The legendary fire that destroyed the original Royal Enfield factory

Fire fighters couldn't save the blazing factory.

 Half a century before Royal Enfield motorcycles were made in India, they were produced in the English industrial midlands, in the town of Redditch, an ancient village that by the 1870s had become the center of the needle and fishing tackle industry. 

Incredibly, it's claimed that Redditch and surrounding districts made 90 percent of the world's needles by the 1870s. (I was amazed when my wife found a circa-1935 packet of Redditch needles in a sewing kit left by the elderly previous owners of our house!) 

From precision engineering of pins and needles grew new technologies, first of bicycles, and then of motorcars and motorcycles.

There's a plaque on the wall of a building on Hewell Road, in Redditch, marking the location of the immense factory that once stood around it, turning out Royal Enfield bicycles and motorcycles by the thousands.

You can see a photo of that building on Jorge Pullin's blog, My Royal Enfields. (Jorge has done a series of articles about Royal Enfield factories in Britain.)

But the Hewell Road factory wasn't the birth place of Royal Enfield. The bicycle and motorcycle company grew out of a building then just outside Redditch, in a building where sewing pins had been made.

Until last week, the site of that original Royal Enfield factory was unmarked. The location is at 196 Enfield Road, in the leafy Redditch district of Hunt End. (Of course the road wasn't originally called "Enfield Road" before the Enfield Cycle Co. located there; it had been called Hunt End Lane, a name since reapplied to a new road in a nearby subdivision.)

Royal Enfield historian Gordon May relates history of the Hunt End Works before unveiling of the new plaque. Project Origin, a replica of the first Royal Enfield motorcycle, is at left.

The plaque in place.

The new plaque was placed June 21 on the remains of a brick wall said to have surrounded the original factory. The wall is all that's left now. 

That's because the factory burned beyond saving in a dramatic fire on March 8, 1969.

The first factory was built, sometime after 1851, as a needle factory named "Givry Works." The Red Lion pub was on Enfield Road nearby, and may have been associated with the factory: workers likely got part of their pay in tokens for use in the pub. (The pub still stands on Enfield Road.)

The Red Lion pub saw Royal Enfield come and go next door.

Expanded over time, the Givry Works at Hunt End was producing bicycles by 1888. Those bicycles eventually began being branded as Royal Enfields.

This is where the first Royal Enfield motorcycle would have been assembled, in 1901.

By the Spring of 1904 this factory in Hunt End had added a purpose built-facility, between the original Givry Works and the Red Lion pub, specifically for production of motorcycles and motor cars.

The Hunt End Works, circa 1904, with new addition in the foreground.

Despite economic ups and downs, the Enfield Cycle Co. then managed to approve construction of the different, much grander factory, on Hewell Road in Redditch proper.

Royal Enfield would move out of the Hunt End factory in 1907, repurchase it in 1912, and finally vacate it for good in 1920.

The Hunt End Works would go on to serve other businesses, eventually becoming a storage facility for Dunlop Tyres.

The Hunt End Works in 1935, when it housed Batteries Limited. 
Note Red Lion pub at extreme left. (Historic England Photo)

And this sets up the story of former Enfield employee Les "Kipper" Gibbs, who was, by 1969, a Dunlop employee.

In Anne Bradford's book "Royal Enfield, The Story of the Company and the People Who Made It Great," Gibbs told how he was the last worker out of the Dunlop warehouse the Saturday of the fire.

He found it ironic that a former Royal Enfield man was the last one out of the first Royal Enfield factory before it was gone forever.

Whoever told it, the tale gets more colorful yet. According to the RedditchVirtualMuseum:

"One of the caretakers liked a hot lunch so at midday he would take an old tyre up to the top floor, spread it out, put his little stove in the centre and heat his lunch. Unfortunately, one day he went to sleep. When the fire brigade arrived they discovered that all the water pipes in Redditch were (what they described as) Victorian and very narrow, and totally impossible to carry enough water to put out a fire. They had to get water from Redditch."

The Redditch Indicator covered the fire.

The Redditch Indicator newspaper captured the blaze in a full-page story the next day, Sunday, March 9, 1969, with photographs. The Redditch Library reproduced the newspaper page in a Facebook post in 2021.

The type is too small to read the Redditch Indicator article in the Facebook post, but an account from the Sunday Birmingham Mercury is online at the British Newspaper Archive, and is readable. Some excerpts:

"At Redditch, in the biggest fire of the day nearly 20,000 car tyres went up in flames at the Dunlop Tyre Company's storage depot. Fifty firemen from all parts of Worcestershire and reinforcements from Warwickshire fought the huge blaze for hours before getting it under control.

"The depot is one of the biggest of Dunlop's 50 storage depots. A huge pall of smoke rose high over Redditch and flames leaping 60 feet into the air could be seen in Birmingham, 16 miles away.

"A Dunlop spokesman said: 'A large number of Mini car tyres are stored at this depot and it may result in temporary shortage of some sizes of tyres for perhaps a week or a fortnight...'

