A is for Attitude
What set rockers apart from other teenagers of the time wasn’t just the bikes, the leather jackets, or the rock ‘n roll – what mattered was attitude. If you were a rocker you were part of the best tribe in town, and you wanted everyone to know it.

 

B is for Birds
Not seagulls, sparrows or even penguins; birds – as in birds in skirts. And lipstick. Was being a rocker and running a great bike about having fun and impressing your mates – or was there more of a hint of importing the birds too? Yes, of course there was.
Birds are largely under-rated in the stories of the rocker years, but a good one could be hard to find. What was tricky was their dads. My sister was a teenager in the rocker years, and I can remember the rows she would have with my dad – usually on a Friday night. It started with her trying to avoid him as she slipped out for the evening, and him inevitably erupting with the immortal phrase, ‘You’re not going out looking like that!’ The skin-tight black pants, the pointy-toed boots, and the ‘bum freezer’ jacket were what he wanted to see his daughter in. And don’t even mention the back-combed bee-hive hair-do. No, birds were great, and you did what you had to do (or could get away with doing …) but you lived in fear of their dads.

C is for Clip-ons
If you think of a rocker riding his Triton and compare it with his dad riding his Sunbeam there are many differences, but one of the most important was the way they both sat on their bikes. With standard bars and foot rests a rider sat straight up, with his legs going straight down from the knee – as if he was sat on a dining chair. The rocker pose was quite different, leaning forward to the clip-ons and with legs tucked back from the knee on rear-sets. The stance said speed, pure and simple.

 

D is for Drip, on the
Hire purchase – what a great invention! Let’s say you wanted to buy a Beeza A65 Star; had pored over the brochures, imagined yourself – all too easily - thundering round the bypass on it with all your mates looking on in envy and admiration, and decided that the A65 was the bike for you. Only one problem – that list of price of £289 16s 0d. The average annual wage is around a thousand pounds a year, and a teenager you’re earning far less than that. After you’ve given a quid a week to your mum for rent, set aside a few bob for beer and ciggies, and topped up the bike, there’s nothing like £289 to spare – let alone the sixteen shillings.

 

On the other hand, thanks to this wonderful new invention, hire purchase, you only really have to find £58 16s. That’s far from impossible; in fact you might get £35 for your old Tiger Cub, and if you can’t get the difference off your dad – on a promise to wash and wax his Hillman Imp every Sunday for a year – then you’re really not trying. Then, after a couple of signatures and a handshake from the salesman, you get to ride away on a brand new Beeza that’ll get you to the ton faster than anything. Isn’t the modern world great?

 

E is for England
Think of something uniquely English, such as Harold MacMillan’s accent, the practise of swan-upping or the phrase ‘Mustn’t grumble’ … and then add ‘rocker’ to the list too. Like mods, rockers were entirely home-grown and owed nothing to the USA. A lot of the best music was American, sure, but the scene was 100% British, and that’s something we can all be proud of. 

 

F is for Fairing
Sorry, just not cool – except the little nose fairings. I don’t care if they did streamline your bike and protect you from the elements; they never looked right on a bike. And once you took one off you realised just how much extra weight was involved in having it bolted to your bike. Fairings were for police riders and AA or RAC patrolmen; no one else.

 

G is for Gunk
As I write the word I can smell it. Everyone’s shed smelled of Gunk, and quite right too. What a brilliant invention. It was one of the first things that my dad introduced me to when I was allowed into his garage; the degreaser made by the gods.

 

H is for Hailwood, Mike
Was there every a greater two-wheeled hero than Mike Hailwood? Throughout the late Fifties and early Sixties there was no one to touch him.

 

Born in Oxfordshire on April 2 1940, Stanley Michael Bailey Hailwood first raced at Oulton Park (qv) days after his seventeenth birthday. He finished in eleventh place, but that was only the start; in his bike racing career he had 76 wins, 112 finishes which took him on to the podium, and 79 fastest laps. He was also a real gentleman and much loved.

 

He had 14 wins at IoM TT, including three wins at the 1961 TT – and it might well have been four if his 350 AJS hadn’t lost a gudgeon pin. He rode as fast in the rain as he did in the dry, and in the ’67 Senior TT, racing Ago, he set a lap record speed of 108.77 on his Honda 500-4 which wasn’t beaten for another eight years.

 

Paid by Honda not to race bikes, he turned to cars and repeated his success on four wheels. He was awarded the MBE, and the George Medal for saving the life of a fellow racer. The man was a star; every rocker’s hero.

 

He died in his Rover SD1 on March 21 1981, along with his young daughter, when a truck made an illegal U-turn through the barriers on the A435 near their home in Oxfordshire. The truck driver was fined £100 and told not to do it again.

