A short stint in the bike trade 1946-47

While motorcycles have been a large part of my life, I only actually worked in the business for a short time, and this came about after my discharge from the RAAF in March 1946. Naturally upon discharge I spent a few weeks casting about for a career in the workplace, not all that easy after five years away, a marriage and two small children. A lot of this time was spent in negotiations for the building of a new home and I was also rebuilding a motorcycle to use to get about. I had no car, and was looking to build up a motorcycle combination to cater for family needs, and as part of this found myself spending some time with long time mate Les Diener and his partner and their new motorcycle repair shop venture. It was right on Easter and I became caught up in the activities that led to us all going over to Ballarat for the first post war motorcycle TT meeting, unfortunately, Les's partner, Frank Tuck, was killed in a relatively minor car accident on the way over. We all returned to South Australia to a much changed scene, almost immediately resulting in me taking a position to help the fledgling business, which without Frank's skilled input, was in danger of collapsing.

So it was that I settled down to repairing and rebuilding motorcycles that had suffered the rigours of five years of wartime, running on all sorts of crude fuel mixtures, lack of mechanical maintenance, and in some cases just pure neglect. Some bikes were just a pile of dismantled parts, but somehow we managed to get them running properly, and in some cases they were completely repainted and sold almost the moment that they went on display in the window. It has to be realised that at this point in time there were few new bikes arriving in Australia, and even when there were some arrivals, they were sold immediately.

This was the period when Les's racing career was beginning to take off, and his Velocette MOV was being developed, first as a scramble machine, the sport in which most of us participated. In a lot of cases we used our ride to work mounts on the weekends. If no scrambles were scheduled, there were always trials and club events, and increasingly road races, which in those days were run on closed public roads, after the clubs involved managed to get the necessary permits, which in those days didn't appear to be all that difficult to come by. One of the reasons almost certainly being that in South Australia at least motorcycles were a fact of everyday life, and almost every family would have a motorcycle in everyday use, very few working people owning cars in those days. Later Les turned to road racing and the MOV by now showing plenty of promise, meant trips to interstate meetings at the New Year and Easter, when major events were staged in those days.

My new home was being built at Warradale, and there never seemed to be a spare moment. Before I realised it, almost a year had passed, and Les had decided to marry. Shortly afterwards the business was wound up and I moved into a position in the local quarrying industry that had been on offer for some time. So my time spent in the motorcycle trade came to an end, but I retained a small link, as I bought the business work-outfit as part of a final settlement, and this rather rough hybrid Ariel/ Norton machine was rebuilt into my family transport at a later date. This too was again dismantled and became the basis of my first car, the 16H Norton powered 'Holdon' 3 wheeler!