Next month in England, H&H Auctions will sell more than 100 vintage motorcycles taken from one of the biggest collections in the country.
Among the lot are four sidecar motorcycles that are as notable for their rarity as for their quirky design style and ride personalities. There will be a 1924 AJS Model D Combo, a 1932 BSA G12 Combo used by the Bath City Police, a 1930 BSA Sloper Combo, and a 1925 Quadrant Combo.
Mark Bryan, the head motorcycle specialist for H&H, found them covered in dust and bird droppings tucked away in a large barn in rural Gloucestershire. It was the proverbial family barn-find, yes, but it was also more unusual than your average dusty discovery.
“It’s very unusual for me to come across somebody who collects multiple of these bikes—sidecars take up a lot of space,” Bryan said. “They are not easy to just hide out of the way.”
A Rarity Among Motorbikes
Sidecar motorcycles require special considerations both on the road and in storage. They’re three-wheeled machines with complicated—and unwieldy—components. You can’t just stack them against each other in a shed as with regular two-wheel motorbikes. What’s more, many early ones were made with cloth covers and wooden frames, so they have largely decayed since the height of their popularity in the 1930s and ‘40s. That was the age of one-car families, when sidecars were used as an essential and highly practical alternative form of family transpiration.
“This is a specialized item—quirky,” Bryan said. Sidecar-style bicycles emerged in the late 1800s, when a motorized “safety” bicycle with a light sidecar earned a patent; by 1914, even Harley-Davidson had cataloged a three-wheeled motorized sidecar bike. During World War I, Western Front soldiers used them for dispatch duties. After the war, cars became much less expensive, and many sidecar companies disappeared. A few brands, such as Ural and Harley, continued to make the bikes for people devoted to their eccentric style: “They’re not generally as nice to ride as a regular motorcycle,” Bryan said. “There is a group of people who love them, but it’s a specialized group.”
A Solid Market
The real appeal, for many devotees, is to access the history and design of the old models. According to Jonathan Klinger, the head specialist at Hagerty, a company that insures high-value and collectable cars and motorcycles, vintage motorbikes make up 5 percent of all vehicles offered at North American collector car auctions. That number has been fairly consistent for the last four years, he said.
“In terms of the overall collector-vehicle market, vintage motorcycles are the second most active in terms of year-over-year activity during the past five years,” Klinger said. “To put that into perspective, they are behind vintage pickups/SUVs but ahead of traditional collector cars, in terms of increased activity.”