorers borne down by the enormous weights they had to carry, but also compromised when one’s turn came to heave that proud banner aloft. Often, particularly on mountain tops or during the group’s Polar explorations, a previously brisk zephyr might soon become more of a gale, which would make grimly hanging onto that banner a king-sized pain in the arse. Why it was never ‘accidentally’ left behind in some crevasse or ‘lost’ in some other inaccessible place, is beyond me, but there it is!

We don’t know who the bloke we are to speak of was, or if the Club existed at all, but we are supposed to know what happened to him; at least according to that great British poet, Longfellow: assuming his poem has an element of truth in it, or is simply a piece of brilliant fiction.

In Longfellow’s profound poem, he describes a banner-carrying youth who may have been a member of the Club – or, more likely, a raving lunatic – being espied by a local maiden as he shuffled alone through her European mountain top village late in a wintry afternoon. He describes the encounter thus:

‘The shades of night were falling fast, as through an Alpine Village passed, a Youth who, through snow and ice, carried a banner with a strange device: Excelsior.’

According to the epic poem, a local lass pleaded with the youth to warm himself at her breast, but the twit, who might have been gay for all we know, demurred. He may have been the sole survivor of an ill-fated expedition, and it may have been his turn to carry the banner, poor bugger but, either way, he was decidedly odd. So, he pressed on, shouting the name ‘Excelsior’ – loosely translated from the Latin as ‘Onwards’, or ‘Upwards’ – into the gathering gloom as he staggered into the blizzardy cold night, and to his impending demise.

Longfellow describes the discovery of the lad’s body the following morning in these touching words:

‘A traveller by the faithful hound, half-buried in the snow was found, still grasping in his hand of ice, that banner with the strange device: Excelsior.’

In passing, that area was said to be the home of the Monks of Saint Bernard, so the hound of which Wordsworth spoke was probably a St Bernard, trotting about with his little bottle of brandy hung around his neck. Longfellow continued the tale, as he wrote the final stanza:

‘There in the twilight, cold and grey, lifeless, but beautiful, he lay, and from the sky, serene and far, a voice fell, like a falling star: Excelsior! ’

As it happens there is a small, if decidedly idiotic, postscript to that odd historical story of the Excelsior motorcycle, which happened while I was working for a short time for Ryan’s Motorcycles, Parramatta in 1969, some eighteen months or so after I had made my long-overdue debut into professional theatre. I had left the Omodeis motorcycle accessory and spare parts emporium in Sydney to pursue my professional career in Melbourne as an actor/singer and was to return to the entertainment industry again several months later; this time in cabaret in the then-burgeoning registered clubs industry and later into musical theatre, television and the occasional movie.

A bloke pulled up outside Ryan’s Motorcycles one day in late 1969 on a ten-year old, plunger-sprung 200cc Excelsior and strolled in, pulling off his gauntlet gloves as he did so. ‘Have you got a clutch cable for me Excelsior?’ he enquired. ‘It’s got one of them Villiers 6E engines in it.’

I still don’t quite know what came over me then, but I leaned forward until I was almost nose-to-nose with the man and, with eyes bugging out and mouth agape, I trumpeted ‘ … still grasping in his hand of ice, that banner with the strange device… Excelsior! Excelsior!’ Having suitably terrified the poor bugger with that piece of odd theatre I turned and wandered over to the box which contained the Villiers clutch cables and took my time in finding one, even though the box was, of course, full of them.

The customer leaned over the counter to whisper conspiratorially to Barry Ryan and Frank (The Good) Shepherd, who were checking some invoices at the time. ‘Is that bloke all right?’ he whispered hoarsely, nodding in my direction.

‘No,’ said Frank, as Barry nodded sagely. ‘Poor bastard’s an actor.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he nodded in return, as if this answered everything. ‘An actor, eh, the poor bastard!’

