Happy New Year!

Of course at this time of year our thoughts focus on the unwanted, the lonely and abandoned. Yes, many bikes have suffered this fate over the years. But what about ex TT machines? They must be out there somewhere, surely…

But let’s be serious.

Imagine I am a 1920s manufacturer. I won last year’s TT with a bike which was basically a pretty complicated version of my standard engine in a set of stock cycle parts. If I sell the bike locally there are two potential problems, first some smart-arse private owner might use it to beat my this-year’s TT racer. Secondly when he blows it up he will expect me to supply him spares and half of them were one offs. Besides, when he pulls the engine apart he will find out all my tuning secrets. So I can either sell the bike abroad (as far abroad as possible) or I can just remove the racing engine, fit a standard one and sell the bike as an ex-demo roadster. Selling abroad has its advantages, after all if the bike is raced very successfully in ‘the colonies’ – Australia or South Africa are a good choice – then it can only help my sales over there. On the other hand, the TT may have just about finished that engine anyway so perhaps just breaking it up and flogging it is the better idea, besides I may be able to use someof the carefully hand fettled bits in next year’s engine…

You can see the problem. In the case of bikes that used proprietary engines, like my favourite Blackburnes, it was even more tricky. They had no control over the actual success of the bike they supplied engines to. Suppose Donkey Motorcycles Limited wanted a Blackburne race engine for their star rider George Formby, who they tell me is a rising star on their best machine… George comes in last place and I am a laughing stock. What’s worse, the little rat has friends at JAP and he lets them pull my engine apart in the pits and copy my cam design and porting…

Again, you see the problem. Blackburne were careful who got their engines. Manager Ike Hatch supplied Super Sports engines to those who wanted them but TT engines only went to manufacturers – and riders – whose ability he was satisfied with and even then they had to hand their engines back to Hatch at the end of the season;  which, ironically, means that an ex-works bike is more likely to be genuine if it doesn’t have a racing engine… In his early days, Irish racer Tyrell Smith raced an OK Blackburne and although it was quick, when he was working on it Wal Handley told him ‘he’d never get it to really go without a ‘kidney’ cam. (Blackburne racing cams are kidney, not egg shaped). Eventually Tyrell obtained an proper works TT engine via his friend Paddy Johnstone, at that time Competition Manager at Blackburne and found it was a very different thing. Cotton and Rex Acme were long standing customers of Blackburne with excellent riders like Handley, Johnstone and Stanley Woods getting the ‘best’ motors.

Then there was Jock Porter, more or less a one man band from Edinburgh.

Jock Porter’s Motor Mart at the top of Leith Walk was, I believe, still there in the sixties but long gone by the time I arrived in Auld Reekie. Porter manufactured New Gerrard machines – Gerrard being the name of his son – initially from a works in nearby Gayfield Square but latterly much of the production was sub-contracted to larger premises in Nottingham. Porter was a successful rider at home and in the Island and most of his early bikes used Blackburne engines. Some years ago I was contacted by Joe Gray from the Shetland Classic Motorcycle Club. Joe compiles an excellent page on the club’s website called Rare Bikes in Shetland in which he turns out an old bike photo and writes what he knows about the history of the bike shown. He wanted to know if I could shed any light on a bike that used to be on the Island in the 1950s and was said to be a New Gerrard.

Well it had an Edinburgh number, right enough, and the engine was very clearly a Blackburne OHV twin but was much older than the saddle tank chassis in which it reposed. The engine was probably aroud 1923/24. The bike as a whole looked 1930s. Besides I couldn’t recall seeing Porter on anything other than a Blackburne single.

But I was wrong, this picture from a Lodge Plugs advert, shows Porter on a New Gerrard that he sand raced at St Andrews on 12th July 1924 which has a very similar twin motor, note the non-standard magneto chain cover. This is an early 700cc unit with parallel tappets – initially Blackburne OHV engines shared the tappet layout of the side-valve engines, which accelerated wear on the valve gear. It wasn’t until 1924 that production OHV motors had tappets angled to match the pushrods.

