Tuesday, 1 October 2013

An Italian Presence




Bennelli’s Come to Town

As much as I like to get out to events and spread the word of the London Motorcycle Museum, you cannot get to them all. Last Sunday was no exception with missing out on an interesting day. It was titled  “Sand and Motorcycles” It is an annual event at the Leighton Buzzard Railway celebrating the history of the sand that was excavated for making the castings for shells in World War One and after the war the company built a narrow gauge railway to the main line. Moving on to World War Two and the pits had expanded to a vast area so some motorcycles were purchased to transport the fitters around the site doing running repairs to equipment. These bikes did sterling service in the most inhospitable conditions as sand and oil grind all the moving parts to paste very quickly. The riders must have been pretty good at off road too! I have now put this event in my diary and will try to be there to represent the Museum next year. So I’ve been busy this past week with Sunday hosting a Scalextric 2CV Grand Prix in the back garden and having to repair all the cars used to some degree over the next few days. Only just getting out to the LE club night on Tuesday to return all the Ally Pally show gear for storage with Chris. It is now Sunday and I need to touch base with the Museum and find out what has happened in the last week. There are two new arrivals to see a 1968 BSA Spitfire racer built and raced by Steve Brown who worked in the race department at BSA and a well used little C10 of 1953 vintage. So while I was there half a dozen bikes with very sporty exhausts made their presence felt and heard. Six Bennelli’s had arrived! What an array of machinery! 






One of the guys had been at the Salon Privee a few weeks ago and promised to come. They had arrived in style. The Bennelli Owners club! Most people remember the across the frame Sei or six in English and that was before the Honda Six!  We had a discussion about the effectiveness of the rear brake on one of the Bennelli’s. I muted the point that it was not necessary to work that well as the front one could stand it on end anyway. There were some nice comments about the Valiant then they disappeared into the Museum and I took a few photos of the bikes. 



They were looking at somewhere else to go today so I mention the Sand and Motorcycle event at Leighton Buzzard and it turned out that one of the guys lived quite close to it. The bit of news was that after talking to Bill about the Speedway Museum at the Paradise Wildlife Park at Broxbourne he told me about the introduction of Speedway into the UK from Australia with the first event being at Canada Heights then, of all places Greenford! In 1928 the track was built and is now no longer there. It has become a housing estate just off the A40 at the north end of Oldfield Lane South or the south end of Oldfield Lane North. Something to follow up when the weather is less hospitable.

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