The Ajay, The Ancient Britain and The Road Rats
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2016 9:56 pm
Having been booted out of school and thrust into the big wide world without any qualifications to my name I was at a bit of a loose end. My Mum was distraught. As for my Dad, well I don’t think he was overly surprised about it. With a penchant for speed and danger that knew no bounds, a total disregard for authority, and being nowhere near old enough to own a legal road going vehicle of any kind I was plod fodder. Due to the fact that my older brothers had been gone for the entirety of my teens I’d devised my own ways of looking after myself in the rough and tumble world of school bullies, gang mentality and the mandatory Saturday night punch ups at the local disco’s, of which by this time I’d been involved in quite a few. Me and my mate’s antics with old motorbikes had been a welcome outlet for this pent up frustration but the cow field soon become too confined a space for birds of freedom such as us and we needed to satisfy our thirst for speed and danger elsewhere.
Dave Crouch was the initial instigator of this. I firmly believe that had he not been part of our intrepid little gang, little of what I’m about to write would have happened. He was unfortunately an opinion leader for all of us on the basis of him being almost a year older than anyone else in our year at school. Because his birthday fell on some awkward date he’d had to stay behind and do another year of school while all his other mates had left. He had therefore turned sixteen long before any of us. This meant that he was legally entitled to have a driving licence and ride a 50cc moped on the road. Being Dave Crouch, a habitual show off and basically a spoilt brat, he persuaded his Dad who owned the local fish and chip shop, to buy him a Garelli 50. This was the Rolls Royce of mopeds at the time. Unrestricted, it was capable of doing 55mph downhill! Wow!
Initially, the rest of us laughed at the concept of being the owner of a 50cc moped. We were all used to riding around on old field bikes which were much bigger and more powerful but this Garelli was a road legal machine and the kudos in that was legion. Crouch could now ride on the open roads with impunity, safe in the knowledge that if he was stopped by the old bill he wouldn’t have to leg it across the fields. I’ll never forget the day he turned up on it, resplendent in his tassled black leather jacket, crash helmet, goggles and scarf wrapped over his mouth. He was a big guy for a sixteen year old and I have to admit he looked every part the quintessential rocker. The fact that his machine was only a puny 50cc Italian two stroke was irrelevant. He was “legally on the road” and boy did that fact make us green with envy. We all had another year to go to enjoy that elevated status.
Chris Palmer, another one of our gang had located another old Matchless 500 and bought it for a fiver. (These old thumpers seemed to be everywhere back then and nobody wanted them) This bike had been tuned up previously and had a high compression head and close ratio gearbox apparently. After a bit of twiddling we got it running and my god was it fast. It was too powerful for the old cow field though. It kept wheel–spinning on the wet grass and we were afraid to ride it on there after a while lest we prang it, so we decided to give it a blast on the road instead. One night me and Gooz took it out onto the M1 motorway. Now this bike was, to all intents and purposes a fully kitted out road bike replete with front and back lights and swept back handlebars. We managed to hit ninety miles an hour on it on our first try. For several nights thereafter we’d tear up and down the M1 taking it in turns to outdo each other speed wise. How we never came to grief is anyone’s guess. Neither of us were old enough to have a licence, the bike wasn’t taxed, it had no MOT, nothing legal at all in fact, yet here we were playing at being would-be Hell’s Angels late at night on a suped up Matchless 500 on the biggest Motorway in the UK! We killed it in the end though. Unfortunately the bike developed an oil leak which got progressively worse. We couldn’t afford new oil so we’d unscrew the sump plugs off parked cars and drain it out then use that to fill it up again (as you do) One fateful night the conrod snapped and disintegrated the engine and that was the end of that.
We’d now destroyed every bike we had. It was mid-winter. Our stomping ground was nothing more than a sprawl of council houses, spread over an area of approximately two square miles. Not much happening there really. It wasn’t like today, where kids can retreat to their bedrooms and play X-Box or Nintendo for hours on end. I couldn’t even stay in my bedroom for more than a few minutes during the winter, it was too cold! Our end of terrace house had no central heating so for entertainment I’d have to huddle round the fire in the living room and watch black and white TV on a fourteen inch screen with my younger sister and my parents. With only three channels to watch that wasn’t exactly a whole barrel of fun, so I’d go out with my mates and look for things to do. Gooz and I had by now become fast mates we and did a lot of things together, most of them without the knowledge of our parents. These days we’d probably be tagged as “hoodies” and would have been issued with ASBO’s every time we got up to something. In reality, we were just kids with boundless reserves of energy, no real direction in life and not enough to do to keep us occupied.
It was on one such windy, rainy winter’s night while we were hanging around outside Dave Crouch’s Dad’s fish and chip shop that Crouch informed us of his latest acquisition. He’d bought an old AJS 650 CSR from someone for a fiver. (Jeez, the amount of things you could pick up for a fiver in those days eh!) Although he was now on the road legally with his Garelli no one else was and he’d grown tired of riding around on his own. The novelty of being the first of us to get a road legal bike had worn off and the little buzzbox just wasn’t fast enough for him; he wanted more and above all he wanted to have us around to show off to. That was Crouch all over. He was nothing without an audience. So anyway, he’d somehow come across this old bike and bought it – or so he said.
