1925 Brough Superior SS80 Pictures
Add Your Photos!
This is a great picture sent in by William Leece of Liverpool. It shows his late father, Roy Leece (1904-1985), on his 1925 Brough Superior, taken, he believes in the mid-1930s.
William says “Going from the diaries he kept, he bought the bike in February 1933 for £10. That would have been about a fortnight’s pay for a motor mechanic in those days. It seems to have been in pretty ropey condition, but I suppoe he’d set his heart on one and a rough Brough was better than no Brough at all. I know he had to braze a penny to the tank to seal a leak, and the diaries tell of frantic efforts to patch the exhaust. At the time he was living in lodgings in Birkenhead. His landlord’s daughter is still alive, and tells me the bike spent more time in their back yard than it ever did on the road. Nevertheless, he always told me that he was the first paying member of Joe Public to ride a bike through the newly-opened Mersey Tunnel – a claim now impossible to prove or disprove, of course. Later in the 1930s he moved to Birmingham as garage foreman with Lewis’s, the Liverpool-based stores chain. I don’t know if the Brough went with him – if its did, I imagine it went the way of so many bikes and cars, effectively dumped with the onset of war and petrol rationing. Buit if anyone finds it in a barn, I’ll gladly give them a fortnight’s pay for it”
As an update to William’s notes, the bike has been traced! Many thanks to Bob Withers of the Owners Club for sending in this recent picture of the very same bike. It would seem that at some stage in it’s life it had an engine change to one from an earlier 1924 SS80, but it’s still great to see a survivor like this.
One more update…. William has just found that on looking at his father’s diary for 1933, he did indeed swap the engine over quite early in his ownership of the Brough, so that’s one mystery solved!
What a great story!