Running a bus depot in apartheid-era South Africa was not for the faint-hearted.

Jim Scott had moved to the republic from Essex in 1978 in search of a new life with his wife Sylvia, but things were not always easy in KwaZulu-Natal.

In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, as South Africa gradually moved towards free elections, fighting between rival factions from the African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party often centred on the bus network.

As manager of a depot in Pietermaritzburg, Jim was on call to deal with any eventuality, however gruesome.

“Knives through the seat backs”

“You had to have two bus stations – you couldn’t mix the two groups,” he says at his home in Northfleet, Kent. “We had to put steel backs down the bus seats because they would stick knives through the seat backs.

“I remember the tech manager coming in one day saying he can’t keep pace with all the door locks that were being nicked off the driver’s cabs. It was costing us a fortune. It turned out they could use these door locks and handles to make homemade firearms.”

To take his mind off the mayhem, Jim would spend the evenings restoring a 1963 Triumph Thunderbird bought from a Zulu in the bush for 600 Rand, equivalent to about £80 at the time.

Therapeutic Triumph Thunderbird

“It was therapeutic,” he says. “If you’ve just been shot at and had to recover a burnt out bus with 22 bodies in it, you need to come home at night and have something to do.

“You go into your garage and you de-rust 40-odd spokes and it takes your mind off it, a little.”

The Thunderbird came home with Jim when he quit South Africa in 2005, fearing for his and Sylvia’s safety in the worsening security situation.

“Things got worse and worse,” he says. “At night, you’d have steel burglar guards up, and you couldn’t leave a window open, despite it being 35C.

“You’d retreat into your bedroom, lock every door, put your alarm on and go to bed. Somehow, someone managed to get into my house, and I woke up to find somebody at the end of my bed.

“I went for him and chased him and, as I went through the house, he whacked me with a hammer.”

It wasn’t until he returned to England that Jim got the Triumph fully up and running, and there’s little chance of the 74-year-old selling the bike any time soon.

“I like the look and the torque” of the Triumph

“I’ll definitely be keeping it,” he says. “I like the look, and the torque on the thing – when you get it on song and it thumps along the road. People look at it and put their thumbs up. Even when I went round the block just now, a bloke in his front garden stuck his thumbs up.

“You can also get all the bits for them. When I kick the bucket, I’ll leave it to one of my two nephews.”

Jim’s motorcycling journey began a day after his 16th birthday when he bought a 75cc BSA Dandy for £15.

“Yuck,” he laughs, “I couldn’t afford a Bantam, but I flogged that pretty soon because I couldn’t stand the bloody thing.

“I then went into scooters, with a Vespa 150, which I had for about 18 months or two years.”

Jim joined the Vespa Club, travelling all over the country doing “all manner of stupid things”.

Vespa jousting contests

As well as “slip-streaming piece-working gravel lorries and getting the scooter off the clock”, the Club would hold various events, including navigation trials and jousting contests.

Jim remembers starting one 250-mile navigation trial in Newbury, travelling through South Wales overnight and ending up in Bristol.

“It started at 9pm, and if you managed to finish you got a free breakfast,” he says. “If you did it in the time, you could get a prize, but by the time 3am hit you were absolutely knackered and people were falling asleep. You’d drive down the road and there’d be a scooter in a ditch and a bloke fast asleep. It was good fun.

“I blew that scooter up and that’s when I went into cars.”

Jim went through several, including a Hillman Minx, Wolseley 6/110, Alfa Romeo Giulia Ti, Vauxhall Cresta, and an Austin 3-litre, the last of which was sold to pay for a deposit on a house following marriage to Sylvia.

Back to motorbikes

And so it was back to motorbikes, Jim riding a BSA Lightning two up from the couple’s new home in Maylandsea, Essex, to Chelmsford where Syvlia worked and on to his job managing Brentwood bus depot.

“We went on our honeymoon to Ifracombe on that BSA Lightning,” says Jim. “I remember, with all the luggage, it stretched the chain by about two inches.

“I also fell off it three times, once near the B&B in Ilfracombe. There was a one-way street on this steep hill, but the B&B was only about three houses up.

“I went up the wrong way for three days, and there was nothing coming. On the fourth day, there was somebody coming down, and I fell off!

“On the way back after a fortnight, there was a force 9 gale and you were riding at an angle to get through it. Then the exhaust pipes blued up, but we got back.”

The Lightning was traded for a brand new BMW R6 which, by comparison, was a model of reliability.

After a couple of years, Jim got fed up with riding through the winters – “freezing fog was the worst thing – you got off and you’re white from top to bottom, and it takes you about an hour to warm up”.

