The engine for everyman - by Steven Myatt

John and Charles Marston, father and son, were two of the most important figures in British bike manufacturing – but it’s possible that you’ve never heard of them. Without them though many British motorcycle manufacturers might never have existed.John and Charles Marston, father and son, were two of the most important figures in British bike manufacturing – but it’s possible that you’ve never heard of them. Without them though many British motorcycle manufacturers might never have existed.

Looking back, it really was a unique situation, and there’s absolutely no parallel for it today. Imagine half a dozen modern motorcycle manufacturers; then imagine they make their own frames, suspension and peripherals – but don’t make their own engines. Instead, they all buy in the same engines from the same specialist engine maker. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Unimaginable.
For several decades Villiers made a fairly limited range of engines and three dozen manufacturers, who simply installed them in the bikes they offered to the public, bought them. And the bike manufacturers didn’t disguise the fact; they very happily advertised that Villiers engines – famous for their reliability and economy, powered their machines.
Like many other motorcycle businesses, Villiers emerged in the second half of the Nineteenth century as a bicycle manufacturer. The craze for pushbikes - from about 1870 onwards – was as big as anything you can imagine nowadays. It was simply the thing to do, the height of fashion. Within no time at all there were cycling clubs in just about every town in the country and the first cycling magazines were published – and become very big business.
The cycling craze had a couple of very important social ramifications too. Firstly, bike ownership very quickly moved down the social scale and was taken up by the working man. It gave him the ability to move beyond a very small radius for the first time ever. It gave the working classes eye-opening mobility and was condemned by some sections of the Establishment as a potential threat to the social order. Actually, there was something in that; cycling clubs took Northern mill workers (in particular) out into the countryside at weekends and showed them that there was clean air and wide-open spaces beyond the dingy surroundings they worked in.
The other factor was that women could ride bikes just as easily and as well as men. Opposition came from the Church, who boomed that for the female sex to ride bicycles was an outrage, and could lead to unnatural urges – which, again, threatened the very fabric of society. Women wore long skirts and put shields over the rear wheels – and just got on with it.
Bicycles were easy to make of course – indeed, were easy to assemble; manufacturers could buy in a lot of the components and simply fit out their own frame. Manufacturers sprang up all over the place to satisfy the demand, this meant that prices for new machines fell, and the high volume produced meant there was soon a very lively second-hand market. You didn’t have to save up for long to buy a bike; even if you didn’t have the will power to save up you could get your hands on a machine thanks to the new concept of hire purchase!
By 1880 John Marston was employing eight men in a workshop in Wolverhampton, and selling as many Sunbeam bicycles as his small team could make. In 1890 he sent his son, Charles, off to the USA – to research the market and to look out for technical improvements on American-made bikes.
As the pedal-operated chain-drive system we still use today became widely accepted, John moved his business to larger premises – in Villiers Street (named after a one-time MP of the town), and modestly, rather than call it Marston’s, named it The Villiers Component Company. The name suggests that John was already interested in supplying parts to other manufacturers as well as turning out complete bikes himself. This is exactly what happened, and the breakthrough, from a commercial point of view, was the development of a rugged free-wheeling hub, which was supplied very widely. Charles patented the system, stopped making pedal-operated systems, and simply sold the free-wheel hub to other companies. Around this time he bought the Villiers name from his father for the very considerable sum of £6,000 – but John did agree to being paid out of profits rather than in a single sum.
Charles had seen far more modern manufacturing techniques being employed in the USA, and he and his father were always keen to employ new thinking. To do that though they needed a new building, with linear assembly lines designed to speed manufacture. By 1902 Villiers was employing 36 craftsmen.
It didn’t take a great leap of imagination to fit one of the new internal combustion engines into a bicycle. The result – where and when it worked – was startling. Where previously you’d needed a lot of effort and been capable of ten or 15 miles an hour, now no effort at all was required and speeds two and three times as great were possible. The distances you could cover increased similarly, but motorcycling was very different from bicycling – because people moved at different speeds, and couldn’t communicate as easily once under way, motorcycling wasn’t such a clubbable pursuit as cycling. There were motorcycle clubs, of course, but they didn’t have the unity of the cycle clubs.
Before the First World War Villiers had realised that the best move for them was to specialise – and do so in the heart of the bike, the engine. In 1912 most motorcycles used single cylinder motors of around 500cc. Villiers went for a smaller and lighter design, giving 349cc, but it was as fast as any 500. On the banked track at Brooklands it topped 46mph.
As soon as the war was over the company offered a 269cc industrial two-stroke, which, among many uses, found its natural home in motor mowers (so many domestic servants had either died during the war or found alternative, and usually better paid, employment afterwards that there was a huge market for labour saving devices both inside and outside the home).
Charles Marston had found a niche, and he was bright enough to realise its potential. He developed a range of engines from 98cc to 249cc, all air-cooled two-strokes and all obviously from the same family. The smaller motorcycle manufacturers didn’t need to spend large sums of money developing their own engines, carbs, gearboxes and electrical systems; they simply got in touch with Villiers and ordered the size of motor they wanted to use – and then bolted it into their own machines. What Charles Marston had achieved was unique, and without him the British motorcycle industry wouldn’t have been anything like as large and diverse.
James and Francis Barnet are two manufacturers who bought in Villiers engines – and, together with their customers – were entirely happy with the arrangement. James offered smart and rather better than average bikes, and started fitting Villiers engines in the late ’20s. The association continued for three decades, with James boasting of their engine suppliers in their ads.
To see some Villiers engines nestling in a variety of chassis, I went to see Classics In Cheshire – those folk who you probably thought were actually called www.britishbikes.co.uk – and from an even larger selection, they very kindly pulled out the machines you see in the pictures here.
The 250cc twin was one of the larger Villiers power plants used in bikes, and Classics In Cheshire had a lovely 1961 Greeves Sports Twin with this motor in it, as well as rather rare Cotton Continental using the same engine. Not hugely different, but differing in detail and emphasis – though both were bikes with ‘sports’ connotations and names with great competition histories.
The two machines from the James stable made a real contrast though: The very smart maroon 197cc Captain dates from 1955, while its younger and much smaller mate dates from the beginning of that decade and is powered by just 97cc. Classics In Cheshire have a slightly scruffy (but cheap!) Francis Barnett Falcon for sale with the same 197cc single as the James. Looking at the two bikes together it was fascinating to see how very different they are.
Most Villiers-powered bikes were small commuters or competition bikes, but several other installations were really fascinating: One of the most spectacular was Cotton’s use of a 247cc single (yes, single) pot engine in the 1965 Conquest.

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