"The fire in the depot at Enfield Road, Hunt End, was discovered just after six o'clock last night. One half of the building was alight when firemen arrived.

Fire fighters arrived to find the Hunt End Works ablaze.

"The man who gave the alarm, Mr. Samuel Brookes, is the owner of a timber yard next door to the store.

"He said: 'I saw black smoke coming from the roof. After I told the fire brigade I saw the roof rapidly disintegrate as flames shot 60 feet into the air. It was fantastic...'

"Last man to leave the store was the gateman Mr. Edgar Vale who locked up at 12:45 p.m. The night man was not due to report until 7 p.m...

"As fireman fought the blaze people crowded into the street, and traffic jammed the surrounding roads.

"Housewives took cups of tea to the firemen and police were called in to deal with the crowds.

"After a series of muffled explosions from the building, residents in houses near the depot were warned by the police that they might have to be evacuated. But firemen prevented flames threatening their homes."

Homes line one side of Enfield Road, across from factory.

The factory site would be cleared, and the modern Hunt End Industrial Estate occupies the space today, behind a tree line, its entrance being not on Enfield Road but off Dunlop Road, to the north.

Yet, in an odd way, a related bit of the Givry Works remains on Enfield Road.

Author Anne Bradford lived at 66 Enfield Road, less than a mile away from the Givry site, and always said that her home was a "replica" of the original Givry Works. In fact, she said this was what inspired her to write about Royal Enfield history.

The Givry Works needle mill as it appeared in 1869.

From left, 66, 64 and 62 Enfield Road as they appeared in 2020.

The resemblance is apparent, if you compare 66, 64 and 62 Enfield Road on Google Streetview to the 1869 illustration of the Givry Works. The side-by-side fronts of the main buildings appear very similar, although not identical.

An explanation for this is in RedditchVirtualMuseum:

"In the 1830s, all the land in the Crabbs Cross area was owned by Farmer Eades. Then he sold a small piece of ground to William Welch to build a needle mill. Welch had a relative who was so taken with the needle mill that he asked Farmer Eades for permission to build an identical mill a bit further along the road. Consequently two identical mills were built, the oldest was Ashberry House, near the top end of Enfield Road (number 66), and the second was Givry Works, halfway along."

Royal Enfield cured his mid-life crisis

Here's a portrait of a very happy me, with my daughters, in 2001.

 People often ask me about my old Royal Enfield Bullet. One question though, isn't asked as often now as it used to be. 

That question is: "Did you restore it yourself?" 

The answer was always "no, I bought it new. It's an old design, still made in India." 

Probably the reason no one asks anymore if I restored the motorcycle is the fact that I now look as old as it does! 

Sure, they don't necessarily assume I'd bought it new in 1955 (when I was five years old). But they'd be justified in thinking, "Hey, this guy is old enough to have bought it in 1970." 

In 1970, at age 20, I would very much have liked to have had a motorcycle. But a car seemed more practical and, soon, I had a wife and children and buying a motorcycle seemed irresponsible. 

Then, at 50, came my mid-life crisis. I realized that if I didn't get a motorcycle soon, I wouldn't have a motorcycle, ever. I decided to get one. 

Still, I didn't have much hope I would find the motorcycle of my childhood dreams. In 2001  motorcycles popular in the U.S. were big, powerful and flashy.

But I still wanted the sort of motorcycle that had existed in 1955 — or 1945, for that matter. It would be simple, naked and probably slow. These vintage machines were available used, but I was no mechanic.

I had tried to restore vintage cars, and it didn't work out well. I didn't want a motorcycle I would have to restore.

Then I found out about the Royal Enfield Bullet from India. It seemed like a miracle. The motorcycle of my dreams still existed, and there was a dealer right in my home town!

Buying a motorcycle remained a selfish, and, I suppose, irresponsible, action.

But confronting midlife answered that concern: it was now or never. This was my last chance. The only question was how to quiet family concerns.

I don't claim to be an expert at subterfuge. But my campaign of small steps gradually made it happen.

My mid-life crisis is now a quarter-century back in my rearview mirror.

I don't necessarily recommend buying a motorcycle. It's a personal decision, worth serious thought.

I'll just say that, for me, at mid-life, it was the right medicine.

Will California finally tame e-bikes?

An e-biker reports what California is considering doing about them.

 Bear with me for a moment. I want to applaud California for regulating so-called electric "bicycles," the fast ones that we call "bicycles," even if they don't have pedals! 

I'm reacting to an informative video by an e-bike rider that explains what is under consideration. 

But, first, a little background. 

I've just returned from a family reunion, held in California, my first visit to the Golden State in years. California has changed a lot in the decades since I lived there, but there was one thing I was sure to keep in mind, something I remembered from my days there as a young driver: 

California actually enforces pedestrians' right of way in crosswalks.

