ALL FOR

AND SIDECARS

Speed

 

Chapter 2: Tiger Cub

                   

- John

The MOT for the Tiger Cub was due not long after the replacement front forks were fitted so I took the bike to Triangle Motorcycles in Victoria Street, Wigston Magna which was a small workshop in the midst of a row of terraced houses, run by Harry & Colin Voyle. Miraculously the bike passed but I was told that the rear swinging arm bushes were well worn and needed replacing soon. The tester was unsure whether or not the plaggy bag headlamp glass was legal and he remarked that the megaphone produced more than 90 decibels of illegal din, but as neither of those faults were covered by the MOT he handed me a test certificate. "Valid for day of issue only". Would the bike last any longer?

John Ellis brings fading memories into focus with an account of his youthful adventures

It is a sad fact that of the many bikes that I owned, I never possessed one with a then new fangled alternator that actually worked and the Tiger Cub was one of those offending machines. The battery was charged off-bike via my dad’s car battery charger which had a 6 volt facility. When the battery was fully charged the bike’s coil ignition worked and side and tail lights would issue a warm but weak glow for a while. However, if the headlamp was switched on the lighting would steal the bulk of the current, starving the ignition coil of electricity which caused the engine to misfire erratically. So it was essentially a daylight-hour’s bike only. Night riding on the fading pilot bulb only would involve riding semi blind along unlit roads with the distinct possibility of being stranded without transport in the middle of nowhere. Even I was not that stupid.

I hadn’t been at all put off motorcycles by Mike’s earlier accident but it did convince me to wear suitably stout clothing and a crash helmet (most of the time), though I did once go out for a spin without a helmet to dry my hair after I had washed it and came home looking like Ken Dodd. As promised my paternal grandma bought me my first crash helmet which was a metallic gold Kangol Meteor jet helmet with black and white go faster stripes. Grandma was shocked by the £6 price tag but coughed up. Grandma said that I looked like Flash Gordon with the helmet on. Flash who? I don’t want to look like a fictional comic strip hero; I want to look like a mean magnificent super fast biker.

An older lad at the factory who had passed his car driving test sold me a Belstaff Trialsmaster waxed cotton jacket with an olive green corduroy lined collar for a fiver. The almost indestructible waxed cotton jacket and a pair of Levi Strauss jeans provided me with a second skin which was essential in the case of spills and other calamities. Later I acquired a leather biker jacket which I wore mostly in the heat of summer when the wax of the waxed cotton jacket tended to melt, begin to feel sticky and emit a strange oily pong.

Every Saturday after the football the whole of my mother’s large family congregated at my maternal grandparent’s council house for tea. Saturday morning my mother often sent me over to my grandparents with vital provisions for the communal tea and I was able to accommodate a vast amount of groceries within the cavernous pockets of my Belstaff jacket. I could and did accommodate two pint (glass) bottles of milk in one of the lower pockets, a Victoria sponge cake in the other, a pound or two of butter in one top pocket and some other vital provisions in the other making me into Ellis’s Mobile Grocery Delivery and Courier Service. The Victoria sponge cake did not travel well and the butter melted in my top pocket.

I became a fine weather motorcyclist due to several uncomfortable experiences in winter and wet weather. In winter it became apparent that the faster the speed the faster one became frozen. Likewise during inclement weather the faster the speed the faster rainwater penetrated the riders clothing. My grandad donated a pair of his old rubberized fishing over-trousers, but I was a skinny youth and grandad was a rather hefty fellow. Baggy over- trousers did not fit the biker image so I performed surgery on them by removing material from either side of the outside seams, thereby “tapering” them to just fit over my ice blue drainpipe jeans. Having fathomed out how to work my mother’s Singer sewing machine I managed to close the seams, but I was unable to seal them against water ingress. On a ride out towards Blaby it suddenly began raining heavily and I became quite damp very quickly as the altered seams of Grandad’s fishing trousers now let in water. The rain penetrated the altered seams through to my jeans where the water wicked up down and around my legs and then continued upwards from the hem of my shirt. Being cold and wet is a most uncomfortable feeling but what could I do? I had to keep going to reach the nearest shelter. The nearest refuge was a café on Lutterworth Road, Aylestone somewhere near the Middleton Street Coalpit Lane/Wigston Lane junction. The outfit was parked outside the café and I sat inside next to a radiator with a cup of strong hot tea, with me competing with the hot tea as to which of us steamed the most.

An Eventful Day (and Half of the Night).

My first employer, a Leicester engineering factory, forced me to attend Charles Keene College on day release. At 9pm when the college day was over I mounted the Tiger Cub and attempted to kickstart it. The engine fired a couple of times but then there was a bigger bang and the engine seized completely. Actually it was the clutch that had exploded when one of the springs in the pressure plate had worked its way out and had wedged itself between the body of the clutch and the inside of the primary chaincase cover, ripping right through the aluminium casing of the latter. I pushed the dead bike maybe 3 miles to a friend’s house in Evington where I left it and then walked home to Wigston chuntering obscenities to myself as I went, but my troubles were not yet over. I walked past the Cradock Arms in Knighton, straight on over the footbridge spanning the Washbrook, along Kingsmead Road and into Meadvale Road heading towards Welford Road and Wigston. It was gone 11pm and Meadvale Road was deserted apart from a single car which drew alongside me and out jumped a plain clothed policeman who he said was investigating several house break-ins in the area. "What have you got in your black dufflebag?" He demanded. I emptied out my college textbooks. Next question "Why are you wearing black leathers?" I explained that I was a motorcyclist whose bike had broken down and had been left elsewhere etc. The policeman asked for my home address and the names of our neighbours on either side of our house. After he had confirmed those details over the police radio he told me to be on my way and stay out of trouble. I hadn’t done anything illegal but he didn’t offer to run me home. (No service). A full set of new clutch springs were bought from Petty’s at the earliest opportunity and, when fitted at my friends house, the bike was back on the road ready for the next unplanned adventure.

