When scooter travel was anything but simple

These days, we have the luxury of high-tech gadgets and designs to make scooter travel much simpler, but it wasn’t as easy in days gone by! Stu Owen reports…

It doesn’t matter whether you’re nipping down the road for a loaf of bread or touring across Europe on a rally; scooter travel these days has become much easier. Whether it’s clothing, helmets, and waterproofs for safety and comfort, or sat-nav and phones for directions, it seems we can’t do without them. Over time, there have been many weird and wonderful inventions aimed at improving the whole experience, but not all have fared well. It’s easy to understand why, when you look at them, they seem complicated or clumsy in their design, or impractical to use, making you wonder who the hell thought them up.

The race is on

As the scooter boom of the early 1950s took hold, it opened up a market for companies and would-be entrepreneurs to capitalise on. The accessory side of scootering was just as big as machine sales, and those who came up with a good design could soon cash in. The problem is that when there is such potential, every man and his dog has a go at it, and, more often than not, gets it spectacularly wrong. The scooter manufacturers themselves came up with certain additions, realising it would be financially rewarding to sell the customer even more. Items outside their remit from other manufacturers were endorsed if it was thought they would be useful to the scooter owner.

The problem was that the financial reward was so great that even the manufacturers, at times, saw pound signs in front of their eyes. That resulted in profitability over practicality, allowing items to be sold that, quite frankly, should have been left on the drawing board. A lot of it stemmed from the concept of scooter design in the first place. Much of its marketing advantage over the motorcycle was based on weather protection, and it’s true that if out in the rain or cold, the rider was better off. That claim soon unravelled because not every part of the body was protected, so bits of you could still get wet.

The answer was to design huge flyscreens several feet tall, and the bigger they were, the more cumbersome they became. Vast windbreakers that were guaranteed to knock at least 10mph off your top speed, but even then, there was a gap between the leg shields and the handlebars where water could get through. Simply attach an apron over it, a bit like a coat for your scooter, to block it out. Great result, but now your handlebars had limited movement as you tried to wrestle against the huge tent-like canvas now attached to the front.

Worse still were the roof designs, based on the idea that rain falling from the sky would be repelled. While standing stationary, yes, but at speed, the designers forgot it came in at an angle, making the whole idea flawed. Perhaps their thinking was that, with this great big mobile veranda attached, the scooter wouldn’t do more than 10mph so that the rain angle wouldn’t be a problem. The wind shear effect would be, though, allowing you to veer violently out of control with a gust of wind that usually accompanies rainfall.

Stowaway

The next big cash-in was luggage space, and as touring became popular, so too did racks, bags, boxes, and, at times, items resembling filing cabinets. A lot of this was down to the space available at the back, especially on a Lambretta that even had factory pre-drilled holes for rack fitting. Racks were good for carrying a spare wheel and stowing a bag on top, but manufacturers came up with the idea of bolting panniers to the outside of them. Soon, scooters became movable suitcases as they were bolted to the front and the back of the machine.

Once filled with luggage, the engineers who had spent years refining the scooter’s balance soon found that it was thrown out the window. Now it was like you had ten tons of spuds strapped to the frame, making cornering and overall handling similar to that of a tractor. It didn’t matter, as those who made the refined and bespoke items used every square inch of the bodywork surface to bolt their goods to. Customers bought into the idea, though, and the squared-off scooter became all the rage. This was complemented by the tartan look, as it seemed the traditional Scottish weave patterns were hugely in favour. This split into leopard-skin and, later, the shiny PVC era, as the scooter almost had a fashion sense of its own.

Now it was the turn of everything else, air horns to radios, map-reading lights to flagpoles, as bolt-on accessories made their way onto the scooter. Impractical they may have been, but the idea was for one-upmanship and possibly the start of scooter customising. If you had a badge bar with emblems on, someone would outdo it with a whip aerial, including more flags than a navy ship. That’s what a lot of the extras became: accessories that didn’t have a purpose but looked good in the meantime, adding unnecessary extra weight to the overall mass of the scooter in question.

The gloves are off

Clothing was an important part of protection, even though crash helmets were not mandatory. Those who did wear a helmet faced a new conundrum because it didn’t protect the face from the elements – cue the visor. PVC plastic was becoming the “in” material for manufacturing, and visor manufacturers loved it. They became bigger, rounder, almost resembling a fishbowl strapped to your head in the quest to repel water. None of them can trump the Turbo Visor, though. The oddball clear disc that spun around like a Catherine wheel thanks to its fin design. Placed millimetres from your face, sending you dizzy in the process as it whirred around at a hypnotic pace.

Clothing depended on one thing: how much wax oil you could plaster on it, with the idea of making yourself as waterproof as a duck. There was always that bit of stitching or part of the zip that refused to conform, meaning that at the end of your journey, you were still wet through. It was the glove design that became the real bugbear, because waterproof technology, it seemed, hadn’t reached handwear. There were two solutions to that: heated handlebar grips, guaranteed to get wet and fuse the battery, or mitts to protect the gloves. At best, they resembled huge kitchen oven gloves, making it impossible to control the clutch, throttle, and brake. One thing these inventions did prove was that health and safety didn’t exist, because no matter how dangerous the design was, it was made available for sale.

Journey into the unknown…

So you had your scooter loaded up to the hilt with accessories, clothed like a warrior, turbo visor included, ready to start your scootering adventure. The first part of that was making sure you had enough fuel, but more importantly, that the two-stroke oil was correctly mixed. That was down to the pump attendant, who would dispense from the pump itself or one of those Castrol tanks on the forecourt. It was a huge responsibility because woe betide them if they forgot. To help at rallies, there were two-stroke service stations so that no one would forget the critical component in keeping the engine running.

Now you needed to know where you were going in a time when motorways didn’t exist, and it was A and B roads with signposts and junctions. That meant the art of map reading and folding became a life skill you couldn’t do without. It was up to your index finger to follow the winding route on the OS map, none of that sat-nav rubbish. You might need a plethora of maps if making a long journey, but at least you had plenty of space to store them, thanks to one of the many panniers you had bolted to the scooter.

What about the weather? You couldn’t watch the TV for the forecast that started later in the day, and even then, it was just a basic chart with a couple of hand-drawn pressure lines. There was a newspaper, but that was about as informative as the back of a crisp packet. Help was on hand as some petrol stations had a daily update on a board outside, perhaps not as accurate as a weather app on your phone, but it put into reality how basic life was back then and how less complicated.

Today’s scooter rider is spoiled for choice because technology, whether it’s waterproof gloves or a deluxe mobile phone holder, makes the experience less complicated. Look at it this way, though: in the early days, when scooter riders numbered in the hundreds of thousands, it was an enjoyable experience despite the primitive technology available to them. They didn’t know any better and adapted to the problems they faced, and it’s true when we look back at old photos that we often comment, “life looked simpler back then,” because it was.

Words: Stuart Owen
Images: Kelsey Media Archive