During the 1950s and 1960s, the Triumph motorcycle company liked to boast that it built “the best motorcycle in the world.”  Many agreed.  The Triumph company was the most profitable of any in the British motorcycle industry, with sales particularly strong in the lucrative North American export market.

 

Much of the credit for that success can be attributed to Edward Turner, the company’s Managing Director between 1936 and 1956, who thereafter was elevated to the board of directors of BSA, the huge Birmingham-based engineering conglomerate that had owned Triumph since 1951. 

 

Turner, who had a notoriously mercurial, even irascible, temperament, nonetheless possessed a keen sense of what his company’s customers wanted.  As he once famously put it, the motorcycle market was determined by the tastes of “fashionable young men.”  Turner, better than anyone else, knew how to cater to those tastes. 

 

Starting with the ground-breaking 1937 500cc Triumph “Speed Twin,” one of the most influential motorcycle designs of all time, through to the dazzling 1959 650cc “Bonneville,” Turner presided over a string of commercial hits for his company.

 

To most of the motorcycling public, the dashing and sometimes charismatic Turner was one of the few recognisable personalities amongst the largely faceless, publicity-shy leaders of that industry.  Indeed, at least in the English-speaking world, he is one of the very few managers of any motorcycle company to rate a full-length biography.[1]

 

Consequently, one might wonder how Winter’s book adds to our knowledge of Turner and, by extension, the British motorcycle industry.

 

In fact, Mr. Winter, a lawyer by profession and a long-time motorcycle enthusiast, has written an interesting book, in equal parts a travelogue, biography, and company history, but also one based on an original premise.

 

In October 1953, Turner, together with Alex St. John Masters and Robert  Fearon, two other senior Triumph company managers, staged a publicity stunt, the so-called “Gaffer’s Gallop.”[2]

 

Using 150cc “Terrier” machines, which were set to debut at the Earl’s Court Motorcycle Show in London later that month, the three riders rode a total of 1,008 miles from Land’s End in Cornwall, the most southern point in Britain, up to John O’Groats in Scotland, the nation’s northern extremity. 

 

In doing so, they demonstrated that, while small, the Terrier was reliable, reasonably fast, and capable of travelling long distances.  These were all important virtues at a time when large numbers of Italian scooters and German mopeds were pouring into Britain.

 

Stunt or not, the ride gained much valuable publicity for Triumph and the Terrier went on to become one of the more successful of the smaller economy motorcycles produced by the British industry.

 

In June 2007, Winter followed in the path of the three gaffers to see how things had changed in Britain over the 54 years since Turner’s journey.  However, by contrast, he rode a 1995 900cc Triumph “Thunderbird” and, constrained by a slim bank account, spent his nights in campgrounds along the way, instead of the often palatial hotels and inns favoured by Turner and his colleagues during their 1953 “Gallop.”

 

All this gives Winter an opportunity to use his book to comment on wider themes surrounding British social history, but also more particularly on the contrast between the comparatively uncrowded roads of 1953 and the congested world of the early twenty-first century.  The book’s focus shifts backwards and forwards, between the 1953 “Gallop” and Winter’s later journey.

 

By and large, Winter’s approach works.  He writes in an engaging manner, has an eye for detail and a sense of humour.  However, he does run into trouble with some of his reflections on the downfall of the industry during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

 

Turner was gone from the scene by then, having stepped down from the BSA board in 1964.  Without him, Winter speculates, the industry really began to falter.

 

Winter points his finger at a wide variety of culprits.  They include number-crunching, flow-chart obsessed managers, corporate asset-strippers, and truculent “bully boy” trade unions.

 

Winter seems especially critical of the new professional managers who succeeded Turner. They contemptuously dismissed the ideas of the largely self-taught engineers (like many of his contemporaries, Turner had virtually no post-secondary education) who were largely responsible for the industry’s success in favour of pursuing designs of their own that motorcycle consumers didn’t want.

 

This is already a well-known point of view, one best expressed by Bert Hopwood, one of Turner’s colleagues, in his memoirs published back in the early 1980s.[3]

 

The problem is that, in his defense of indigenous talent found in factories like the Triumph plant near Coventry, Winter fails to offer an alternative—what strategy should have been followed to stop the successive waves of Japanese imports which devastated British market share, first in North America and then later in Britain and Europe? 

 

More particularly, he praises Turner for a warning he gave to his fellow BSA directors about dangers of potential future foreign competition following a visit to Japan in 1959.  However, the fact is that Turner, who was then probably the single most influential figure in the British motorcycle industry, subsequently did nothing to follow up on his own warning.  Indeed, instead he went into semi-retirement, likely caused by growing ill health, and failed to propose strategies for countering their burgeoning Japanese rivals before he died in 1973.

 

Finally, although Winter’s book includes a bibliography, the endnotes are frustratingly incomplete.  One, for example, merely reads “National Geographic magazine,” a reference of little help to his readers.  Even worse, for a book so full of information about Turner and the glory days of the British motorcycle industry, there is no index.

 

Notes