#side car

[opelman]

522 - SGR Suzuki by Laurent Quérité Via Flickr: Championnat de France FSBK Side-Car L. ERAGNE / S. CESCUTTI Circuit de Ledenon Gard France IMG_5432

[undead-knick-knack]

Road trip 🖤💜

[fidjiefidjie]

Bonjour, bonne journée ☕️ 🎅

Santa Claus en Side-car dans Oxford Street 🇬🇧 Londres 1949

Photo Fox Photo/ Getty Images

[ledepassionne]

Moto-Guzzi

[life-spire]

@ limamauro23

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[boanerges20]

1971 Kawasaki GT500 Mach III Side Car.

[junglestrut]

Honda Monkey Sidecar

[gibier3000]

We came across this old photo of John Tickle calling at our house in Hornsey, north London, to enquire whether my older brother John Stevens was available to act as his mechanic for a trip to a race circuit in Spain. My brother was at work at the time but our Dad used this as an opportunity to practise his newfound retirement hobby of photography. John Tickle’s business career in later years is reasonably well documented but I thought it might be useful to fill in a little of the earlier years. I asked my brother for memories of the Tickle connection and this is how he recollects the events of 60 years ago. John Tickle was born 1936 and the 1939 register shows the family in Sutton Road, Muswell Hill N10. He attended Tollington Grammar School and was in the school swimming set, as was my brother. John Tickle was so good that he was selected for the British swimming team at the 1952 Olympics but unfortunately a bout of influenza put paid to that. My brother didn’t get to know Tickle then, because they were in different year groups and of course a lower year wouldn’t presume to talk to a higher year and an upper year wouldn’t deign to converse with a lower year. It was only after schooldays were over that a mutual friend introduced them, because John Tickle needed a mechanic for his Manx Norton and brother John was an engineering apprentice with the Napier company that made the Deltic engines that the diesel railway locos got their name from. Brother John helped Tickle out at various English circuits at weekends, then used a summer holiday to accompany Tickle to some continental circuits, Mouscron, Mettet and Zandvoort. Up till then, John Tickle had raced a solo bike but striking up a friendship with a Dutch sidecar racer converted him to chair racing, with his wife Cathy as passenger. In those days it was still mostly a matter of bolting a sidecar chassis onto a solo bike. The sleek purpose-built integral racing outfits were yet to appear on the scene. Thereafter, John Stevens’s mechanicking tailed off, as he now had a fulltime job. John & Cathy Tickle became well known round the circuits, home and abroad, as a privateer. He developed a business supplying Manx Norton spare parts, initially from premises at 163 Potters Bar High Street and subsequently expanding to a factory in St Neots, Cambridgeshire.