If you’ve ever been overtaken by one of these on the highways of Britain you’ll have been lucky. And you would doubtless have wondered what it was and how come it was moving along so quickly. Steven Myatt reports on a rare Czech.

When you think of old East European bikes you don’t always have images of beauty and delight floating into the inner mind, now do you? I don’t think I’ll enlarge on that observation for fear of having the fans of the mighty – but yes, ugly – Ural Cossack come round and hit me with their hammers and sickles, but I reckon that the bike you see here is a truly handsome machine.
It’s a 500cc Jawa twin, and while there is a hint of BSA around the cases and a touch of Triumph on the nacelle – okay, and the flashes on the tank are a wee bit early-’50s Triumph too – it’s not too derivative. The big distinguishing feature is the engine, and yes, it’s a unit-construction, overhead camshaft dry-sump twin. And given that the bike was introduced in this form in the very early ’50s, it’s really quite an innovatory machine.
Jawa established a great reputation for producing fast, lightweight race bikes in the period immediately after the WWII, but this bike is very different. It has no racing pretensions, though the engine was used in race bikes, unsurprisingly – very successfully in moto-cross; it’s a very stylish, slightly flashy, and very comfortable bike that could easily be used for leisurely long-distance touring. It’s also very Western, and wouldn’t have looked out of place in any British bike dealers of the period – though it might have produced a lot of head-scratching from window-gazers more used to the technical sophistication of, say, Panthers.
The Jawa isn’t unlike the ohc NSUs – though those were 125cc and 250cc singles – but they were the product of the capitalist culture, until ’57 when the whole business was sold to Yugoslavia, so they don’t count. It’s certainly a much more modern bike than MZ/DKW’s machines of the time.
I’ve got the bike’s original log book in front of me, it runs to 26 pages and gives a huge amount of information about the machine. It tells us the internal measurements of the engine, the overall dimensions of the bike, and the specified sizes of tyre (even I can translate that word from the original Czechoslovakian – ‘pneumatik’. Easy.) The bike was first registered in Prague in the month of ‘supna’ in 1958 to one Samuel Durinda, who was 26 at the time. Yes, there’s everything you could want to know about the owner’s private details too; including, I think, his occupation and where he worked. Still, this was Eastern Europe in the ’50s, and if anyone liked bureaucracy for the sake of it then they did.

Faired in rear light and substantial reflector add to the refined feel of the Jawa.

Being a ’58 this 500 will have been one of the last, as production ended that year. The model was never updated to swinging arm rear suspension.
Sam kept the Jawa until the summer of 1974, after which it seems to have had two more Czech owners before coming west – and judging from the documentation I’d guess it made its way here via West Germany. Back in ’58 he must have been an incredibly proud young man, riding around his country’s capital city on so smart and so advanced a bike. How come he could afford it? Consumer goods like this were very expensive then, of course. Perhaps he was a rising star in the Party? Or, maybe his dad was Kommissariat Of Tracktorz or something?

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