Honda Owners: Sixty years and counting

One of my proudest achievements in life was accomplished at a very early age, well before I had started a proper career. It all began with a love of motorbikes, and an infatuation with one particular bike from an unknown company by the name of Honda.

Back in 1960, fresh out of school, I was working as a bank clerk in the northern English town of Wigan, midway between Liverpool and Manchester. I’d been infected with the motorcycle bug for some years and would rush out every Thursday to collect my copies of Motor Cycle and Motor Cycling. It was my dream to work somewhere in the motorcycle world, although my current mount, a 500 cc AJS single-cylinder competition bike from way back in 1949 didn’t quite cut the mustard. I aspired to something newer and shinier in order to turn my dream into reality. But I couldn’t afford a modern version of my old banger.

All this changed one day when I walked past Foster’s Motor Cycles in Scholes, a busy street just outside the centre of town. In the window sat a gleaming 125 cc Honda Benly Super Sports looking for an owner. It wagged its tail and I was enraptured. I had to have it. This, I thought, would set me up as a serious motorcyclist. What I didn’t know was just where the little Honda would lead me.

Strange names

This was a futuristic mount, the like of which I had never before seen. Yet, at the time, I had only the vaguest notion of the Honda marque. Everyone I knew had BSAs, Triumphs and Nortons, even a Francis-Barnett. Imported lightweights with strange names were very much beyond the pale, however pretty they might have looked. But this Honda was something else.

The Benly, known by its CB92 model designation, was irresistible, and it wasn’t long before I was persuading my long-suffering parents to guarantee a substantial hire-purchase contract. The Honda cost £213, a huge chunk of dosh for a teenager earning a meagre 70 shillings a week—or £3.50 in new money. I could have bought a nearly new car for that sort of cash. But I didn’t want a car; I wanted a Honda Benly Super Sports.

It was that little Honda that started my career in more ways than one.

I was out in all weathers on the little CB92, despite its rather excruciatingly narrow seat. Cut a dash it certainly did, but it was pretty uncomfortable to ride. But I just couldn’t get enough of it. Unfortunately, I soon noticed that Japanese motorcycles weren’t the flavour of the month, even in Wigan.

Honda was one of the first really visible consumer durables to reach Europe, and its Japanese origin awakened barely suppressed antagonism among the populace. Only fifteen years after the end of the war, it was a time when men would shake their fists as I rode my inoffensive little machine around town. Almost all men over 30 had fought in the war, many of them in the Far East. My Honda was not wanted here, I soon found out.

Within the motorcycle industry and a very compliant press, however, the problem went much deeper. It was nothing to do with the war. It was the fear of competition and a decision to ignore new ideas. The motorcycle press was full of negative comments about Hondas, and some of the biggest complainers were the British manufacturers.

Yet the makers in Birmingham, Coventry and London didn’t regard Honda as real competition; they saw the marque as a joke, an irritation that would disappear within a couple of years. Only after subsequent racing success did the press take Honda seriously. Honda, followed a few years later by Yamaha and Suzuki, and finally by Kawasaki, almost killed the British manufacturers. They didn’t see it coming, they ignored the threat when it came, and they were too late to react.

Let’s start a club

All this irritated me no end. I believed in the little Honda and I knew it would succeed. I was in love. So I started a campaign of writing to the motorcycle press, offering an alternative view to the negative comment that was so prevalent. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was called public relations.

I even decided to form a club. That’s what Englishmen do when they wish to make a point. Strand two of us on a desert island, as the saying goes, and we will immediately form a club. Within a year we’ll be organising a concours d’elegance.

A notice, penned by me, was published in the national Motor Cycle magazine. Much to my surprise, some twenty Honda owners from all over the North turned up to the inaugural meeting in the dingy upstairs room of the Market Tavern in Mesnes Street, Wigan. Immediately we formed ourselves into the Honda Owners’ Club of Great Britain, without questioning whether anyone else might have had the same idea in another area. I was ever a globalist.

