Scootermania by Josh Sims

Author:Josh Sims
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844862788
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

Thousands of enthusiasts gathered at the St Albans National Scooter rally in 1959.

CHAPTER 3.

LET’S GO CLUBBING

Let’s go racing

All together

NOW

All hobbyists tend to coalesce in clubs eventually; it is a way of sharing one’s perhaps particular passion with people who understand it, rather than find it strange or trivial. And the scooter was no exception. Such was the ease with which the scooter became an integrated part of so many owners’ lives (the very appropriate use of the word ‘owner’, as opposed to ‘rider’, which seems reserved for motorcyclists, speaking volumes) that they quickly became objects around which groups of the like-minded wanted to meet. Early scooterists had even got into the habit of saluting to each other when passing, acknowledging the particularity of their preferred mode of transport.

The sheer rapidity with which the club scene had taken off was a phenomenon in its own right. Take, for example, the Vespa Club of Great Britain, one of the first and what would become one of the biggest of European scooter clubs. It grew out of the more local North-West London Vespa Club, the first in the UK, formed in 1952 by a railway engineer who had recently bought one of the Douglas-made Vespas. Within seven years the UK alone played host to some 120 scooter clubs nationally. The following year the London branch held an event at the city’s Harringay Stadium with sufficient interest that the Vespa Club of Great Britain’s initials – or at least three of them, ‘VCB’ – could be spelled out in the massed ranks of several hundred scooters parked on the pitch.

By then, every western European country – Norway excluded, the weather seemingly to have precluded interest in scooters there – had a national Vespa club, overseen by the Vespa Club of Europe. Such clubs would provide a means of keeping on the road, through the sourcing of replacement parts, for example, long after even major manufacturers such as Lambretta had ceased to operate.

Much as the scooter might be considered the motorbike’s quirky cousin, so, too, were the club activities associated with it. Posing outside the famed Ace Café, near London’s A1 road, with one’s Triumph or BSA was perfect for the leather-clad machismo of the motorbike’s clan. But for scooterists, at least initially, something much more genteel was called for. What in retrospect might seem like quaint gymkhana-style events (derived from competition between mounted British soldiers serving in Raj India) were typical at rallies: one could expect to see the skills required of scooterists to tackle the fearsome water splash, or the challenging see-saw obstacle, much as, in years to come, rallies in the US would run a slow race, the winner being the last scooter to cross the finishing line.

How about formation riding? About 15 scooterists, dressed in white overalls and helmets, hanging on to two Vespas in various poses – for which a British team took home the trophy from a European-wide gathering of Vespa fans in 1957. Or, the following year, the

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