My name is Neil Trinder, I'm just going to give you a quick walk around tour of my
1941 G3 military Matchless. What makes this different to any of the other kinds of
military machines is the fact that this is an overhead valve as against a side valve
which the BSA M20 and the Norton 16H would have been.
This is a girder fork model, which is a very early example. The first 6,000 ordered
had girder forks, but only about 4,500 were made with girder forks
as the Collier brothers, who owned Matchless, developed the teledraulic fork, which is what you
have basically on all modern machines now. The advantage was that the teledraulic
fork had a six inch travel, and it could handle rough ground a lot easier. So dispatch riders
who very often were riding off-road to a map to go to certain destinations carrying secret documents,
would then handle a rough ground a lot easier. So it was a preferred model. Unfortunately
most of them got snaffled by the officers because they wanted to ride the best things.
The differences between this and the civilian machine is that
the engine was designed against a pre-war model called the G3 Clubman, which
had a higher state of tune than the G3 Military, and obviously the thing was painted in military
green. It had a quickly detachable rear wheel, which obviously in battlefield
conditions would make it very easy to change an inner tube or repair a puncture.
You would be fitted with panniers to carry documents etc.
The other thing that is missing off this is, obviously in modern times, is the headlight mask.
You would have a headlight mask on the headlight for blackout conditions.
Aside from that it's pretty straightforward. It runs pretty much like a civilian machine,
but it's in a lower state of tune. The gearing is slightly lower to cope with off-road conditions,
and make it a lot easier to ride on things like shale, mud and
rough ground. I'm very often asked, and if the cameraman will bring the camera in, what this is
for here on the tank. It's a little channel that was put in actually to stop the rain running
down and going all over the front of your trousers, making it very uncomfortable to ride.
At the front end of the bike we have a strut here, which in common with a lot of civilian machines,
is the front stand. So if you had a puncture on the front, you could get the bike up on the front
stand and make it easy to remove the front wheel. As to riding, when I first had the
motorcycle I thought it would ride like a bag of spanners. I was very, very surprised how well
that a girder fork machine handles in comparison to a modern machine. The strangest part about it
was getting used to watching the headlight bobbing up and down over bumps. You soon get used to it.