David still scootering at 76
It’s nearly 60 years since David Brown went on his first scooter rally on his then brand new Lambretta Li150.
And as we chat at his home in Lincoln, he’s gearing up for the trek to Scarborough with the Horncastle-based Generations Scooter Club, still loving the scooter life as much as when he was a teenager.
“It’s been great fun, and entertainment,” says the 76-year-old. “I’ve enjoyed scootering throughout my life.”
But it didn’t start off that way, David cutting his two-wheeled teeth on a Honda 50, then a Honda 125 motorbike, on which he passed his test.
‘I want one of those’
“Then my friend bought a Lambretta Li150 Pacemaker and I was like Mr Toad when he saw something new – ‘ooh, I want one of those’,” he remembers, soon buying one from A & A Cox in Grantham in 1966.
It opened up a whole new world, even more so when he joined a scooter club in Horncastle, and then one closer to home in Lincoln “because it was a 40-mile saving every time I went anywhere”.
“It was called the Lincolnians back then but after a while a Vespa club formed in Lincoln and, because a lot of the members with Vespas drifted over, we changed to the Poachers Lincoln Lambretta club,” he says, with an early Poachers sign still hanging in his garage.
David travelled all over the country in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, from Torquay to Blackpool, and Bristol to Norfolk, the Isle of Man and even Stockholm.
“There was a rally virtually every weekend during the summer, and we’d throw the tents and stuff on the scooters and head off,” he remembers. “You’d pitch your tent in the rally field, or a farmers’ field, and there was always a lot of drinking and revelry, but we also had various gymkhana events.”
Scooter gymkhanas
These included slow rides, rough rides, jousting, and skill tests.
“With the jousting, the purpose was to knock us off, and the popular thing was to try to hit the rider instead of the jouster,” he smiles, looking at a photograph of himself about to fall off when riding pillion. “I didn’t get injured, but panel racing was the dangerous one.”
This involved someone sitting in an upturned side panel attached by a rope to a scooter and dragged along, in a race around a circular track with other scooters.
He remembers advising a novice racer at Lincoln not to hold on under the panel.
“Did he take any notice? No,” he says. “The panel went up and came down and his thumb was under it, and it chopped the end of his thumb off.
“Someone took him to hospital and came rushing back, saying ‘have you got his glove?’ ‘Yeah why?’ ‘Well, his thumb end is in the glove’. They managed to sew it back on.”
Cleaning and polishing
David entered his Li150 into concours competitions, winning at the Isle of Man in 1968, back when he would spend hours cleaning and polishing his scooter.
The mods and rockers rivalry still lingered, but David and his friends steered clear of any confrontations.
“We didn’t get involved in that, but we nearly did once when we were coming back from Portsmouth,” he says. “We were riding along and we heard the noise. I looked around and there were motorcyclists coming and almost surrounding us. But we were very lucky, because not far behind them was Bromley Lambretta Club and they had 20 or 30 scooters, and the motorbike people just cleared off.”
In 1969 he upgraded to a Lambretta GP200, and in the same year he spotted an old Series 1 Lambretta with a sidecar attached, and it was love at first sight.
The chance to buy one came up at a meeting of the Grantham Newtonians Scooter Club.
“One of my friends had put a Watsonian sidecar on his scooter and he and his girlfriend went out for their first ride with it,” he remembers. “He didn’t fully understand how to ride it, came into a corner and, instead of accelerating round the corner, he braked, which is the worst thing you can do.
“He went straight on, hit something and smashed the sidecar up, with his girlfriend in it. He took it straight off – she wouldn’t have anything to do with it after that.
“I had to do a lot of bodywork on the fibreglass to repair it.”
David got hold of an old Series 2, fitted it with Series 3 bodywork and fitted an SX200 engine before spraying it yellow and green.
Sidecar competition winner
He covered thousands of miles with the combination, touring the continent, and competing in time trials, winning the Full Day Trial at the Isle of Man in 1973 with sidecar passenger Richard Bull.
“It was five trips around the TT course,” he says. “Richard was incredibly nimble, and he was out like a rabbit pushing the sidecar if we were in trouble.”
In 1975, David – who worked for David Brown Tractors (no relation) – met his future wife Betty, and the pair went on holiday with the sidecar combination to the Netherlands and into Germany.
“The only time we broke down was in the late ‘70s, when me and Betty were going on holiday up to Richmond in Yorkshire and the cam follower on the points broke off,” he says. “So that was the end of the little trip. We got just beyond the Doncaster bypass, and stopped at a garage. One of the neighbours had a car transporter and came and picked us up.”
With a young family to raise, scooters took a back seat in the 1980s and, when his parents downsized their home – where he had been storing his scooters – he had to sell up.
Scooter life rekindled
It wasn’t until 2010, and a visit on foot to the Euro scooter rally in Lincoln, that his scootering life was rekindled.
“I met some of my old scooter friends there and that sparked me off again,” he says, buying a 1964 Lambretta Li150 Silver Special.
“Then I thought I’d get a sidecar again, but I didn’t want to put the sidecar on the Silver Special, so I bought a 1959 Series 2 Li150, to which I fitted a standard 200cc engine.
“The tuned scooters have power bands, and you’re all right if you can get in the power band and stay there, but with the sidecar you can’t get in the power band and stay there. The revs drop and once you drop out…”
He got hold of another Watsonian sidecar, and painted the combination in the same yellow and green as his original outfit.
“It’s good fun, really enjoyable,” says David, who has covered more than 60,000 miles on the combination since 2013, with stickers on the sidecar proof of his many excursions.
Trips have included three Derby 150 rallies, a 150-mile jaunt around the Peak District, and a couple of coast-to-coast rides, and the Snake Pass Challenge.
The rallies are a little different to the 1960s and ‘70s, but David still loves the sense of camaraderie.
“Riding scooters does take me back, but they don’t really *do* anything anymore at a rally,” he says. “We’ll have a drink, a cup of tea, a BBQ and a natter, and then come back. There are no gymkhanas or anything like that.”
Vespa GTS for longer trips
In 2020, he bought a brand new Vespa GTS, a recognition that riding the old Lambrettas becomes increasingly difficult as the years advance.
“On longer trips I’ll take the GTS, because there is a difficulty working the clutch and kicking off and that sort of thing on the Lambretta,” says David. “It’s also so much more comfortable, and there are more modern ones on the rallies now, the Vespas and the Royal Alloys, which are popular with the younger people.”
The GTS has also opened up a path to more rides out, courtesy of the Vespa Club of Great Britain’s Riders Regional Challenge, which provides a list of 100 locations to visit over eight months from February to October.
The first time he ticked them all off, he thought ‘I’ve won our region’, which is the north Midlands.
“But the winner last year did 754 sites all across the country,” he laughs. “It’s just a personal challenge and it’s great fun.
“Now I’ve got the Vespa I’ll keep going for as long as I’m able, but still enjoy riding my Lambrettas.”
Scooter stories is a series of articles exploring the lives and experiences of scooterists and collectors. Click on the Scooter Stories category link to read more.