When the client had finally departed, after many a glance inside to see what I might do next, we all had a bit of a giggle about it, but Barry asked me to please never do that again: ‘Like a Good Chap?’

I reckon it doesn’t hurt now and again to bring a little levity into the often hum-drum daily circus we call life. I know that not everyone agrees with that premise, but back in the Mists of Time before a large dollop of the fitness of the occasion finally overwhelmed me, I sometimes couldn’t help it. I happily confess I am still more than a little inclined towards the ridiculous, for better or for worse.

1972–1973

Lester Morris Motorcycles

Ural

It’s interesting, if not surprising, to note the Russian-built Ural motorcycle outfit is enjoying a new lease on life in Australia, after out-growing its horrific birth pangs in this country during the early seventies. The bikes were originally imported in 1972 by Arnold Glass, of Capitol Motors, who claims he had to import them from Russia as part of a deal he negotiated to import many low-priced Russian tractors which were made by an associated factory.

It is clear that the new Ural is a vastly improved machine from the shocker which arrived in Australia half a century ago, and it would need to be, for I carried out this nation’s first, and only, road test report on one of those machines, and came away from it shaken and stirred, and forever thankful that I had survived such an awful experience.

Quite some years later, not long before I became the proprietor of the motorcycle store which briefly bore my name, the ubiquitous motorcycle guru Peter ‘The Bear’ Thoeming looked at me sideways – as he so often does – while he peered at me through his thin-rimmed glasses. His head was cocked to one side like a bird peering down the neck of a bottle, finger and thumb stroking the corners of his be-whiskered mouth.

‘Tell me, Morris,’ he asked puckishly, as he then scratched his enclosed chin with the back of his hand. ‘Tell me, what’s the worst motorcycle you have ever ridden?’

‘The Urinal.’

‘Eh?’

‘The Urinal.’

‘That’s down the end of the hall. Turn left, then right as you leave the office’

‘No. To answer your question, that’s the worst motorcycle I ever rode. That Russian thing. Bit like an ancient BMW. Flat-twin, 650cc ohv with shaft drive.’

‘Oh. You mean the Ural? Made by IRBIT, near the Ural Mountains,’ he said knowingly. ‘There are two of them now, you know. Or at least there were. Virtually identical. The Cossack is the other one, made in Kiev, sometimes known, erroneously, as the Voskhod. They were all flat-twins with sidecars on the right-hand (or wrong) side. Of course, we only had the solo machines here in 1972.’

‘Well, whatever,’ I answered, feigning interest. ‘The Urin – er – Ural was the worst motorcycle I ever rode. I’ve actually heard the bike called Ural or Cossack.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, looking at the ceiling as he scratched his jaw again. ‘They came from different factories in Russia, and they arrived in Australia at different times. One lot, in bright green, which we never saw, were made with sidecars and were equipped for a foreign police force. But that country also had solos for pursuit work.’

I think he said the Venezuelan Police but I lost interest almost as soon as I had answered his question, so I can’t be sure about that. I really wish The Bear hadn’t asked me that question, because I had almost forgotten the bike ever existed: I must have expunged the whole experience from my mind, I imagine.

At the time I was writing for three motorcycle mags, commentating at race meetings from Bathurst to Amaroo Park and back again and writing the ‘Chain Chatter’ motorcycle column for Sydney’s Daily Mirror newspaper. Oh, and at the same time I was attempting to operate my own motorcycle dealership in the Sydney suburb of West Ryde.

The Mirror’s Motoring Editor, Mike Kable, who had managed to get me the gig with the Mirror, secured various machines from time to time for road test reports, among them the swift and fine-handling 315cc Suzuki two-stroke twin, the reliable, if pedestrian, Jawa 250 two-stroke single – and the frightful Ural.