There were indeed other groups—including a thriving club run by Pete Goodger in Reigate— as we soon found. Sadly, Pete died in 2019 and missed the 60th bash. Within little more than six months, however, we all got together and the Honda club became a national institution.

Within weeks I was up and down the length and breadth of the country almost every weekend, drumming up support and helping organise events, including club stands at race meetings and at national motorcycle rallies. We cultivated John Hartle, a leading Honda racer based nearby in Chester, and he became our first president. It all helped spread the message and bring in new members.

For my sins, I am now card-carrying Member Number One; the club has lasted 60 years and is celebrating its golden anniversary this year. Last weekend I joined members at Sammy Miller’s motorcycle museum in New Milton, to celebrate the club’s achievement. I was made extremely welcome by the current president, Jude Browne, and her army of organisers. It was a time for reflection, to reminisce and, for me, the opportunity to present concours prizes and do what founder members do.

Although the club is now in its old age, it has survived very well without any direct input from Evans. Soon after the foundation of the club, I had to be seen as independent and couldn’t be too closely associated with one company or its “one-make” club.

It was all the more impressive, then, that I was welcomed back so warmly last weekend. The intervening years slipped away and I was again upstairs in that shabby Wigan pub meeting room, sitting in front of my new flock. I was the youngest one there on that wet evening in 1961; now I’m one of the oldest.

This meeting marked a turning point in my life. Without a doubt, my whole career would have taken a different turn had I bought a BSA instead of a Honda.

I put all my enthusiasm into the Honda Club and this led directly to a change in career. Bye-bye banking, hello journalism. As a result of my efforts on behalf of Honda owners, I was offered a job by the same magazine, Motor Cycle, that had published the original call to arms.

All my worldly possessions, such as they were, were soon strapped to the pillion seat of the little Honda Benly Super Sports and we headed to London to seek our fortunes. It was a brilliant move. I can say that my years working for that magazine were some of the happiest of my life.

I worked alongside wonderful colleagues, people I had idolised as a keen reader, who became life-long friends. They included leading photographer Don Morley who is now a regular reader of Macfilos and a font of knowledge on all things Leica. I had the run of all the latest models, I wrote features and did road-tests. I could tell the editor that on the following day I would be “out road testing”. This was a well-recognised euphemism for skiving around the countryside, navigating from greasy spoon to greasy spoon, to use up the generous 24 pence daily subsistence allowance. There wasn’t much not to like about this sort of freedom, and I thrived.

Most of my road-test bikes were Japanese or from minor European factories, though. I don’t think they cared to let the office junior, the Honda-favouring enfant terrible, loose on the creaking, leaking, smelly old British bikes of the era. They feared I might tell the truth and upset the advertisers. I thus tended to be persona non-grata at the BSA or AJS factories, and I had to work hard to gain acceptance.

A change in career

Thus started my career in journalism and public relations. Later, through the company I founded, we handled publicity for other bike manufacturers, including Suzuki and Kawasaki, and eventually for the industry as a whole. Motorcycles have thus been a major part of my life, alongside photography and motoring. Leica remains a Johnny-come-lately marque compared with the original Honda…

Last weekend’s 60th-anniversary party was a time for reflection, much concentration on the success of the Honda Owners’ Club and my modest contribution to its birth. But more so, on what might not have been. If that first meeting in Wigan had not taken place, it is almost certain I would never have entered the world of journalism. I might never have moved to London. I probably wouldn’t have started Macfilos. So the meeting at the Market Tavern has a lot to answer for.

As I left the local branch of the then National Provincial Bank for the last time, the manager and my erstwhile colleagues told me what a fool I was to give up such a promising career on a whim. “Why”, they said, “you could be a bank manager one day”. Good that I didn’t listen.

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If you are in the area, why not visit Sammy Miller’s wonderful bike museum?

If you happen to live in the UK and own a Honda motorcycle, why not join the Honda Owners’ Club. Tell ‘em Mike sent you…

And if you are keen on fine engineering, let Allen Millyard explain how he built this Mike Hailwood Honda Six replica from scratch…

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