Back Street Heroes November 2023

Hello and welcome to this very special issue of BSH – the 475th since the launch but, more importantly, the issue that corresponds, 40 years on, to the very first issue, No 1, all those years ago. And, ’cos we feel it’s really something to be celebrated, we’ve done a very different issue than is usual, with ex-staffers looking back at those heady days during which they worked for the mag’; a very different take on the magazine’s history; an update of a classic feature from days gone by; a very poignant fiction piece; and much more, too – we hope you like it! On top of that, if you scan your ‘phone over the QR code wossname hereabouts, you’ll be able to download a free digital version of Issue…

ONE This is a very historic Cheshire farmhouse, which had a simple bar and two supping rooms for many years. As such it’s called the Harrington Arms, and it’s in the village of Gawsworth in east Cheshire. I used to ride down there from the hills in the early Seventies when I lived above Kettleshulme (and we’ll get to that eventually), but I went there one gloriously sunny late spring evening in 1983. The momentum behind the launch of the magazine you’re currently holding was just getting underway. I’d recruited Jim Fogg, Stu Garland and Maz Harris – all of whom signed up immediately for whatever it was, and for no pay – and I was amassing features, and had started talking to printers, paper salesmen, and wholesale magazine distributers.…

AT 14 I was reading the magazine New Motorcycling Monthly… well, I say reading, but it was more looking at the pictures of choppers (I still have them in my garage library). In those pre-BSH days I’d buy NMM or Bike or Superbike or anything else that had choppers in – my Gran even cut out and gave me an article from TV Times featuring the Sixties’ pop star Lulu on a Triumph chop. At 16 I graduated to Easyriders which, with its talk of Pans, Knuckles and Shovels, was like deciphering a foreign language. At 18 in 1981 I bought a Suzuki GS250T and, after reading an article I Superbike by Steve Myatt, went to see Gary Sylvester at Custom Engineering Ltd. in Leeds. It was a ride that…

ALASTIAR MCFARLANE The things I remember most about the early days of BSH are the people who helped sustain it; the promo activity that was fundamental to early success; and the fascinating capabilities of the true heroes whose bikes we featured over the many years. I think the easiest way to approach this is to give you an insight into the people at the time with a genuine thank you for laying the foundations for BSH – forty years and still very much alive thanks to: NIK SAMSON who joined us many, many years ago, and promptly launched his bike into a ditch taking a barbed wire fence with him. I knew he’d be worried about losing his job so I rode down to Huntingdon to give him the reassurance…

This XS650 may look familiar to long-term readers of the magazine because it was given away in issues 31 and 32, back in 1988. It may also be familiar to those who watch Henry Cole’s ‘Shed & Buried’ television series on Quest as it appeared in an episode of the series earlier this year when it was found in the care of a gentleman by the name of Taff, bought by Henry, got going again by the famous Allen Millyard, and then, apparently, sold to the guy who’d won it originally all those years ago back in 1988. The programme was aired back in June, and a couple of months later we were approached by the current owner, Roy, who wanted to know if we wanted to, or knew anyone…

EVERYTHING CHANGES, AND YET, CURIOUSLY, EVERYTHING REMAINS THE SAME. WELL, MORE OR LESS. ALMOST EXACTLY FORTY YEARS, STOCKPILING FEATURES FOR THE MAGAZINE WHICH WAS SLATED TO BE LAUNCHED AS BACK STREET HEROES (‘BLOODY SILLY NAME; YOU’LL GET NOWHERE WITH THAT’) IN A FEW MONTHS’ TIME, I WROTE A PIECE CALLED ‘REASONS TO BE CAREFUL – PART THREE’. IT WAS ABOUT ALL THE VEHICLES AND PEOPLE WHO WAKE UP EVERY MORNING APPARENTLY ON A MISSION TO MOW DOWN BIKERS. NOW, GETTING ON FOR ALMOST HALF MY LIFETIME, EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT – EXCEPT THAT NOTHING IS DIFFERENT. SO, TOWARDS THE END OF THE FIRST QUARTER OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY THE MESSAGE IS MUCH THE SAME: TRACTORS All sorts of things have got vastly wider over the last four decades: Range Rovers; the…