 

I is for the Isle Of Man
In 1903, with its usual kill-joy spirit well to the fore, the British government banned the racing of motor vehicles on the public highway and introduced a 20mph speed limit. Thankfully, Sir Julian Orde – the secretary of the Automobile Club of Great Britain (founded in 1897 and ‘Royal’ from 1907) – had a good idea. He thought that the government of the Isle Of Man might take a more laissez faire approach to this sort of thing, and he was right. The good folk of The House of Keys weren’t that bothered how fast people drove and rode on their  688 miles of public road, and when they did get round to thinking about they decided, in their great wisdom, that a 52.15 mile course could be used for racing.

 

At the beginning of the Twentieth century the island was the backwater it had been for centuries, with a population of just 30,000. A report of 1900 noted that great improvements had been made in the previous thirty years, especially in terms of housing and transport as tourism had started to become an important factor in the island’s economy, but as it noted sadly ‘drunkenness still continues much too common’.

 

The 1904 races were only for cars, but motorcycles competed in their own event the following year (though they had to be re-directed as they couldn’t get over the steepest parts of the course).

 

By the rocker years the TT was enjoying its golden age. The races had world championship status and the Italian machines – MV Augusta, Gilera and FB-Mondial – had arrived, to give the Velos and Nortons something to worry about. The racers were hugely famous and were every rocker’s heroes; Surtees, Hailwood (qv), Read, Redman, Duke … and so many more. It’s no surprise that the stance of a rider on a café racer was exactly that of a TT rider.

 

In 1957 Glaswegian Bob McIntyre achieved something that every other rider had been dreaming of for years; he lapped the circuit at an average speed in three figures. Geoff Duke had come ever so close, with a time of 99.97 mph, but Bob clocked 101.03 on his 500cc, four-cylinder Gilera. Could it get any better? Well yes, it could; in 1961 the first Hondas arrived, creating even more exciting competition. TT week at the Island – rocker heaven.

 

J is for Joe Lucas
Joe Lucas was known as the Prince Of Darkness decades before Peter Mandelson adopted the mantle. If your dynamo failed fifty miles from home, or your lights went out at midnight then it was Joe Lucas’s fault.

 

Joe and his son Harry founded their company in 1872, basing it in Great King Street in Birmingham. In 1879 Harry Lucas invented a hub lamp for use on bicycles and called it ‘King of the Road’ – a slogan they used on many of their products in later years.
In the earliest years of the Twentieth century they began to specialise in electrical components for cars and motorcycles, and in 1914 won the contract to supply Morris cars. They were a major supplier to the military during the First World War, and expanded rapidly through the inter-war years. In 1930 they came to an agreement with their then-rivals Smiths, agreeing to split up the market between themselves, and not to encroach on each other’s areas. This meant that Lucas had a near-monopoly on automotive electrics.
If you owned a British-made bike in the rocker years then Joe Lucas would almost certainly have provided the electrical components. And you might well have cursed his name at some point. There’s a blue plaque commemorating Joe Lucas in Carver Street, Birmingham – but you can’t see it at night; it’s too dark.

 

K is for Kangol
Kangol, Stadium, Centurion, Everoak – yes, your trusty crash helmets. I looked at the history of the crash hat last month so I won’t dwell too long here, but the question for any rocker was always … to wear a skid lid or not? It was a tough one. Staying alive was a big plus, but so was keeping your quiff in immaculate condition. Brylcreem was a great help, but just going a few miles while wearing a helmet would flatten your quiff out of all recognition. Tricky, eh?

 

L is for Lightning
In 1958, at exactly the right moment in history, Lewis Leathers introduced the Lightning leather jacket – and that was the one for me. Your leather jacket was just about your most important (and expensive) purchase after your bike, and it had to be dead right for you. The choice was very subtle and few outsiders would ever have understood the significance of that choice, but with its wrist zips, four body zips, and two adjusters on each side, the Lightning was it. Slip it on (reassuringly heavy), feel that luxurious lining, and undo the studs on the collar and turn it up; then you were in business.

 

M is for Mum
Like many fathers of his generation, my dad was a slightly distant figure to me when I was a teenager, and – to be fair – teenage me was incredibly different from teenage him thirty five years ago; as was just about everything else around us. The way he regarding his motorcycle was wholesome and practical; for me my bike was sexy and exciting. We never saw eye to eye in that department, sad to say.

 

My mum, on the other hand, was a loving pragmatist – who let me have my head and stood diplomatically between me and dad. She it was that loaned me the £60 to buy my first big bike when my dad would undoubtedly have said no. And though my dad reacted with fury if he found me using his spanners, my mum turned the other cheek every time she came home to find I’d stripped an engine in her kitchen.