“It doesn’t run, needs a new inlet manifold and a few other bits and bobs,” he said as he led us all out to the back of the chip shop to show us.
Lit only by the fat encrusted back window of the shop he pulled off the tarpaulin that covered the bike and we stood there aghast. It had a chrome tank with that unmistakable AJS badge on the side. Big bulbous alloy twin pot engine, reverse cone mega’s, jampot rear shocks, ace bars, alloy mudguards. It was a proper honest to goodness greaser’s café racer.
He never could get it going though. Crouch was more of a poser than a get-yer-hands-dirty mechanic type like me and Gooz so the bike sat there for a couple of months going rusty. I offered to buy it off him several times but he steadfastly refused, stating he’d get round to it one day. He never did though. Eventually I managed to get him to sell it to me for £15. A week later I’d found an inlet manifold for it and after cleaning out the carb and plugs it roared into life. That bike was a revelation. It was smooth, fast and went like hot shit off a shovel. Now remember, I’d only just turned fifteen years old so I had no licence, no insurance, MOT or any of that good stuff but that didn’t bother me one bit. I was a rocker! I painted an MV Agusta logo on the back of my leather jacket with silver paint (I just liked the look of it) stuck some tassles on the arms with superglue, stole a white scarf from my Mum and a pair of goggles from my Dad and blasted up to the Ancient Britain Pub in St Albans where I knew a bunch of bikers hung out.
What I wasn’t aware of at the time was that those bikers were a bunch of Hells Angels known as the Road Rats. There were a couple of them standing outside as I rocked up on the Ajay, blipped the throttle and parked the bike up amongst a gaggle of Triumphs, Beezers and the odd Harley. Then I sauntered into the pub, giving the two motley looking geysers a nod as I did so. They just looked at me with poker faces. I went in and headed for the loo. As I was standing there at the urinal with my Johnson hanging out the door burst open and one of the bikers who’d been standing outside bowled in, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and yanked me backwards. The second guy entered and the two of them now had a hold of me and I honestly thought I was going to be raped! They seemed to be more interested in the logo on the back of my jacket than anything else though.
“Who the fuck are you?” said one of them.
I was too traumatized to speak. The words just wouldn’t come.
The other guy turned me around and looked at the back of my jacket again. “Ah, leave ‘im John, he’s just a kid,” he growled.
I was shoved back into the urinals and they left as quickly as they’d arrived. It seems they thought I was a rival Hells Angel gang member encroaching on their turf. The MV logo on the back of my jacket had been mistaken by them as a Hells Angel Chapter insignia.
Phew! That was a close shave. I decided it might not be a good idea to hang around and socialize. For one thing I was way under age to be in a pub anyway and these guys weren’t exactly the friendly type. I made a bee-line for the door and scarpered. As I rode home I pondered on the fact that I seemed to have more trouble off bikes than on them and for sure I never went near that pub again.
Dave Crouch was the initial instigator of this. I firmly believe that had he not been part of our intrepid little gang, little of what I’m about to write would have happened. He was unfortunately an opinion leader for all of us on the basis of him being almost a year older than anyone else in our year at school. Because his birthday fell on some awkward date he’d had to stay behind and do another year of school while all his other mates had left. He had therefore turned sixteen long before any of us. This meant that he was legally entitled to have a driving licence and ride a 50cc moped on the road. Being Dave Crouch, a habitual show off and basically a spoilt brat, he persuaded his Dad who owned the local fish and chip shop, to buy him a Garelli 50. This was the Rolls Royce of mopeds at the time. Unrestricted, it was capable of doing 55mph downhill! Wow!
Initially, the rest of us laughed at the concept of being the owner of a 50cc moped. We were all used to riding around on old field bikes which were much bigger and more powerful but this Garelli was a road legal machine and the kudos in that was legion. Crouch could now ride on the open roads with impunity, safe in the knowledge that if he was stopped by the old bill he wouldn’t have to leg it across the fields. I’ll never forget the day he turned up on it, resplendent in his tassled black leather jacket, crash helmet, goggles and scarf wrapped over his mouth. He was a big guy for a sixteen year old and I have to admit he looked every part the quintessential rocker. The fact that his machine was only a puny 50cc Italian two stroke was irrelevant. He was “legally on the road” and boy did that fact make us green with envy. We all had another year to go to enjoy that elevated status.
