A man and his passion

“A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocations, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness. Because Boa loves me, he gives me five more miles of speed than a stranger would get from him.”
Excerpt from “The Road,” by T.E. Lawrence

T.E. Lawrence is one of those larger-than-life characters that have always fascinated me. He became famous after the First World War because of the remarkable role he had played while serving as a British liaison officer during the Arab Revolt of 1916-18 against the Ottoman Empire. When the war ended, an American journalist, Lowell Thomas, toured Britain and the Empire giving an outstandingly successful slide-show about Lawrence’s achievements. The romantic story of Lawrence's campaigns in Arabia and Allenby's in the Holy Land appealed strongly to a British public sated with horrific accounts of trench warfare on the Western Front. From this beginning grew the legend of 'Lawrence of Arabia'.
No country was more in need of a hero at that time. However, Lawrence shunned the limelight and joined the RAF, taking a number of assumed names to keep a low profile. His one passion were his motorcycles, all Brough Superiors, which befitting its mantle of ‘the Rolls-Royce of motorcycles’ cost about as much as a small house at the time. The 1937 SS 100 model had a sticker price of £155.


Lawrence gave all his Brough Superiors the name of Boa--short for Boanerges, the sons of thunder. They were all numbered, from George I through George VII. George VIII was awaiting delivery, having already had the stainless steel petrol tank and other special parts from its predecessor fitted, when Lawrence was severely injured in a tragic motorcycle crash, on May 13th 1935, near Clouds Hill, Dorset. I presume one of the Georges was wrecked in the crash, which apparently happened when he lost control of the machine whilst trying to avoid two errand boys mounted on bicycles. He died five days later, never having regained consciousness.
For many people, T.E. Lawrence and the character portrayal of him by Peter O’Toole in the 1962 David Lean motion picture ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ are one and the same. I myself was rather late in seeing this film, I was only eight years old in 1962 and I seem to remember it had been given an ‘A’ rating by Lord Harlech and the British Board of Film Censors. This meant that one had to be 14 years old to see it and then only in the company of an adult of 18 years or more. I missed out and it would not be until many years later that I first saw it. This was in 1991, not long after we’d purchased our first VCR, on an NHK BS2 satellite broadcast. After the initial sequence portraying the fatal crash and a brief interlude at a memorial service to the great man at St Paul’s Cathedral the film must have one of the most spectacular sequences in cinematic history. Dawn breaking over the desert followed by a panoramic view with towering ziggurats, two stick-like travellers and shimmering heat haze is absolutely unforgettable, as is the haunting score composed by Maurice Jarre. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a bold, mad act of genius to make ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, or even think that it could be made. Omar Sharif, who played Sherif Ali in the film, said 27 years later: “If you are the man with the money and somebody comes to you and says he wants to make a film that's four hours long, with no stars, and no women, and no love story, and not much action either, and he wants to spend a huge amount of money to go film it in the desert, what would you say?” Nevertheless, it is superb cinema, and it was no wonder that it took seven Academy Awards the following year. I now have the complete restored 228-minute Director’s Cut on VHS videotape (though I rarely have time for such a viewing marathon) and it will be one of my first DVD purchases, when I finally acquire the necessary hardware. I did hear that T.E. Lawrence’s family were not very happy on viewing the movie for the first time saying that he was not at all like the character portrayed by O’Toole. The film is not totally accurate, the viewer is led to believe that Lowell Thomas was really called Jackson Bentley who told Lawrence’s tale through syndicated journalism while the war was still in progress. If one is really interested in him, his book ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ telling the tale of the desert campaign with the Arabs against the Ottoman Empire, is a must-read. However, it is not of the great T.E. Lawrence that this post is all about, but of his all-consuming peacetime passion, the one which eventually brought about his untimely end--motorcycles. Another quotation from the great man, before we continue:
"When my mood gets too hot and I find myself wandering beyond control I pull out my motor-bike and hurl it top-speed through these unfit roads for hour after hour. My nerves are jaded and gone near dead, so that nothing less than hours of voluntary danger will prick them into life..."
T.E. Lawrence, April, 1923

