[John] We're here at The National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull. I'm joined by James Hewing, Motorcycle
Director, and we're at a very special event. Tell us a little bit more about this James. [James] Yeah this
is um one of our 'try out classic bike' days and so we put these days on for friends of the museum.
So you've got to be a museum friend, and it's like any museum sort of membership scheme except
ours is exciting, it's not boring. So you know, the thing is about museum membership schemes, you know,
you'll get like a sort of a magazine and you'll get free entry once you've paid and
10% off in the cafe, and all that. Well you get that with our membership scheme, but
we wanted to create something that was really different from what really anybody else in the
world was doing, and that is use the inventory, let our museum friends ride the bikes. [John] So this is
a living museum, so these are some bikes going around behind us then that are actually normally
on display in the museum, but guys get to ride them and try them for themselves.
So we can hear and see some fantastic machines going around us James, and we've got a real
mixture then, a real different... [James] Yeah we try and get things from the sort of 1920s that people,
even if they're used to riding old bikes, maybe aren't used to riding things quite so old with
hand change, or lever throttle. And so we usually have a selection of bikes from the 1920s
right up to the 1960s, and sometimes 1970s. And in this case, I mean our oldest bike
is the 1927 Coventry Eagle Flying 6. And then we've got bikes right through
to the 50s and 60s like a BSA B31, a BSA Star Twin. We've got a late 50s Aerial 650 Cyclone. So
we've got all different engine capacities as well from a BSA Bantam right up to sort of 650, 750.
[John] And it's a single cylinder, parallel twin, V-twin and two strokes. Pretty much a taste of
everything then. [James] Exactly, so there's almost one of everything. And in terms of the hand-change
bikes, we've got the Model 29 S29 BSA, and the Coventry Eagle Flying 6. And of course
don't forget that like the Coventry Eagle is a very valuable bike, you know, a lot of
your viewers will know how expensive they are, they're sort of, can be Brough Superior
prices. And so again that's really important to us to let people ride not just Bantams
like we've got here, but really important to let people ride bikes that perhaps they would never
ever get to even sit on, let alone ride. [John] It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to ride machines
that, you know, you can only dream of owning or even riding. [James] That's right, yeah, and I mean in terms of
the cost, because people always ask the cost, they think this is an expensive
day, we only ask that people cover the cost of the fuel and the insurance. Well we know what fuel's
like at the moment but, I mean all our friends here today, all our museum friends, it's just £20.00
for the whole morning. [John] Wow 20 quid, and you get a whole morning's entertainment, and the chance to
ride bikes that you never normally would and it's great value, and yeah, and is there going to be
more? How many of these events do you have in a year then James? [James] Yeah so now we're sort of after
the old, now we're out of the pandemic, post covid, we usually have five or six. We don't
start them too early, we start them at the end of March and then by sort of the end of September
when we start to lose the weather, because it's no fun people riding bikes that they're not
used to in in the rain. And so we've always been fairly lucky with the weather, touch wood, but
we tend to go from this sort of end of March through to the end of October.
But there's a special friends page on our website, on the museum website, www.thenmm.co.uk
and they can find the friends page and
and details of what other things that the friend scheme can give them, but
also the dates of the upcoming events, which is updated sort of every six weeks or so.
[John] Excellent, well I'm seeing all these bikes go round, I've just seen my dad pull in on the Cyclone there,
I'm itching to get out on one myself so I think I'll have a go then James. [James] Yeah, enjoy. [John] Cheers.