Chris Palmer, another one of our gang had located another old Matchless 500 and bought it for a fiver. (These old thumpers seemed to be everywhere back then and nobody wanted them) This bike had been tuned up previously and had a high compression head and close ratio gearbox apparently. After a bit of twiddling we got it running and my god was it fast. It was too powerful for the old cow field though. It kept wheel–spinning on the wet grass and we were afraid to ride it on there after a while lest we prang it, so we decided to give it a blast on the road instead. One night me and Gooz took it out onto the M1 motorway. Now this bike was, to all intents and purposes a fully kitted out road bike replete with front and back lights and swept back handlebars. We managed to hit ninety miles an hour on it on our first try. For several nights thereafter we’d tear up and down the M1 taking it in turns to outdo each other speed wise. How we never came to grief is anyone’s guess. Neither of us were old enough to have a licence, the bike wasn’t taxed, it had no MOT, nothing legal at all in fact, yet here we were playing at being would-be Hell’s Angels late at night on a suped up Matchless 500 on the biggest Motorway in the UK! We killed it in the end though. Unfortunately the bike developed an oil leak which got progressively worse. We couldn’t afford new oil so we’d unscrew the sump plugs off parked cars and drain it out then use that to fill it up again (as you do) One fateful night the conrod snapped and disintegrated the engine and that was the end of that.
We’d now destroyed every bike we had. It was mid-winter. Our stomping ground was nothing more than a sprawl of council houses, spread over an area of approximately two square miles. Not much happening there really. It wasn’t like today, where kids can retreat to their bedrooms and play X-Box or Nintendo for hours on end. I couldn’t even stay in my bedroom for more than a few minutes during the winter, it was too cold! Our end of terrace house had no central heating so for entertainment I’d have to huddle round the fire in the living room and watch black and white TV on a fourteen inch screen with my younger sister and my parents. With only three channels to watch that wasn’t exactly a whole barrel of fun, so I’d go out with my mates and look for things to do. Gooz and I had by now become fast mates we and did a lot of things together, most of them without the knowledge of our parents. These days we’d probably be tagged as “hoodies” and would have been issued with ASBO’s every time we got up to something. In reality, we were just kids with boundless reserves of energy, no real direction in life and not enough to do to keep us occupied.
It was on one such windy, rainy winter’s night while we were hanging around outside Dave Crouch’s Dad’s fish and chip shop that Crouch informed us of his latest acquisition. He’d bought an old AJS 650 CSR from someone for a fiver. (Jeez, the amount of things you could pick up for a fiver in those days eh!) Although he was now on the road legally with his Garelli no one else was and he’d grown tired of riding around on his own. The novelty of being the first of us to get a road legal bike had worn off and the little buzzbox just wasn’t fast enough for him; he wanted more and above all he wanted to have us around to show off to. That was Crouch all over. He was nothing without an audience. So anyway, he’d somehow come across this old bike and bought it – or so he said.
“It doesn’t run, needs a new inlet manifold and a few other bits and bobs,” he said as he led us all out to the back of the chip shop to show us.
Lit only by the fat encrusted back window of the shop he pulled off the tarpaulin that covered the bike and we stood there aghast. It had a chrome tank with that unmistakable AJS badge on the side. Big bulbous alloy twin pot engine, reverse cone mega’s, jampot rear shocks, ace bars, alloy mudguards. It was a proper honest to goodness greaser’s café racer.
He never could get it going though. Crouch was more of a poser than a get-yer-hands-dirty mechanic type like me and Gooz so the bike sat there for a couple of months going rusty. I offered to buy it off him several times but he steadfastly refused, stating he’d get round to it one day. He never did though. Eventually I managed to get him to sell it to me for £15. A week later I’d found an inlet manifold for it and after cleaning out the carb and plugs it roared into life. That bike was a revelation. It was smooth, fast and went like hot shit off a shovel. Now remember, I’d only just turned fifteen years old so I had no licence, no insurance, MOT or any of that good stuff but that didn’t bother me one bit. I was a rocker! I painted an MV Agusta logo on the back of my leather jacket with silver paint (I just liked the look of it) stuck some tassles on the arms with superglue, stole a white scarf from my Mum and a pair of goggles from my Dad and blasted up to the Ancient Britain Pub in St Albans where I knew a bunch of bikers hung out.
What I wasn’t aware of at the time was that those bikers were a bunch of Hells Angels known as the Road Rats. There were a couple of them standing outside as I rocked up on the Ajay, blipped the throttle and parked the bike up amongst a gaggle of Triumphs, Beezers and the odd Harley. Then I sauntered into the pub, giving the two motley looking geysers a nod as I did so. They just looked at me with poker faces. I went in and headed for the loo. As I was standing there at the urinal with my Johnson hanging out the door burst open and one of the bikers who’d been standing outside bowled in, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and yanked me backwards. The second guy entered and the two of them now had a hold of me and I honestly thought I was going to be raped! They seemed to be more interested in the logo on the back of my jacket than anything else though.
“Who the fuck are you?” said one of them.
I was too traumatized to speak. The words just wouldn’t come.
The other guy turned me around and looked at the back of my jacket again. “Ah, leave ‘im John, he’s just a kid,” he growled.
I was shoved back into the urinals and they left as quickly as they’d arrived. It seems they thought I was a rival Hells Angel gang member encroaching on their turf. The MV logo on the back of my jacket had been mistaken by them as a Hells Angel Chapter insignia.
Phew! That was a close shave. I decided it might not be a good idea to hang around and socialize. For one thing I was way under age to be in a pub anyway and these guys weren’t exactly the friendly type. I made a bee-line for the door and scarpered. As I rode home I pondered on the fact that I seemed to have more trouble off bikes than on them and for sure I never went near that pub again.
