Bert Hopwood

Just finished reading "Whatever Happened to The British Motorcycle Industry".

Took forever to find a copy...it's out of print and very expensive here in the states. Got it from England

I followed his train of thought completely having been a new product development engineer for most of my working life. Some say he has too many sour grapes in his story, but that is because of the product development part of him. He wanted to make stuff...and was stymied many times.

I found the story to be sad, and very similar to what I felt in the USA much of my career. The wrong people were always steering the ship and thought us engineers were a pain in the you know what, more than understanding that we had a good idea of what could and couldn't be done with the state of the art at any given time.

Some horrible mistakes were made...but you wonder if the depression and WWII didn't have an effect on the conservative thinking of management. Making due with old equipment, slow to adopt new ideas and technology.

There are some awesome pictures of development motorcycles that I had never seen in his book. Some were way ahead of the curve.

I know many here have read and discussed this book, but wanted to share my thoughts on it.

I'd always thought that it would have been good if Doug Hele had written a book.
To my way of thinking, he was a better engineer, always improving things that others had already done.
But then he came along later.

Of course, he too may have decried having to work with old outmoded designs, rather than been given a clean sheet of paper.
But as has been pointed out here already, the H*nda canteen these days runs with a bigger budget than about the whole of the entire British MC Industry*.
So they have a LOT to splash on new designs.
* Inflation not included...

Doug Hele was an interesting guy. Was considered a "tuner" by upper management. One of those super bright guys that gets lost in the shuffle when there is no-one to recognize technical talent.

Didn't Hele (and Hopwood) have a lot to do with the redesign of the BSA/Triumph Bandit,
when Turners design was shown to be less than good enough.

As it happens I've just (literally 15 minutes ago) finished reading a chapter in one of Vic Willoughbys books about the 350 Fury/Bandit. It was an attempt to make the previous Turner designed 350 reliable, quiet, powerful. About the only common feature of the two engines was the height, apart from the obvious capacity and number of cylinders of course. The rest was pretty much pure Doug Hele, with some "design for manufacture" elements from Hopwood. It's a really good example of what a good/brilliant brain can do to overcome problems. Great shame that the design arrived just to late to go into production, the collapse of BSA/Triumph overtook it.
I actually ordered one!!
Doug Hele also made a 180 degree crank Norton Navigator back when he was at Norton (obviously) in the early 60s. Apparently it was so smooth, it hardly had to be bolted down.
A Doug Hele book would certainly have been very interesting.
cheers
wakeup

Rohan said:

I'd always thought that it would have been good if Doug Hele had written a book.

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Although written by Mick Duckworth, there is a book about Doug Hele.

https://normanhyde.co.uk/triumph-experi ... ivery.html

The Fury and Bandit were just too late. They had the products but management took too long to make the right moves.

Even earlier there were product designs that were competitive that were shelved for any number of reasons.

The management just did not understand the marketing of motorcycles.

They didn't recognize the competitive threats until they were in their faces.

Part of a successful business is developing products that people want "before" they even know they want them. Finger on the pulse. Marketing.

The British Motorcycle Industry really didn't lead for a very long time...they followed. The Fury and the Bandit were "me too" products way too late in the game. Not that they were bad designs, but they sure looked like copies rather than new designs.

Did people really want the Honda Cub? Or the Dream? Honda sold the idea of what a motorcycle was and marketed to a different market segment to gain share and then attacked the throat with the CB750. Nothing they produced was revolutionary or unknown in design. They had better quality, reliability, lower cost and marketing. The marketing was the key.

The board rooms at Norton, BSA and Triumph were filled with accountants who barely understood what a motorcycle was let alone understand how to develop and sell the product. They were caught up in business diversification and let the motorcycle business go to hell, even though it was supplying the funds for the diversification. A very classic example of how not to do it. We used to call these guys "Fat Cats". Happy to ride the wave and line their pockets and none of them are anywhere to be found once the bottom falls out. In later years they were "Corporate Raiders". Sucking the good out of a company and then running for the hills.