However, the frame is not the same as the Shetland bike, which appears to be duplex, with the front exhaust pipe running between twin down-tubes. Perhaps the engine had come from Porter and been fitted to an anonymous frame, retaining the registration details of the New Gerrard, as was common in those more relaxed days. It seemed like that was the end of the story, after all it was a long time ago and the Edinburgh Registration records no longer survive.

Then last year the discovery of an incomplete OHV 500cc twin Blackburne engine on Ebay stirred things up a bit more. Blackburne didn’t make a 500cc twin – other than the few made for the 1926 Senior TT. Blackburne were very successful in all TT classes barring the senior for the simple reason that they hadn’t made a 500cc OHV engine of any kind since the 1921 TT (in which all retired). My personal opinion is that since Blackburne were serious exponents of modular design – all engines from 175cc OHV to 550cc side valve used the same bottom end – perhaps a 500cc OHV top end was just too much without a redesign. Anyway for 1926 they redressed the balance with a 500 twin, one such being fitted into Wal Handley’s Rex Acme. By all accounts the bike was a complete brute, the Rex chassis is excellent but very light and the frame of Handley’s machine appeared to be based on a very early Rex frame with a peculiar twin down tube arrangement and proved hopelessly inadequate, Handley’s colourful progress round the track and his death-defying grapple to second place making their way into TT legend.

But I hadn’t realised Porter was also racing a Senior New Gerrard (and Cotton too had one of the twin engines) until I saw this picture of Porter’s machine in the September 2015 issue of The Classic Motorcycle…

and I realised that the chassis was remarkably similar to the bike in the Shetland picture. Allegedly Porter had retired early in the race due to appalling vibration and in fact Handley’s was the only twin to finish. Now as I said at the start, Blackburne racing engines remained Blackburne property and were returned at the close of the season, so plainly the bike would have lost its engine, and since Porter had his old 700cc twin lying about, fitting it to the TT bike was the obvious thing to do. As you can see, in Porter’s day it had Webb forks and a Burman racing gearbox but these were parts he would most likely have kept for other projects; but that strange duplex frame – whose front tubes, interestingly, are a remarkably similar design to those of Handley’s Rex, also pictured in this feature – is the giveaway that shows these two frames to be one and the same. I thought I should get back in touch with Joe Gray and advise him that the Shetland bike had once been not only a New Gerrard but a very unusual, unique in fact, TT bike, and, er, any chance it might still exist?

Joe came back to me say sadly, no. The man who gave him the photo said it had been broken up for scrap in the late 1950s. But he did have a bit more information to share. Evidently after our initial correspondence, Joe had placed his query in Old Bike Mart and somebody had forwarded a picture of the bike as it had arrived on Shetland in the 1940s.

 and There it is; the Missing Link. This is clearly the 1926 TT New Gerrard but fitted with the diamond forks and the Edinburgh FS series number.

Mad things happen in the old bike world. Imagine if that chassis had still been somewhere on Shetland and that Ebay engine could have been fitted to revive a unique TT  bike. Sadly not this time.

But before leaving you, here is a truly batty – but non-motorcycle – story to make up for it (well, a bit).

Judy was at the Customer Service  desk in our local supermarket. His pen having walked, he foraged behind the counter. “Ah, secret stash of pens eh?” Judy asked. “Yes there’s everything in here,” he replied, “Lost property…look at this,” he held up an old colour photo found outside the shop and read off the back. “Foreman family Christmas 1977″ whoever they are.”

“I know who they are!” replied Judy, a bit shaken. It was a pic Judy had given to a friend from Suffolk at New Year. She later told us she had placed it inside her old 2015 diary and hadn’t even noticed it was missing, it must have slipped out on a visit to the shop.

Freaky. Perhaps I could get Judy to just nip up to Shetland and have a look for that New Gerrard…

Cheers Rick