Yes indeed, that is what a skittish motor-bike will do for you and no mistake, prick your nerves into life. Especially in the best season of the year, the autumn of Western Japan. There is something intensely relaxing about concentrating one-hundred per cent on controlling your automotive mount. You will think nothing of haring over the same stretch of road again and again in successive weeks just to see if you can’t lean her a little further, exit each corner a little faster and always be in control. Balls-out speed is not the ultimate objective, you can get that on any common or garden motorway. A winding road with a good surface is preferable to ‘unfit roads’ and one without too much negative camber is also a plus. Manhole covers with their slick iron surfaces can present a major problem if there’s a bit of moisture about, most especially when they’re sited in the apex of a bend. I sometimes get the feeling that highway engineers are sadistic bastards when they site the things the way they do, especially if they aren’t quite flush with the road surface. Riding the same roads repeatedly gives you fore-warning of such hazards and an unfamiliar road is always approached with caution. Common sense tells you that.
It is also the fact that you are really part of the action on a motorcycle and not insulated from it, as you are in an automobile, that gives the things such appeal. The first book that I bought after graduating from the University College of Wales was Robert M. Pirsig’s little classic ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’. Though the reader soon finds out that the book actually has precious little to do with motorcycle maintenance or Zen for that matter, Pirsig did know what they were all about, as this quotation shows:

“… Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned brown and cattails were waving in the northwest wind. The pungent smell then was from muck stirred up by hip boots while we were getting in position for the sun to come up and the duck season to open. Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold. The blackbirds were gone then. But now in July they're back and everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.”

Right on the money...

My own machine is only the third one I have owned so I hardly count as a grizzled veteran. I first fell in love with them just over twenty-three years ago when I was just starting on my first teaching job in the city of Matsuyama at the Western end of Shikoku. I needed some form of cheap transport that didn’t require a parking permit and a second-hand Yamaha XJ 400 was just the ticket.
Not only did it get me about from workplace to workplace in places where no train went to, it also took me and my new wife on honeymoon in Eastern Kyushu. Kitted out with panniers, top-box and tank-bag it carried us and all the tackle two people in love could ever need. Unfortunately, the relationship (with the bike, not the missus) lasted only a single year. It was reluctantly sold and the proceeds added to a war-chest in preparation for a one-year MA course at the University of Durham. I had a different job by then, which could be accessed by bus, so its utility was not really a necessity any more. As the new owner took it away, I promised myself that one day, one day, I would get another one.
That day did not come till eighteen years later when in September 2000, I was able to purchase a handsome used model of a wine-red and chrome 400 cc Honda VRX Roadster. (The picture shows a blue one--use your imagination) Two years before, duff cartilage in my knees had obliged me to give up the other great passion in my life--kendo-- and there was a hole in my life that needed filling.

The Honda was a very pleasant motorcycle, its engine put out only about thirty-five horsepower which was adequate for someone getting back into the life and the V-twin configuration not only looked good, but sounded nice too. The best part about it was its disc brakes. These had been the worst feature of the Yamaha, especially in the wet. The Honda’s discs would pull you up smartly in any conditions short of snow and ice and generally inspired confidence. Its worst feature was a hint of fussiness in cornering, if you attempted to change lines to avoid something, it would shake its steering head with a hint of petulance as if to say “don’t go there boy...”. I put this down to the fact that the bike was a bit of a hybrid, with an engine designed for a chopper-type cruiser (the Steed) shoehorned into a sporty double-cradle frame. It had not been designed from the ground up. We had a time, a good time together for a couple of years, but it was only a station on the road.
The Honda had been purchased with one purpose in mind--to get me enough riding experience to have a crack at the Japanese oh-gata (large-size) motorcycle test. To ride anything over 400 cc it is mandatory to pass this test and to say it is difficult is a major understatement. I finally succeeded in satisfying the examiners at the Seishin Car School in Western Kobe in January 2001 after a half year of drilling and practice on their lumpy, grumpy, nasty old Honda CB 750s. I can safely say that it is the most difficult thing I have succeeded in doing in almost a quarter-century of expatriate living in this country.
With that out of the way, I could concentrate on the next hurdle, which was raising the necessary coin to trade in the Honda for my dream machine.