 

N is for Norvin, NorBSA
Yes, the special – that symbol of invention and ingeniousness, which could be created in a shed with not much more than a set of spanners, a pair of pliers and a hammer.
Imagine doing that in your shed nowadays; putting a modern Kawasaki motor into a Honda frame … you wouldn’t dream of it and probably could only do it if you had the workshop resources of a Formula One team.

 

O is for Oulton Park
It’s only Oulton because it was always my nearest race track – twenty miles away down the A556 (nowadays it’s about four miles away!) – but it could be any British race track. The very best place to watch your heroes and – on the way home – re-enact their exploits with your mates. Hell, the speeds you’d have claimed to have touched on the A556!

 

P is for Pride & Clarke
If you are of a certain age then the address 158 Stockwell Road, Brixton means just one thing; Pride & Clarke, the company which Britain’s biggest bike and accessory dealers – and one of the largest mail order outlets for many years. I never went to 158 Stockwell Road, but I pored over their press adverts, reading every word and checking every price.
Pride & Clarke sold everything, from big end assemblies to lather jackets, from speedo cables to glassfibre racing seats, and from complete engines to camping stoves. When I was first in the market for bike bits, in the Sixties, their leather jackets started at six pounds and ten shillings, handlebars started at seven shillings and six pence, full fairings were twelve pounds, nine shillings and six pence, and complete engines ranged from three pounds and ten shillings up to twenty five quid. If it had anything at all to do with a motorcycle, Pride & Clarke sold it.

 

And they sold bikes too, of course. In the late Fifties they boasted that they had two thousand bikes in stock. They often ran special offers on machines which they had been able to buy up in large numbers. In the Thirties they offered the ‘Red’ Panthers, with the 250 costing just twenty eight pounds, seventeen shillings and sixpence. They put their own badges on bikes – such as the 122cc, Villiers-engined Cub – which were built especially for them. They imported and offered continental-made bikes which you otherwise didn’t see in the UK. After 1945 they offered a huge range of ex-military bikes and spares.

 

Their premises were famous for being painted bright red, and on any  Saturday through the Fifties and Sixties there would be hundreds of customers in and out of the building during the day. Your entire week’s wages could go on clothing, spares and accessories – and if your pay packet wouldn’t cover it, well, Pride & Clarke had their own hire purchase available.

 

Q is for … er, queue
As in queueing at the post office to renew your tax disc. Ten bob well spent.

 

R is for Reliant
Marriage – it has a lot going for it, needless to say; security, companionship and, if you’re lucky, great meals on the table every evening. Marriage has a number of down-sides though, and one was the domestic pressure which crowbarred young men away from their beloved motorcycles. You’d do your courting on the Bonneville and she’d love ever minute of it, but someone, once you were back from your honeymoon (at the TT?) there’d be a subtle change of emphasis and the bike would come under threat … and be in the local small ads within months.

 

What to do then? You only had a bike license and couldn’t afford to buy a Ford Prefect. The answer, sadly, was the three-wheeled hell which was a Reliant. For just £90 down and thirty six payments – which would total £450 1s 6d – you could be in the warm and dry, enjoying 65 mpg, a top speed equivalent to that of a milk float, and seating for four (so long as two were under three years old). There was also the chance of tipping the damn thing over if you cornered the way you used to on the Bonnie. No two ways about it; once you’d got your name in the log book of a Reliant your rocker days were over and you were middle-aged. Could slippers and a pipe be far away?

 

S is for Solvol Autosol
There are three half-used tubes of Solvol Autosol on the shelf in my garage, and I couldn’t start to guess how far back the oldest dates. I used one only this week – delighting in the gold, black and red livery – but, sadly, only to polish the toaster and kettle in the kitchen. Still, the smell alone took me back to the weekends when I’d spend hours burnishing my bikes’ chrome plate.

 

What was – and is – the good of chrome? It’s expensive, it degrades in the British climate, and it took so much work to keep it looking good. But of course it was essential if you wanted to stand out; to sparkle in the sunlight and shimmer under night-time neon. And was there was chrome that was Solvol, and several of your mum’s best dusters – now covered in smelly, black grunge.

 

T is for Twist Grip
The magic ingredient; the path to excitement and freedom. The twist grip was the one reliable antidote to teenage boredom. It was exactly what the wallpaper in your mum’s parlour and your dad’s job were not. Put your right hand on that lever and twist it – can you remember the first time you ever did that on a motorcycle? – and you went through the Looking Glass into a wonderful world.

 

U is for Universal fitting
‘You’ll be alright with that mate; it’s a universal fitting’. That’s what the bloke in the brown coat behind the spares counter always told you, and whether it was a silencer, a mudguard stay, or a luggage rack, he was lying. I’m surprised his pants weren’t ablaze as he spoke.

