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Ever the gentleman
himself, Steven Myatt considers
a most civilised machine –
the quiet and comfortable
S7 and S8, designed to be
a ‘nice person’s
motorcycle’
 In
the ’50s – indeed
from the end of WWII until,
well, I’d say the mid
to late ’80s –
the motorcycle was primarily
the preserve of the working
man. There were exceptions,
of course there were –
what would generalisations
be without exceptions? But
the great majority of bikes
were designed with the lower
middle classes and working
class in mind, and were marketed
accordingly.
Men who drove Humbers, Jaguars
and Alvises went to work in
comfort, sitting on sweet-smelling
leather and peering over walnut-veneered
dashboards, not out in the
rain on Tiger Cubs and Frannie-Bs.
As I say, there were exceptions,
and they had existed ever
since the first motorcycle
took to the road. They were
the chaps who could afford
a Vincent or a Brough, but
they weren’t large in
numbers, and even those marques
weren’t advertised in
The Times or Country Life.
The shaft drive is very clean
and works well if the rear
drive is lubricated with an
AG140 oil only, see, most
EP gear oils attack the metal
of the bronze worm wheel.
No, whether
it was the cheery weekend
enthusiast, the Brylcreemed
rocker or the trench coat-wearing
commuter, Britain’s
motorcyclists were, in the
main working men. In modern
demographical terms, they
were manual workers, skilled
and semi-skilled, and, like
my dad, on the lower rungs
of white collar occupations.
Tradesman, rather than professional
people, men who dealt with
problems in the pipes with
a plunger, not an anaesthetised
scalpel and who ended their
day propping up the bar, rather
than those who had been called
to The Bar.
The engine unit is a satisfyingly
big unit and gives the deserved
impression of having been
thought about.
So, it was
something of a radical departure
when one of Britain’s
best-known two-wheeled manufacturers
launched a new machine which
was aimed very directly at
what it described as ‘gentlemen’,
and suggested that it was
exactly the right thing for
going to the golf club on,
or for taking Daphne to Torquay.
It was the bike for Captain
Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson,
not Corporal Jones or Private
Pike – not that his
mum would have let him have
a nasty, noisy, smell motorcycle.
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