I believe that Dennis Poore was one of them...his other businesses benefitted while the motorcycle business fell apart. He was no better than the earlier idiots. He allowed the Meridan strike to go on because he wanted to get rid of Triumph. A very poor way to do it...and it ended in the failure of Norton and subsequent demise of Triumph.

It's a very classic case of the rich getting richer and the rest suffering.

dennisgb said:

The board rooms at Norton, BSA and Triumph were filled with accountants who barely understood what a motorcycle was let alone understand how to develop and sell the product. They were caught up in business diversification .

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I'm not sure that Nortons should be included in this sweeping statement. ?
Name another product, other than motorcycles, that came from Nortons ?
Until the AMC era, 500cc was about it, with the occasional 350, and a few 600cc for the sidecar chaps.

And Nortons were oft criticised for their lack of financial acumen,
being a 100% racing-was-everything outfit, and to hell with the finances.
Thats why they had 5 financial restructures (was it ?) in 50 years,
BEFORE the AMC buyout of the early 1950s added to that count.

Mr Poore probably deserves more credit than that too, he could have easily asset stripped the company,
but chose instead the rocky path to keeping Norton production going.
At considerable expense, one would imagine.

Q. How do you make a small fortune from motorcycle manufacturing.
A. Invest a large fortune in it.

Rohan said:

dennisgb said:

The board rooms at Norton, BSA and Triumph were filled with accountants who barely understood what a motorcycle was let alone understand how to develop and sell the product. They were caught up in business diversification .

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I'm not sure that Nortons should be included in this sweeping statement. ?.

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Yes your right it wasn't quite the same at Norton...statement should have been BSA and Triumph since was in reference to the Fury and Bandit.

Rohan said:

Mr Poore probably deserves more credit than that too, he could have easily asset stripped the company,
but chose instead the rocky path to keeping Norton production going.
At considerable expense, one would imagine.

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Poore's took all of the other businesses from BSA (who were all profitable BTW) and put them under Manganese Bronze Holdings. No where is this discussed in terms of how many millions he made off that move. Norton was profitable shortly after he took over...before the merger with Triumph/BSA. How long after that occurred was the collapse? How much money did he actually put into the business after the merger? I think history is too kind to him. Just my opinion.

Sure the deal with the Government was to include funding that was pulled, so he can't be entirely blamed, but there was something in it for him or he wouldn't have pursued it in the first place. What sense did it make for the smaller company (Norton) to take over BSA and Triumph? Because Poore's sold the Government a bill of goods that had a $4.5MM price tag attached to it. Anyone in their right mind should have been able to see this was folly at the time...or they didn't care. Could it be that they wanted it all to collapse with the hope to rebuild with cheaper labor and less overhead? Or possibly the Meridan Co-op was already in the making within the Government...we will never know for sure but something was very strange about the whole sequence of events.

I worked there for almost two years, joining shortly after the Poore take-over. I was based at the Wolverhampton Villiers factory in the "Competition, Experimental and Test" group. The story that was publishe at the time said that he didn't want to see the Norton name disappear and thought he could save it.

He got some really good people in engineering and design who worked on the Commando and AJS Stormer projects, but his selections of top management people weren't very good. The Managing Director, Dr. Bauer, didn't seem to have much of a clue about motorcycles. He was a former Rolls-Royce (Aero Engines) person with a Ph.D in combustion chemistry. He didn't seem to have a very good relationship with his close subordinate managers at Wolverhampton and I don't think he visited Plumstead very often.

