Mokum Rally

The Mokum rally was held just to the north of Amsterdam but still within the city limits.

Mokum is the old Jewish name for Amsterdam and as the rally was organised by a Dutch/Jewish lad why not? Rob and Aukija (sorry that's the nearest I can get to the spelling) Kevelling ran Moto-Club de Tweewieller Amsterdam (motor cycle club two wheeler). Rob and his very attractive wife were friends of Roger Halfyard and Kelvin Clouting. I met them at various rallies in Holland and Germany. They also posted out rally lists to let everyone know what was happening and where.

In 1976 I had a Dutch girl friend who lived in Haarlem, 10 km out of Amsterdam. Sonja was a motorcycling rallist, which was where we met. She knew most of the Dutch rallists and she rode a Honda 350cc four, very soon to be replaced by a Suzuki GS 550 four. We were due to go to the Isle of Man TT races when I got a job welding on a prototype nuclear reactor in Germany, starting in June 1977. That was the end of the holiday. We had to make the most of what we could and one event that came up was the Mokum rally.

It must have been late August. The weather had been bad for a week or so. On the construction site I was working on the earth moving trucks had turned the road into a sea of light clay mud which baked solid on any hot surface so you may have a mental picture of the state of my BMWR90/6. I had only cleaned it the previous weekend and now it's a right mess, enough to win me the prize for the dirtiest bike. A brand new Amsterdam dustbin which I still have.

The rally had been planned for a while and one event was to be a BBQ (bring your own meat).

Now if you lived in the south of England and had free ferry passes because you worked for British Rail then it's just as cheap to go to Amsterdam as it is to go to Manchester. Where would you go? A lot of the lads from the Dover 69 club had invites to the rally and set off Friday night only to have forgotten to have bought any meat for the BBQ. But they knew the cooks on the ferries and managed to blag some meat from the ships kitchens.

Dover/Oostende 3.5 hours, Oostende/Amsterdam 4 hours. Not too sure of the location of the rally site, the lads from Dover, Flash and his mates stopped and asked some young lad in Amsterdam for directions. They were getting through to him when he suddenly screamed and ran off. He had spotted blood from the defrosted meat dripping freely from the pannier of one of the bikes.

Due to the rain the BBQ was aborted and as the 69 club got ready to go back to Dover on Sunday morning I was given all this unused meat. Twentyfour pork chops and 24 sirloin steaks. George Perrin and girl friend Sindy from Manchester were stopping over with us at Sonja's flat on Sunday night and we dispatched the pork to the bin on health grounds. We all had sirloin steak, even Sonja's 3 cats ate well.

As far as I can recall the rally was held just once and Rob and Aukija split up.

- Les Hobbs