It is pretty obvious to anyone who knows motorcycles that the designer of the Kawasaki W650 had a mate with a 1968 Triumph Bonneville, but in fact the machine owes its heritage to the Birmingham Small Arms Company, usually known as BSA (or Bloody Sore Arse according to my father). At the end of the 1950s the Akashi-based Kawasaki Aircraft company acquired a controlling interest in a cash-strapped motorcycle maker known as Meguro who had been making a licensed copy of the 500 cc A7 BSA. The Meguro Senior had gained a reputation as a solid, reliable machine and was particularly popular with police patrolmen. The new Kawasaki Motorcycle Corporation kept up the licensing agreement with BSA and eventually produced a licensed replica of the 650 cc A10 model which was sold under the moniker of W1. BSA were the biggest motorcycle company in the world at the time. The machine was in production for about ten years and went through two upgrades (W2 and W3) until it was finally dropped in 1973. By that time multi-cylinder OHC rocketships like the 900 cc Z-1 were the industry standard and the antiquated vertical-twin design just could not keep up. Originally designed by Edward Turner in 1937, the Achilles heel of this configuration is VIBRATION. Lots and lots of it, enough to shake your tooth-fillings loose, which eventually takes its toll on machine and rider alike.
In 1999, having seen success with its ‘retro’ styled Zephyr series, Kawasaki decided to pay tribute to the old W series with the W650 and that’s when I first got my eye on it. However, the resemblance to those old bone-shakers is merely cosmetic. The vibes have been (almost) removed by a clever internal balance-shaft, the dodgy Lucas electrics have been replaced by a modern system with no contact-breakers, the old push-rod OHV engine is now an OHC, driven by a handsome bevel-gear shaft. And most important of all--it doesn’t leak oil all over the place. You could keep it in the bedroom if you wanted and it wouldn’t disgrace itself.
Black Mariah and I have been an item since 2002. I took delivery of her on September 4th, which also happened to be the 20th anniversary of my marriage to the lady whom I went on honeymoon with on the Yamaha. One of these days we will take a 2nd honeymoon--probably along the Pacific coast of Tosa Wan, one of my favourite parts of Japan. I will probably keep Black Mariah until I can no longer ride and then bequest her to my son. Selling her is out of the question...
To finish up I’ll leave a final quotation from T.E. Lawrence, in a letter to George Brough about his ‘Superior’ motorcycles.
27.9.26
Dear Mr. Brough,
Yesterday I completed 100000 miles, since 1922, on five successive Brough Superiors, and I'm going abroad very soon, so that I think I must make an end, and thank you for the road-pleasure I have got out of them. In 1922, I found George I (your old Mark I) the best thing I'd ridden, but George V (the 1922 SS100) is incomparably better. In 1925 and 1926 (George IV & V) I have not had an involuntary stop, & so have not been able to test your spares service, on which I drew so heavily in 1922 and 1923. Your present machines are as fast and reliable as express trains, and the greatest fun in the world to drive: - and I say this after twenty years experience of cycles and cars.
They are very expensive to buy, but light in upkeep (50-65 m.p.g. of petrol, 4000 m.p.g. oil, 5000-6000 miles per outer cover, in my case) and in the four years I have made only one insurance claim (for less than £5) which is a testimony to the safety of your controls & designs. The S.S.100 holds the road extraordinarily. It's my great game on a really pot-holed road to open up to 70 m.p.h. or so and feel the machine gallop: and though only a touring machine it will do 90 m.p.h at full throttle.
I'm not a speed merchant, but ride fairly far in the day (occasionally 700 miles, often 500) and at a fair average, for the machine's speed in the open lets one crawl through the towns, & still average 40-42 miles in the hour. The riding position & the slow powerful turn-over of the engine at speeds of 50 odd give one a very restful feeling.
There, it is no good telling you all you knew before I did: they are the jolliest things on wheels. Yours very sincerely
T E LAWRENCE


The ‘jolliest things on wheels’ -- now there’s an expression. I couldn’t agree more. Last year, the Yamaha corporation released its concept of what riders really want. Torque Sports is the notion behind the MT-01 which I had the good fortune to road-test this summer. My God...


If anything is the successor to the Brough Superior this is. Only available in Europe, you won’t get much change out of ten thousand pounds sterling. Now, where’s that Lottery ticket?