Harry Palmer

I remember the moment I became a scooterist very clearly. For some reason Nigel Jones, the coolest dude in school was walking past Richard Saunders house just as I pulled up on my new Vespa PX. Richard had come out of the house to see the new scooter and Nigel and his crew saw the both of us tinkering with it. “Mod are you now Ben?” Nigel called across the street. “Yep” I replied. With that I gained some new kind of magic power and a bit rubbed off on Richard by proxy. Richard and I had both messed around with Honda C90s and various mopeds but purely as transport. Here finally was a real scooter with some real street cred.

I’d bought the PX from a guy called Ben Hapgood who was a wheeler-dealer and always welding up some old banger. An old lady living in his street had given it to him whilst clearing out her garage. I persuaded him to sell it for £175. It came with rusty florida crash bars and a lay back seat rest, checkered mud flap and was in a right state. I cleaned it up as best I could and hit the road. I thought I was the bees knees in an old open face helmet and Ray Bans.

I was so obsessed with this scooter that when a friend of Estelles bought me a model PX years later there was only one thing to do: –

One day in late 1991 I was visiting a friends house down on Meadow Lane when a guy with John Lennon glasses and a small mustache flagged me down. He asked if I wanted to join his scooter club, meeting every Wednesday in the Knights Arms. I said sure why not and went along to the next meeting. This guy was called Tony a part-time DJ, he lived with his grandmother in a room papered with pictures of scooters and he was such a laugh.

I got to the Knights Arms the following Wednesday and sure enough there was a real live scooter club having a meeting. They’d all been genuine 80s scooter boys and still had the look (flight jackets, DMs and psycho-billy hair cuts). I met up with the “Mutant Beach Pig Scooter Club” every week after that. I can’t remember everyones names but there was a guy called Pickle from Heol y Cyw with a Lambretta chopper who always came with a guy who was into Northern Soul (his car was covered with stickers of obscure American record labels). Another guy called Lionel sold me a Mallossi kitted 180cc engine for the PX, which he later admitted he’d been running on JET-1A kerosene! We did a couple of scooter rallies that summer, Llandudno and Bournemouth and they gave me a club patch: -

I first got a Lambretta whilst on the Tenby Scooter rally of 2000. I was living in Reading at the time and had ridden down to Porthcawl on my new Vespa ET4. I had ridden the old Vespa PX around Porthcawl since I was 17 but finally gave it to my nephew Joe when I moved away. After a few years of full time employment I bought an Vespa ET4 from the A4 Scooter Store in Maindenhead, what a blast, 70mph at the twist of the throttle with no worries about two stoke oil. I did the entire length of the A4/A48 one night after work, going over the old Severn bridge with the L plates taken off.

Joe and I rode down to Tenby on the Friday and pitched our tent on the rally campsite. Needless to say we got very very drunk at the do and crashed out in the tent. In the morning we decided to go for breakfast and gathered up our wallets, oh shit I couldn’t find my keys!

We searched the whole morning and couldn’t find them anywhere. This was a really bad situation as I had lost the keys for the ET4 and also my flat in Reading. In the end the only solution was the call the AA and ask for help. After lots of messing around with the steering lock we dragged the ET4 over to their stall with lots of people taking the piss “ha ha lost your keys? That’s what they all say!”. The AA said they couldn’t crack the ET4s immobiliser and the only choice was for me to have the scooter taken back to Reading (where I had the master key). I agreed and off it went on the back of an AA truck.

Whilst we were talking with the AA a man on the next dealer stall was listening and after the ET4 had been taken away he asked me if I was interested in buying a Lambretta. To be honest this was the last thing on my mind (“one of those weird scooters that always breakdown? No way!” was what I initially thought) but I was glad to have some sympathy. He was selling a GP125 cutdown with Vega leg shields and a SX150 engine for £350. I didn’t know anything about Lambrettas. But I did know that I would have to buy an expensive train ticket to get home and I still had my credit card with me. Joe was also worried that he wouldn’t be able to find the way home without me and we didn’t have a map. There and then I decided to buy this Lambretta. I got some cash with my VISA card from a cash machine on the campsite and paid the money. The guy (he was a policeman from the midlands) showed me how the choke and petrol tap worked and how to start it with the key in different positions. I went for a test ride around the campsite and came back with big grin on my face, I was hooked, a certified Lambretta nut case had been born. After we had exchanged details he promised to send his part of the V5 once he got home. I was so happy to have some transport that we spent the afternoon cleaning it up.