 

You’d get it home, full of hope, and an hour later you’d be almost in tears, hammered it, stretching it, forcing a screwdriver down the side to open the flanges up – whatever. Eventually, after you’d uttered several words which your mum didn’t know you knew and had skinned your knuckles – and had made up your own brackets and used three different sixes of USF bolts – you got it to fit. Sort of. And by then your mates had set off.

 

V is for Vincent, Gene
Perhaps the greatest rocker icon of all. Closely followed, in my book, by the young John Lennon.

 

W is for WD-40
Yes, the great ‘get out of jail free’ card. Has any garage, shed or workshop even been without it? And what did our grandfathers do before it was invented?
It was created in 153 by Californian Norm Larsen, and the name comes from the fact that he was trying to create a Water Displacement oil, and he came up with this one at his fortieth attempt (true, honestly). It was first used by the Convair company to protect the outer coat of the Atlas rockets. It was also useful if you owned a Norton Atlas … or a C15, or an Ariel Arrow or a Tiger Cub. Everyone has their own favourite use for WD-40; I use it to clear ants’ nests in walls (again, true).

 

X is for X-Ray
Apart from having my little tootsies X-rayed  on the Start-Rite machine in the shoe shop on George Street, I didn’t gain the attention of a radiographer until the summer of 1968. I served time in Altrincham General Hospital after coming off my bike in Ash Grove, Timperley, and meeting a lady’s ornamental garden wall at rather too high a speed. The man with the stethoscope told me that I had chipped a piece off my knee cap, and he scrapped out a large amount of gravel from the wound, before bandaging it all up and sending me on my (painful) way.

 

I was lucky. A couple of months later my mate Steve Green hit a car and shattered his pelvis and both legs. He was laid up for the best part of a year. Motorcyclists have always been grateful for advances in medical science, and with good reason. And along with antibiotics, the X-ray machine must have been one of the most useful – and has figured in the lives of many of us as doctors have pondered exactly which bones we’ve shattered this time.

 

The first X-ray machine was demonstrated by one H L Smith as long ago as 1896, and only six months later similar machines were being used to find bullets in the bodies of wounded soldiers. Since that time, 27,422,340 motorcyclists have been X-rated following road accidents.*

 

Y is for ‘Your Not Going Anywhere On That, Sonny Jim’
In 1960 the Ministry of Transport brought in the MoT test for vehicles more than ten years old. In itself it was a good idea, and took a lot of dangerous clunkers off the roads of Britain. In practise it gave huge power to MoT testers to exercise their dictatorial powers over innocent young motorcyclists. My nemesis was a guy at a bike shop called Moreton’s in Broadheath. If he didn’t like you – or your bike – he could exclude you from the road. And he didn’t like anything that was non-standard. You could argue until you were blue in the face that your after-market parts were safe but if he disagreed then that was that. So, you had to keep all your original bits and spend a day before you went for the test bolting them on to the bike, go along and get your certificate, then spend the following day putting it back the way you wanted it. Just one of the crosses you had to bear.

 

Z is for Z-Cars
Something unfortunate happened in 1962; police forces across the land began to buy the newly-launched Ford Zephyr 6 MkIII, and life for rockers started to get a bit uncomfortable. Out-running a Ford Anglia was easy-peasy, and once you were away, that was it – no in-car video, no Gatsos, nothing to prove you had ever been there. The Zephyrs were more of a challenge.

 

Designed by Roy Brown – a Canadian, not a rude comedian – who also designed the ill-fated Ford Edsel, the MkIII Zephyr/Zodiac range was more Detroit than Dagenham, with big chrome grilles and tail fins. Some forces bought the puny 1.7-litre Zephyr 4, but with the 2,553cc engine under its bonnet, a Zephyr 6 was a serious fast pursuit machine.
The critical factor was that full-width grille. If had a vertical central division then that meant the car with the flashing blue light was a six, and a speeding ticket and a ten shilling fine wasn’t far behind you.

 

The Zephyrs could be seen on TV from ’62 too. The series Z-Cars, with its jaunty theme music and night-time shots of a Zephyr on patrol in the opening titles, was a big change from previous cop shows. Shot largely on film and on location (whereas the likes of Dixon of Dock Green was studio-based), it was raw and – for its day – surprisingly gritty. It wasn’t exactly The Sweeney (that was more than ten years away) but it was far truer to life than dear old George Dixon. Interesting fact; the title of the programme didn’t come from the fact that they used Zephyrs (not the more luxurious Zodiacs) but from the fact that all police forces had single letter codes, running south from A in Cumberland. Z was an unallocated letter.

 

* Totally false statistic. I made it up.