N
NortonGuy
Guest
Frog said:
The 59 Club is not really historically important at all, in fact it is has had a negative influence on the real history of sporting motorcyclists in the U.K. by overshadowing what happened previous to it and what was going on in the background while it was parading in the press.
As stated in the article by Reverend Shergold the "59" club was not really formed until 1962, at which point there had already been Cafe Racers running around for THREE decades. The 59 Club and Reverend Shergold were actually what took the image and lore of the Cafe Racer and used it to make a publicity splash for themselves.
So the Johnny-come-lately 59 Club and Shergold actually was signaling the end of an era, the transforming of a genuine group of fringe outcasts into a popular social and fashion trend. 1962 was also when the British motorcycle industry died. The evil conglomerate and empire AMC shut down the old Norton works on Bracebridge Street and laid off all the employees. They kept the name and some of the tooling and used them to make motorcycles at their main factory in another city, but themselves went bankrupt in a few more years. In the meantime AMC axed the production of the famous Norton and Matchless racing bikes, BSA axed the production of the Goldstar, a motorcycle that was an icon amongst Cafe Racers of the classic era, and also BSA and Triumph both axed their pre-unit construction motorcycles for newer designs. Honda was poised to put the final nail in the coffin of the British industry by 1962 with wildly increasing sales of it's "consumer goods".
The Cafe Boutique businesses that still exists today did not arrive until very late in the game, until the mid-1960s, and they further contributed to the decline of the integrity of the Cafe Scene. Dunstall, Tickle, Ian Kennedy etc. turned the Cafe Bike into a ready-made, bolt-on image, where before the bikes were either genuine production racers or built up with a combination of genuine cast-off racing bikes and/or racing bits added to bikes that creative individuals could come up with on their own.
Before 1962 British motorcycles were labor-intensive works of art built up in small numbers by craftsmen. The Vincents, Goldstars, Norton featherbeds, Triumph pre-unit, Velocettes etc. were special rolling works of art. The riders of these limited-production machines were also rare individuals dedicated to their machines and riding first, style and fashion being a footnote function dictated form, not the other way around.
All this changed in 1962 with the emergence of the 59 Club, signaling the sanitizing of the Cafe Racer into a socially acceptable marketing commodity and fashion movement, and the death of the British motorcycle industry of old and it's replacement with Market and Corporate-controlled manufacture of consumer goods with profit alone the main soul-less target.