I don't remember tha timing on the relocation of the Birmingham Norton product manufacturing line to the Associated Motorcycles place at Plumstead, but a majority of the people didn't move, losing a good deal of expertise. It also made communications difficult, as it was close to a 3-hour trip between the two locations. There was also a significant level of antagonism between the "old-timers" at Plumstead and the "Clever Devils" at Marston Road.

frankdamp said:

I worked there for almost two years, joining shortly after the Poore take-over. I was based at the Wolverhampton Villiers factory in the "Competition, Experimental and Test" group. The story that was publishe at the time said that he didn't want to see the Norton name disappear and thought he could save it.

He got some really good people in engineering and design who worked on the Commando and AJS Stormer projects, but his selections of top management people weren't very good. The Managing Director, Dr. Bauer, didn't seem to have much of a clue about motorcycles. He was a former Rolls-Royce (Aero Engines) person with a Ph.D in combustion chemistry. He didn't seem to have a very good relationship with his close subordinate managers at Wolverhampton and I don't think he visited Plumstead very often.

I don't remember tha timing on the relocation of the Birmingham Norton product manufacturing line to the Associated Motorcycles place at Plumstead, but a majority of the people didn't move, losing a good deal of expertise. It also made communications difficult, as it was close to a 3-hour trip between the two locations. There was also a significant level of antagonism between the "old-timers" at Plumstead and the "Clever Devils" at Marston Road.

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Frank,

Your comments are always welcome because you were there. It's really hard to get a true understanding of Poore's. He seemed to most to be a savior and had his heart in motorcycles, yet some of the things he did, particularly concerning the merger with Triumph/BSA seem odd to me.

Your point on Dr. Bauer is interesting, and his expertise was outside of the motorcycle industry, but it might have been driven by Poore's own and continuing of Norton's ties to racing that brought him there.

Those situations of in fighting you write about exist everywhere, but one of the issues in my mind was the merger of formally competitive manufacturer's and the competition sort of continuing...or the winner's and loser's not knowing who was who. Turner and Hopwood are a prime example of that at the top levels of the companies. In the case of AMC, it makes sense that the old timer's would have a bit of an axe to grind. There likely was a lot of pride there that got stomped on.

dennisgb said:

It's really hard to get a true understanding of Poore's. He seemed to most to be a savior and had his heart in motorcycles, yet some of the things he did, particularly concerning the merger with Triumph/BSA seem odd to me.

Your point on Dr. Bauer is interesting, and his expertise was outside of the motorcycle industry, but it might have been driven by Poore's own and continuing of Norton's ties to racing that brought him there.

Those situations of in fighting you write about exist everywhere, but one of the issues in my mind was the merger of formally competitive manufacturer's and the competition sort of continuing...or the winner's and loser's not knowing who was who. Turner and Hopwood are a prime example of that at the top levels of the companies. In the case of AMC, it makes sense that the old timer's would have a bit of an axe to grind. There likely was a lot of pride there that got stomped on.

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It has always been my understanding that the merger with BSA/Triumph was at the request of the Government, Poore apparently was reluctant. The sit in at Meriden forced (the new) NVT to re-manufacture all the tooling for the triples, as it was all stowed at Meriden, under the control of the co-op people. The management at NVT (presumably including Poore) determined that the only designs of merit worth saving, were the triples. Hence the tooling re-manufacture, this would have cost significant amounts of money, GBP3M springs to mind, but I'm quite happy to be corrected on that. It seems to me that this isn't the action of a management team that wants to kill off a marque. It is to the credit of the (combined) NVT management team that they were able to introduce the T160 at all.

Prior to the formation of NVT, BSA/Triumph was losing vast amounts of money, which is what got it in the mire in the first place. I'm not sure that Poore had too much influence on BSA/Triumph at the time apart from providing some competition.

Dr Bauer did indeed have some , um, unusual ideas for motorcycles. At one point I was shown a frame that he had designed which consisted of four approx 2" diameter tubes spreading out from the steering head, it must have weighed several times the weight of a Commando frame, and yet it was to be powered by a Villiers 250 two stroke twin, the 4T as I remember. The skins of rice puddings need not have worried!

cheers
wakeup

Don't forget that trade unionism was in part to blame for the high cost of manufacturing. If you remember
back in those days in a union shop how it was. Much like civil service. High pay, low effort. lots of bad attitude.
The Duckworth book mentions some job actions and the positively fossilized work rules.
It wasnt one thing that sunk the ship. It was everything.

