The other day a speedway friend of mine posted up this picture. He is helping a friend tidy up and catalog the belongings of his friend’s late father and this motorcycle was buried in the back of the garage. I had no idea what it was but guessed, incorrectly as it turned out, that it was a BSA Bantam. This cheap and cheerful little two stroke motorcycle was hugely popular in the 1950’s being the staple of impoverished university students as well as other low-income earners as it provided basic transportation, could be maintained by anyone with even the most basic mechanical knowledge and ran on the smell of an oily rag. It also would happily run on the very poor quality pump fuel that was available in Britain for many years after WWII. Below is a picture f a pristine Bantam so you can see why I made the call that the mystery bike was a BSA.
My first memory of the Bantam was long before I was actually interested in motorcycles myself. A young man who was a friend of my mum and dad had one in Adelaide where we lived in around 1956. I remember it very clearly as Dave was forever tinkering with it whenever he came to visit. I found out many years later that this was the standard situation for people who owned these bikes. Due to the fact that fuel had to be premixed (a proportion of standard petrol and two stroke oil), mixing in the correct proportions could be a bit hit-and-miss and fuel standards varied widely. Because of this, the engine was notorious for “whiskering” the single spark plug. Now this strange phenomenon is usually as a result of either weak spark (Joseph Lucas invented darkness) or poor fuel/oil mixture. What actually happens is that the unburnt two stroke oil forms a carbon build-up that, in the case of the Bantam, very quickly builds up and bridges the gap between the two electrodes on the spark plug and stops it from working. In the Bantam, whiskering could take place in as short a distance as 20 miles since the last fill-up so riders would be used to carrying a plug spanner and a set of feeler gauges with them so that they could remove the plug, clean it and put it back in again while on the side of the road.
However, once I had submitted the question of the bike’s identity to the Facebook brains trust, the picture very quickly became muddied. Some agreed that it was a BSA but the lack of a tank badge was causing a few difficulties. Then the old bike geeks pointed out that this particular bike had the gear lever on the incorrect side of the bike for it to be a BSA and so we wandered off into the realm of European bikes instead.
Three points here. It has only been since the arrival of the Japanese bikes on the scene in the early 60’s that the now-accepted standardised layout of gear and brake levers has been common. Up until then it was not standardised at all with the levers being transposed almost at will. British bikes, almost right to the end of the British bike industry, had the gear lever on the RIGHT and the brake pedal on the LEFT. The last iterations of British bikes often transposed the pedals by means of linkages passing through the gearbox casing of the bike. Secondly, finding and identifying the bike was much harder than it first seemed because it wasn’t just the British bike builders who produced huge quantities of little two-stroke single cylinder bikes in the aftermath of WWII. Many European manufacturers also built and sold these cheap and cheerful bikes for the same reason as BSA had done with the Bantam. Thirdly, though I am sure that many of you will know, BSA were the initials of a small arms manufacturer who had produced thousands of rifle and other guns during WWII. BSA stood for Birmingham Small Arms.
So, having discarded the Bantam, the next suggestion was that it was a James, another British manufacturer who built the chassis and running great of their bikes and installed proprietary engines to complete the package. Amongs the manufacturers who provided powerplants were JAP and Villiers. The engine in the mystery bike certainly looks like a Villiers powerplant. JAP engines were usually larger and their engines were pressed into many other types of service, their big V Twin motor being the unit that powered the famous Morgan three-wheeled cyclecar. The Villiers engines were usually smaller and I remember during my childhood that most lawnmowers were powered by Villiers engines. VICTA put a a stop to all of that nonsense.
Pictures of the James also disqualified it. From there my experts moved to the Continent, suggesting NSU and several other European manufacturers of the day. Unsurprisingly all of these suggestions were valid as the same basic template of a small bike with a little single cylinder two stroke engine was being followed everywhere at the time. Someone suggested that it could be an Eastern Bloc product as the Russians and the Soviet satellite states all copied the more up-to-date European designs during this era.
And it was finally in Russia that one of my astute students of the game landed the correct identification. The bike, it seems, is a Minsk M104, produced in the USSR well into the 1960’s this example seeming to be a mid-1960’s model. In the mean time, my speedway friend had sent me some more photographs that confirmed the identification that had now been made. I must confess that I had never heard of the brand though I am, of course, familiar with the city after which it was named “Minsk, which is just a rouble’s throw from Pinsk.”
Here is a better example.
It is going to be interesting to try and follow the trail of how the bike made its way to Australia as I don’t believe the brand was ever imported in numbers. Chances are it was a private import and, if this is the case, then it is likely that this example is one of the very few in the country. My friend now has the bike and has no plans to sell it but was very grateful that my ever-reliable panel of experts were able to identify it for him. I’m not sure what is going to happen from here but I do love a detective story, don’t you?