Driving our rental car, I paused when pedestrians stepped off the curb and, when I was a pedestrian myself, I had the unusual experience of cars stopping to let me get safely across the street. It was nice. It seemed civilized.

This is not generally the case in any other U.S. state I've visited. Drivers routinely —maybe even intentionally — intimidate people in crosswalks into letting the cars barrel through first, regardless of the "Walk" signal.

If the traffic light changes to "Don't Walk" before the pedestrians make it across, well, that's just too bad.

This is the law of the urban jungle. Pedestrians have a lot more to lose in case of collision with a car, so they must beware.

Unfortunately, now, with the advent of electric (so-called) bicycles, the same intimidating danger of collision extends to sidewalks and pathways almost everywhere. Not all riders of electrics use the walkways, of course, but enough do, in cities, to create a whole new dynamic.

Parents pushing strollers, children walking to school, seniors moving slowly and people walking dogs on leashes are forced, by the fast-moving (and silent!) danger, to give way to what are in fact, whether legally defined as such or not, motor vehicles on the sidewalks.

Ironically, these riders use the sidewalk ramps at intersections that were originally intended to ease the way for the handicapped — not for motorized traffic. Well, that certainly didn't work out as planned!

Finding a way under law to enhance safety is complicated, and California may or may not get it right.

The e-bike riders fear and oppose having to register, pay taxes, display license plates, wear safety gear, carry required lighting, and endure speed limits far below their speed capabilities. These are all things most motorcyclists accept without complaint.

Most basic to motorcycling law are age limits on when a young adult can ride.

Increasingly, these fast-moving electric machines, purchased by adults, are being ridden by their children. Age limits? My home state doesn't seem to have them.

Obviously, no one expects to ride a motorcycle on a sidewalk. Yet, understandably, e-bike riders want to ride on sidewalks and pathways. It's safer for them than riding in the street and, besides, the practice is that, on the sidewalk, you can ride "against traffic." 

It seems pretty clear that the future is electric. There will be more electric motorcycles that will obey all  the standards set for motorcycles. Good.

Increasingly, there also will be forms of electric mobility that may require lesser standards.

Although, if  you think about it: why?

If you're going that fast, don't you need to be on the street, obeying the laws that apply on the street?

Posing my Royal Enfield with a tank

My Royal Enfield motorcycle with M60 tank.

 Royal Enfield's long connection to military service naturally inspires owners to pose their motorcycles in front of military hardware. These opportunities usually involve war memorials. 

So, yes, that's my Royal Enfield Bullet, posed next to a tank. It's not the first time I've managed to photograph my motorcycle close to a war memorial. 

It is, however, the closest I've ever gotten to one. 

In 2021 the Royal Enfield Owners Club (UK) created a calendar for 2022, with the months illustrated with photos submitted by members. Several of the months showed Royal Enfields in front of military objects, including a superb shot with a Spitfire airplane! 

I'm jealous. Not many Spitfires or Sopwith Camels are on display near my home in Florida.

I did manage to get a photo of my Bullet with a Korean War era Sabre jet; but the jet was mounted on a pylon, so it wasn't easy.

Other times I got a photo with a cannon.

Then, recently, I became aware of a tank on display in a nearby park, as a memorial to Purple Heart (wounded-in-action) veterans. Photos of it suggested it might be close enough to the street for me to get a photo with my Royal Enfield.

The tank is described as an M60A3TTS. It's the kind of tank usually referred to as a Patton tank, although the M60 was not officially named that. The name sticks because it shares a general appearance with U.S. tanks since the M46 Patton, which fought in the Korean War.

A prominent feature of the M60 (and the M48 before it) is the cupola atop the turret, giving the tank commander a miniature turret of his own, armed with a machine gun.

It's a distinctive look, making the tank popular with model builders, although in practice it was often criticized for making the tank taller and thus harder to hide on the battlefield.

In 1989 the US Army had a total of 5,400 model M60A3TTS tanks. The last of these left service with the National Guard in 1997, leaving plenty available for displays. (Some ended up in the ocean, as artificial reefs.)

The Military Order of the Purple Heart Chapter 674 received Oakland Park city permission to place a surplus M60 on display in Veterans Park, 3805 NW 21st Ave., in 1996.

Interestingly, it was expected to be not only a solemn memorial, but an active playground for children. And why not? It's impervious to damage. There are no "Keep Off" signs here.

But this meant that it eventually was positioned on a (safer) sand pad, not concrete.

In practice, the scale of the tank makes it uninviting to children — it's hard to get up onto it. But the loose sand makes the tank almost impervious to anyone trying to maneuver a motorcycle into position for a photo!

So, after riding the motorcycle to the tank on the sidewalk (no one was looking) I had to huff and puff to get the ideal picture. 

There was no good way to get the long barrel of the big gun entirely in the photo. Also the size of the tank reduced my motorcycle to insignificance in comparison.

So compromise was necessary. How did I do?

(By the way, the tank appears white. It actually is a very faded desert sand in color. The machine gun originally in the cupola is not fitted.)