The 650cc OHV flat-twin was, so he said, inspired by BMW but it looked more like a reject BMW design from about 1932 with its lumpy alloy castings, unevenly finned cast-iron cylinders with rough cooling fins, its 6-Volt generator (yes, a seventies generator, and 6-Volt at that) sitting on top of the engine castings. In all it looked like a vintage motorcycle. It had telescopic front forks and swing-arm rear suspension, which looked modern enough, but the finish was a bit agricultural and equally as effective. There was the occasional Russian thumb-print in the paintwork and the thin layers of chrome looked as though they had been very thinly applied over lightly rusted surfaces. In fact, the exhaust pipes already had an encrustation of rust on them, from the exhaust ports almost to the gearbox.

The front-end looked solid enough, with forks about as thick as pick handles – and they proved just as effective as pick handles in absorbing road shocks. In short, the forks on the test bike didn’t work at all! On one occasion, in the fond hope that they would free up a bit, I ran the front wheel – at walking pace – into a brick wall, but the only thing that moved was a pot plant which fell from the balcony above and smashed to the ground alongside me. Did it fall, I wondered at the time, or was it pushed? I noted a crack in the wall from ground level to an upper window as I hastily departed the scene: I trust that crack was there before I arrived!

As if to compensate, the rear shocks worked a little too well, for the bike was so softly sprung at the rear-end that the wheel pattered madly over bumps, spending more time in the air than on the ground. Riding on the paved Motocross circuits which pose as this nation’s roads allowed the front-end to hop about all over the place, while the rear-end would often step-out through corners. It felt like riding a machine with a flat rear tyre, and I quickly grew tired of looking down every few meters to check the tyre’s condition. All you could say about this frightful machine’s handling is that there wasn’t any!

The brakes were equally strange, but were cleverly matched to the machine’s suspension. The front brake didn’t work at all, but the rear brake would lock the wheel solid at the slightest touch! I once tried both hands together on the front brake lever, but the bike pressed gleefully on at undiminished pace. In fact, with mind and body prepared for some degree of retardation, the bike would seemingly accelerate when the front brake was applied. That was about the only time the bike showed any degree of acceleration!

Riding in heavy traffic, as I dimly recall, was a nightmare, not only in view of the dangerous brakes, the non-working forks and the flat-feeling rear tyre, but because the clutch – and subsequent gear-change – had a mind of its own. The engine idled like a bagful of live chickens, and the clutch refused to disengage fully when changing gears. Selecting first gear from a standing start was an acquired art, for you would either stall the engine or, if you opened the throttle wide enough, the bike would leap away snapping your neck like a frozen carrot. If the traffic hadn’t moved very far, and you had to stop again, you would then have to reef on the front brake lever with every ounce of strength you possessed, at the same time as you gently caressed the rear brake pedal.

Regardless, the device would often stall halfway across the intersection and then demonstrate the efficacy of its awful gear-change by not allowing you to select neutral gear again. There you were, practising your pelvic thrusts for the world to see while sawing the gear lever back and forth in a frantic search for an apparently non-existent neutral.

No point in leaping off and trying to push the bike out of harm’s way as the horns blazed: the clutch wouldn’t allow that. However, you could leap off and gently select a false neutral by hand. You discovered it was a false neutral only when it suddenly leapt into gear again about ten seconds later in the middle of the intersection as you trotted triumphantly alongside it. That bike cheerfully made arrant novices out of the most professional of us: oh, and as for the machine’s performance is concerned – well, it didn’t have much of that, either!

If the clutch grabbed and refused to fully disengage, then it would compensate for this by slipping badly whenever you turned the wick up – which was often – and you would do this more in anger or frustration than a desire to see how fast the thing could go. When you did squirt the thing in anger it would cough back through the strange carburettors – which usually indicates a lean mixture – and then backfire through the mufflers on the over-run, which is then indicative of an over-rich mixture! Following the theme of brakes and suspension, it seems like another each-way bet, doesn’t it?

