Today the Dover Transport Museum posted details of the Summer 2021 raffle. The prize? A 1967 BSA Bantam 175.
I brought back an old memory of when we started to ride motorcycles to school in 1972/3. Some of the lads that beat the licence age change in December 1972 when the minimum age to ride was upped to 17 from 16 rode mostly old British bikes. I missed out as my birthday was a week after it came into effect!
So it was a year later when I was in the 6th form that I could ride legally. All the biker lads had old British 250's but one bloke, Roy, lived near me, and had a BSA Bantam 125. It was ex-post office. It was still painted red, mixed with rust. It had a 1965 C-reg. I think.
I would occasionally go on my Mum's 1971 Honda C50 complete with tartan patterned Tower panniers.
The trip from school to home was about 6 miles. By bus it was anything around an hour to an hour and a quarter but only 20 minutes, with traffic, on the C50.
I would come out of school after lessons, drop my bag in the pannier. Key in. Start the bike with one kick. Set off in my school uniform. The lads were kicking and kicking or bumping up and down the road.
About half a mile from home the Bantam would go past me making smoke like a convoy destroyer trying to evade a U-boat! The other local-ish bloke on an RE 250... never passed me at all.
At that time Honda had shown the world the CB750 with an amazing four cylinders for a road bike! In Britain we struggled along with singles and twins and the Trident/Rocket-3's were being raced.
Everyone knew that it could be done for racing. After all Gilera had four cylinders in the 50's and Moto Guzzi even more.... Honda has six cylinder 250s! But not on the road for ordinary plebs.
And it was bikes like the C50 and it's larger siblings the C70 and C90 that were the cornerstone of Honda.
Reliable and clean! The C50 wasn't fast but it started straight away and buzzed along until the "hares" went past. A great little bike.
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