During that afternoon we were approached by some members of a scooter club from the north of England to see if I wanted to swap it for a brand new PX which had seized on the way to the rally, the lad really needed to get home and was desperate for a working scooter. I said no and that confirmed my new status as a Lambretta maniac as it was in hindsight probably a very good deal.

As Saturday evening came it looked like rain so Joe and I (who still both had hang overs from Friday) decided to ride back to Porthcawl (we’d also broken the door of the tent in our drunken stumbling the night before). We packed up the tent and got ready to leave. I then realised the lights of the Lambretta weren’t working. I rode over to the stall which was still going and started complaining to the guy at which point be cut me off and turned the ignition key to the correct position. Wow did I feel stupid!

After filling up with petrol we set off on the narrow country lanes back to Porthcawl. The weather got worse and worse and at one point we almost decided to stop and stay in a Bed and Breakfast. We pressed on until the exhaust fell off the Lambretta! The brass cylinder nuts had come loose and the whole thing fell off onto the road. I’ve since found out it was an after market Spanish pipe which was only attached at the cylinder. We pulled into a lay by but couldn’t find the nuts on the road so I had call the AA for a second time. They were not happy at all about me having two vehicles in their system on the same day! In the end they agreed to send a recovery van. With that Joe decided he would never be able to find the way on his own. We came up with a plan, he would pretend to be me and I would ride his PX home. The AA patrolman fell for the story after failing to find suitable nuts in his bits box. Joe got a lift home in the warm van reading the paper and I got to ride the rest of the way in the pouring rain.

In October 2000, much against the advice of Michel Fish, I decided to ride my scooter to Brussels. it had been standing outside my friend Ians house in Teddington (near Kingston, west London) since that summer so I thought that it may as well be getting rusty in Brussels than London. On the Wednesday before I was all set to get the Eurostar over on the Friday night when work decided that I should attend a two day induction course in London! So I got a Eurostar ticket to London for free. I booked the 4pm Saturday Seacat catamaran from Dover to Ostende (there are only three sailings a day and the other two are either too early or too late), that way I could take the local roads down to Brussels as Ostende is much closer to Brussels than Calais (plus its in Belgium). I set off at 9:30 on Saturday morning from Teddington, fully mapped up, wearing three coats and two pairs of gloves taking the south circular through Wandsworth and Clapham and finally out onto the A2 to Dover. Because of all the local Saturday traffic getting out of London took about 2 hours and the trek down the A2 through Kent took another 2. The cross winds were unbelieveable! Averaging about 50mph means that eventually most lorries have to overtake which was no picnic in the wind and rain. The A2 to Dover can’t decide whether its an A road or a motorway, still having a provisional licence I kept having to avoid the motorway sections and go through tiny villages.

I got to Dover at around 1:30pm to find that all of the Seacat sailings had been cancelled because of the bad weather and that I’d be given a free ferry ticket to Calais instead! Holy toledo, I don’t know the way on local roads from Calais and I don’t have a map of France! so I got on the ferry not having much choice, I decided to rip off the L plates and go on the motorway. I got talking to an old Italian guy on the boat who was riding a Ducati 900 down to Paris, he thought I was mad but we had a chat about bikes and things and went on our way.

With all the faffing about with boats I didn’t leave Calais until about 5pm. The E40 is the main truck road for Northern Europe it goes across the top of France and then splits, one way goes up into Holland the other down through Belgium into Germany, so as you can imagine its mega busy. Luckily for me it was not too bad, the wind was still very strong but the amount of traffic was less than I expected and at least it had stopped raining, a couple of frogs got a bit shirty beeping at me and waving their arms about but that’s pefectly normal for French people. I would have flashed them the Vs but it was too windy to let go of the handle bars! Not being a car driver at the time, changing to driving on the other side of the road was not too bad although I missed an exit slip road for the services at one point so I carried on for a bit and went up the ‘on’ slip road the wrong way! nobody saw me. It’s about 180kms down to Brussels and this took another 3 hours with one petrol stop. By the time I got home I was frozen solid like Jim Carey in Dumb and Dumber going to Aspen on the monkey bike. I could have stopped for a coffee but once you get going its hard to stop!