The twin carburettors were odd devices employing guillotine-slides like the early Honda works racers, but with somewhat less efficiency. (‘Works’ racers are highly specialised machines ridden only by the very best riders, who would be contracted to the various factories.) Because of the razor-like slides the carbs were very narrow and extremely short. They also piddled petrol out of every orifice and would alternatively run rich or lean depending on the corners you happened to be negotiating at any given time. If it was, say, a left-hander, then the inside carburettor would flood when you were cranked over and the outer carburettor would run lean. The bike would then, as some sort of unwanted encore, mumble over-richly through the left muffler and cough-back through the right carburettor because it was running lean!

Can you imagine the Venezuelan Police trying to chase a miscreant while riding one of those things? The crook would have to go back every now and again to aid his pursuer, even if to loan the poor bugger a hanky. Oh, and you didn’t need a horn on the thing, because people could hear you coming long before you appeared. You weren’t game to use the horn anyway, after using the device once and having to apologise for doing so. That horn would rend the air with a Falstaff-like belch or stentorian fart of which any character actor would be justifiably proud. Shakespeare would have loved it!

Finally, the engine ran so hot that it bathed the rider’s shins with a furnace-like blast, imbuing the skin thereon with the hue and polished appearance of a bright-red Jonathan apple. If it was raining, you sat there with your trouser-legs steaming for everyone to see and to jeer or point at.

Riding at night was an experience, for the headlamp emitted a dull amber glow, which conked out about three meters ahead of you. Not only was it difficult to see where you were going after dark it made the task of seeing you difficult for pedestrian and motorist alike. They could hear you well enough, they just didn’t know where you were!

It was rumoured at the time that NASA was very concerned about the Russians. They had heard – not from me, be assured – that the Russians had learned how to bend light-waves, which as we know is not possible. Had they asked me I could have told them not to worry – it was merely the Ural’s headlamp beam, which glowed amber for the first few meters then took a ninety-degree bend and nose-dived onto the roadway.

That awful creation had one or two redeeming features, I must confess. As I have previously mentioned, it was built in an adjunct to a tractor factory, and the importer was forced to take the motorcycles as part of his deal to import the range of excellent farm machinery. In view of its solid construction and agricultural appearance I referred to it in the (unpublished) road test report as ‘Ural – the Two-Wheeled Tractor’. It looked like a two-wheeled tractor, as I remember, and it behaved like one as well.

Be that as it may, the Ural employed wheels with spokes as thick as your little finger, a substantial, heavy gauge frame, and the bike enjoyed the cheerful, agricultural look, which hinted at a longevity it has apparently enjoyed. I suggested, at the time, that a collision between a Ural and a cement mixer would see the bike undamaged and the mixer an utter write-off!

There are to this day, believe it or not, quite a number of those very early Urals to be seen stumbling about the countryside and it has been said that one man in the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney has a backyard full of them. Maybe someone got their wires crossed somewhere, for I suggest the owner of that batch of 1972 (Vintage?) Urals in the Mountains might have been having a large party at the time and had rung through to order several Portaloos … and ended up with a bunch of Urinals instead! I further suggest that the reason he still has those bikes is that the importers could neither sell them, give them away, nor pay somebody to take them off his hands.

Thankfully, the all-new Ural is a very acceptable motorcycle, albeit in sidecar form now, and is as far removed from that first machine as it is possible to be.

Kart racing

It was some time in 1972, just under ten years after I had given away racing go-karts in 1963, while enduring a rare train trip, when a fellow in a seat directly in front of me opened a copy of Karting News. In it there was a photo showing a BSA outfit which had had its sidecar removed and a series of stout planks bolted onto the chassis rails in its place. Upon those planks was perched a racing go-kart which was securely strapped in place with the agency of two strong, webbing ties and several ‘Aerolastics’. I was enjoying a swift read of a page in the magazine over the bloke’s shoulder, so the sight of that photo was discovered entirely by accident.