Onder said:

Don't forget that trade unionism was in part to blame for the high cost of manufacturing. If you remember
back in those days in a union shop how it was. Much like civil service. High pay, low effort. lots of bad attitude.
The Duckworth book mentions some job actions and the positively fossilized work rules.
It wasnt one thing that sunk the ship. It was everything.

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Quite right.
cheers
wakeup

wakeup said:

It has always been my understanding that the merger with BSA/Triumph was at the request of the Government, Poore apparently was reluctant.

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That's not the way Hopwood framed it in his book. Doesn't mean he was correct, but he talks about BSA/Triumph trying to negotiate funding from the Government only to be told that Poore's had a better plan.

When the BSA stock fell to nothing overnight, Poore's changed the terms of the deal and they had no choice but accept it.

As I say "...it's my understanding". I'm quite happy to be proven wrong.
Incidentally, it's "Poore", no "....s".
The UK at that time, early 70s, was an awful place to be working. There was the union unrest, the tail end of the Colonel Blimp era of generally poor management, fuel shortages, lot's of long established companies closing down, poor governance and so on. Mind you industry hadn't experienced the delights of highly qualified idiots such as we endured, and are enduring, coming in and telling everyone how to do their jobs. But that's another thread I suppose.
cheers
wakeup

Wakeup,

Not trying to prove anyone wrong. There are many different views on what happened, I was just paraphrasing what I got from the Hopwood book.

He was on the other side at BSA...in serious trouble and dealing with the end so that view is much different than the Norton perspective. They felt like they got screwed by Poore. The value of the subsidiaries were felt to be double what they got in Hopwood's opinion.

Those of you who were there have a first hand understanding so it's important information and more reliable than what we read about it.

Given all the things that happened, Poore made an effort, just not sure he wasn't trying to make the deal for the subsidiaries to build up his main company. Those parts of the BSA deal were protected from the motorcycle business and survived long after Norton was shut down. He made a good living at MBH afterwards until his death. None of that is talked about much. That was the only point I was trying to make.

Dennis

Wakeup:

You're absolutely right about how things were in the UK in the mid-1960's. That's why we've lived in the US for the last 47 years. I was hired by Boeing in 1968, then got laid off in the massive RIF in 1971. Boeing went from a workforce of 103,000 to 36,000 in 18 months. After three years with a contractor at NASA, Boeing re-hired me and I spent 26 years with the company after that, before taking early retirement in 1998.

Where I worked in Australia was pretty grim as well, at times. Seems like it was a Worldwide syndrome. From 1989 onwards, I happened to be working in the Manufacturing department of Thorn-EMI, AWADI, British Aerospace, BAE Systems......same company but the name changed as a result of takeovers, mergers etc. On average we had rounds of redundancy about every 18 months. At one point Manufacturing went from over 300 down to about 50 overnight. I consider myself lucky to have survived for twenty years in this tumultuous environment. In fact I enjoyed the first 18 years, hated the last two as a result of which I retired 4 years early at 61 in 2008.
The whole "western World" decline of Engineering, whether motorcycle, motor car, aircraft, electronics, optics etc etc is very sad, but unfortunately I believe inevitable, given the march of Globalisation.
cheers
wakeup

When I graduated as a mature-age student as an electronics engineer in the mid-80s, this country was crying out for designers. I've been lucky to stay a designer since then, but the rate at which my industry is collapsing is alarming. I look with envy at other countries that have expanding manufacturing and have enough foresight to see the real value of basic science and R&D. We have no regard for investing our mineral wealth in research, industry or infrastructure. I cannot see how we will not end up with industries in the same state as that which Bert writes about.