Yet Another Eventful Day

Lunchtime approached at the Leicester factory where I worked but as I couldn’t afford a dinner at the factory canteen I decided to ride home to Wigston on the Tiger Cub for one of my mother’s cooked meals which were far superior, and free. I had 60 minutes to ride home, down my meal and ride back to work.

Speeding up Welford Road bound for Wigston I took a sweeping right into Aberdale Road. Accelerating away from the junction, the megaphone of my bike fell off onto the road. Initially, due to the change in exhaust note and increased volume, I thought I was about to be overtaken by a 500cc single, but instead when I looked back I saw my megaphone lying forlorn in the middle of Aberdale Road. Collecting the megaphone but having no means of securing it in its proper position on the end of the open exhaust pipe I rode home with it on my lap whilst enjoying the grown-up exhaust note. At home I bolted down my dinner, fixed the megaphone back on secured with an aerolastic bungee strap and set off back to work. I heard a vintage bike behind and was curious as to its make and model as I didn’t recognize it.

What happened next happened fast, as I was travelling so fast. My attention had been distracted more than it should have been by the mystery bike and when I turned my head to look forward again, just before Chapel Lane, Knighton, to my horror I saw that a uniformed policeman, who was not wearing a high-vis jacket, had just stepped off the kerb on the opposite side of the road holding his school crossing lollipop stick. The policeman was looking up Welford Road in the direction of the cemetery oblivious to my situation, so he wasn’t paying any more attention than I was. My addled brain went into overdrive, thinking that if I braked hard there was every chance that I couldn’t stop in time and by then the schoolkids would have been on the crossing, so I opened the throttle wide and carried on regardless, swinging rapidly to the right into Chapel Lane hoping that the policeman would not take my number. To avoid any chance that he may attempt to chase after me in his Morris Minor squad car I rode over the Washbrook footbridge from where I made an extremely circuitous detour via Oadby to Gartree Road, Evington.

Leaning the bike over in an attempt to enter Shady Lane at speed, ever conscious of the possibility that I would be late for work, I hit some loose gravel and dropped the bike in front of a car which was attempting to exit Shady Lane at that same precise moment. A little further on my perilous journey the megaphone again fell off. Thoughts of "I should have stayed in bed this morning". I can’t recall my route after that or if I arrived back at work at all that day. If I was late at the factory gate I would have been locked out for the afternoon shift, so I probably went for a ride out in the countryside.

Around about that time Len was riding a Bianchi 50cc moped which had 3 gears and would top 45mph when most mopeds had a single gear and a maximum speed in favourable conditions of 30mph. This was probably the beginning of Len and I temporarily swapping over and riding each other’s bikes. I found the Bianchi to be remarkably nippy for a 50cc machine as we rode our swapped over steeds in the vicinity of Newton Harcourt.

One evening at dusk, having spent the day at Len’s house, I decided to ride my Tiger Cub home but found that the battery low and the lights wouldn’t last the journey home. Len lent me an early 1950’s BSA D1 Bantam 123cc in Mist Green which he had surplus to requirements. The D1 Bantam engine is reputed to be a mirror image of the pre-war German DKW RT 125, the design of which the Allies took as part of War reparations for WW2. DKW stands for Dampf Kraft Wagen which translates to Steam Power Wagon in English. The unit construction DKW engine/gearbox design was reversed to transfer the left foot continental gear change to the traditional British right foot gear change. The Russians did a similar thing in reverse with the BSA C15 design, which had nothing to do with war reparations, but possibly industrial espionage. The Bantam had 3 gears and a maximum speed of a heady 45mph.

The next morning I was riding the Bantam back to Len’s along Aylestone Road, past the gasworks, in the direction of Braunstone Lane when I was overtaken by a Police Panda Car which pulled across my path having switched on its illuminated “Stop Police” sign. Did he mean me? I wasn’t doing anything wrong but I stopped anyway as requested. The policeman got out of his car looked disparagingly at the Bantam and asked “What’s that?” I told him it was a motorbike. “Are you sure?” He joked. “Is it yours?” “No it belongs to my friend Len.” “Oh yes we know him: He’s a cheeky young so and so.” Yes, that sounds like Len. “Are you insured to ride it?” “Yes my Co-op Third Party Only insurance policy covers me to ride any other bike that is not registered in my name.” The policeman checked the Bantam over visually and, after telling me to “keep out of trouble”, he got back into his car and drove off.

The Tiger Cub continued to disintegrate on its own accord. The splines inside the kickstart lever sheered so the bike had to be bump started after that. The spade key jumped out en route to an uncle’s and on arrival I had to leave the engine running on a fast tick over whilst I borrowed a screwdriver to turn the thing off.

Finally I decided to offload the troublesome Tiger Cub by selling it for £20 to a former schoolmate who lived in Kirby Muxloe. On my way to deliver it to him one of the nuts which secured the front footrests fell off, so I had to ride the bike with no footrests by hooking the back of my knees over the rubber knee grips on either side of the petrol tank whilst carrying the detached footrests on my lap, delivering them to the buyer by hand.

It is true to say that there is nothing like a reliable motorcycle and my Tiger Cub had indeed been nothing like a reliable motorcycle.

- John Ellis