It was, however, not only a surprise to see that photograph – which carried no caption – but it was an enormous shock as well and of more than passing interest to me because that BSA outfit was mine and so was the racing go-kart! I was utterly astonished because that jaunt was by no means forgotten, but I would never have expected to see a photograph of it anywhere on this earth.

I don’t know who took the photo, of course, or how it made its way into a publication which had not existed when I was racing karts, but I knew at once that the photo was taken circa 1961 in the very early days of kart racing in Australia, and it must have been taken at Broadmeadows, near Newcastle, where the kart was campaigned just once, but with some vigour and some success. It was driven upon the recently built, quarter-mile, dirt-surfaced circuit specially designed for kart racing, but it must have been an early meeting, for I believe the track was hot-mix sealed very shortly thereafter.

In late 1960, kart racing was just becoming established in Australia – especially in New South Wales – with tar-sealed circuits laid-out in Sydney at Taren Point, Londonderry and Granville, with smooth dirt circuits at Leppington, Canberra, Lithgow and Broadmeadows. Other tracks were to follow shortly, and all of them were about a quarter-mile in length.

I had read in a 1959 American car magazine of a company in Los Angeles called Ingels-Borelli, the company offering a set of blueprinted plans for the building of a go-kart chassis. The plans were said to be very comprehensive, with detailed instructions on the correct king-pin and castor angles, wheelbase and wheel-track dimensions, so that the steering geometry was correct, allowing the device to go precisely where it was pointed at race speeds.

In the earlier fifties the sport was unheard of in Australia, but I still sent the money across to the States immediately, the blueprints arriving by air-mail later in 1959. Among the details the plans contained was the diameter, gauge and type of special alloy steel tubing for the chassis, and the gauge of sheet metal which formed the pan that covered the base of the frame and backrest, while helping to strengthen and stiffen the entire machine.

With no idea of what was in store for International Kart racing in later years, Ingles (clearly too big for his first kart) and Borelli pose in 1956 with their first effort. It is yet to have the frame’s rails ‘lowered’ and is lightly powered by a tiny industrial engine, but the design remains almost exactly as the later blueprints indicated when the kart’s details arrived at our garage in Australia late in 1959.

The first Art Ingles go-kart made in 1956 featured straight sections of tubular steel and small-diameter wheels, but the later design plans which arrived in Sydney specified carefully bent cross-tubing for the front of the frame where the ten-inch diameter wheels were to be mounted. King-pin and castor angles, which were variously seven (7) and nine (9) degrees were detailed – I can’t remember which was which – with corresponding kinks in the frame’s side rails. Our rear wheels were to be twelve-inch outside diameter. The kinks in the front and side rails meant the little racer was lowered to a ground clearance of about an inch or so. The result was a low and urgent-looking little machine with a wheelbase of forty-eight inches, and a wheel-track of just on thirty inches: pre-metric, Imperial dimensions in those days, of course!

When finally put to the ultimate test in very close-company racing, it soon became plain that the little vehicle’s steering geometry was spot on, for the swift little kart (usually) went exactly where it was pointed; always allowing for the inevitable ‘bumps and nudges’ along the way, that is!

A pushbike factory in the western suburb of Guildford – just a few hundred meters from my home – built a special jig for us to locate the tubular steel which they had supplied and specially bent to the blue-print’s specification. I ‘fish-mouthed’ the ends of the tubing for a close fit and my brother Andy attended to welding the frame, while I searched for a set of wheels which might be strong enough to be used one day for serious racing.

I found wheels of 10 x 3 for the front end, the rear wheels 4.00 x 4, the latter with the suggested outside diameter of 12". The aluminium alloy wheels were designed for large trolleys and specified for very heavy loads, so they happened to be perfect for the job.

The power-plant we originally used was a highly tuned 150cc Hurricane lawnmower engine which pushed the little thing along well, but a few weeks later I bought an old Ambassador motorcycle and used its Villiers 197cc engine – minus the gearbox – to power the kart.