“Almost wrote the car off”

“So I thought for the next winter, I can’t do that,” he says. “I traded the bike in for a new Fiat 126, thinking I was being smart. Winter comes, and it’s snowing like hell and we’ve got to do this 26-mile run to work – the traffic’s all backed up and I think ‘I know the back roads’.

“I remember going over the top of this hill and, oops, the car’s not going to go where I want it to go, and we sailed down the road doing the skater’s waltz and almost wrote the car off.”

Jim was soon promoted to a bigger depot at Southend, which meant he could no longer drop Sylvia off at work – so it was once again back to two wheels, this time for the pair of them, a Honda CB550K3 and a Honda 70.

By the end of 1977, Jim had grown weary of the battles between the trade unions and senior management, and was looking around for another job when he saw an advert in the Daily Telegraph.

“It said ‘transport men wanted in South Africa’,” he says, “so I went up to London and had an interview. They said ‘if you’re successful we’ll call you and your wife back for another interview’. “When they called back, I said to Sylvia, ‘what the hell are we going to do if they offer us a job?’”

The couple decided that if the offer matched their combined salaries plus 20 per cent, they would accept.

Moving to South Africa

“They offered us more than that, with a car, house, everything,” says Jim, and the decision was made.

After heading south in February 1978, Jim was employed to run bus depots for KwaZulu Transport, first at Gamalakhe, then moving on to Newcastle, Durban, and the headquarters at Pietermaritzburg.

“That’s where we were sitting one day and one of the blokes came into my office and said ‘do you know it’s DJ day today?’” recalls Jim. “I said ‘what the hell are you talking about?’”

He was referring to the famous DJ Run, a historic motorcycle road race first held between Durban and Johannesburg in 1913 now run as a regularity trial.

“The bikes happened to refuel on our bus route so, stuff work, and off we went to spend the whole morning at the refuelling stop,” says Jim, who returned to the depot and said “that’s it, I‘ve got to get a motorbike”.

“I went into the workshops and said ‘does anybody know where there are any motorbikes?’ The Tech Super said ‘leave it with me’, and a week later he said ‘I’ve found one – actually I’ve found three’.

Getting the Thunderbird from a Zulu gentleman

“They were owned by this Zulu gentleman, and included a Speed Twin and a Thunderbird. He had first dibs and took the Speed Twin, and I said I’d have the Thunderbird without even looking at it.

“The next day when I got home, it was in my back garden. It was obviously pretty dilapidated, the exhaust had all gone, the seat was rotten, it had a homemade centre stand, and some weird and wonderful chain guard on it.

“But, because the Pietermaritzburg climate is very good, there’s no rust like here, no salt on the roads or anything like that. So the frame, front forks, wheels, and mudguards were all there.”

Restoring the Triumph, imported to South Africa by the Shimwell brothers of Boksburg and first owned by the Natal Witness newspaper, was a long-running affair, with Jim making return trips to the UK for parts.

“I was working all hours – out there you work 28 hours a day nine days a week,” he says, permanently on call for accidents and incidents.

“I did the restoration as and when I could fit it in. At the same time I was renovating a couple of cars as well, including a Fiat 850 Special.

Travelling to the UK for spares

“The problem with being in South Africa is that you haven’t got the spares supply. I used to come back to the UK once every two years to get spares, and take them back.

“I remember going down to Oliver Barnes at Tri-Supply when he was still in Bournemouth, and spending the whole day in his shop.

“I had four pages of spares I wanted and I sat there and we spent the whole morning building up this pile of spares – centre stand, seat, exhaust, you name it, every nut and bolt and washer I wanted.

“I must admit he was very good. My sister drove me down there and he sat her there in a corner and gave her drinks and kept her quiet.”

The next problem was how to get them back to South Africa…

“They were all packed in suitcases and hand luggage,” he says. “There’s me trying to pretend the hand luggage doesn’t weigh a ton, with a centre stand and exhausts in it. They X-ray it – looking for an AK47 or something and think ‘what’s this?’ I eventually got through customs and started getting the bike back together.”

A hectic work life wasn’t the only reason for the lengthy restoration project, with some projects that Jim farmed out taking far longer than they should have.

“The rear axle on the bike was shot, but I had all the bits, and I took it to a workshop in Pietermaritzburg,” he says. “Weeks and months went by. I kept going back and he’d say ‘I haven’t done it yet’. In the end he finally did it and said ‘you’ve had to wait for so long, here it is, take it, no charge’.

“At the other extreme, I needed to have the front forks remachined and hard chromed. I took them down to Pinetown, a suburb near Durban, walked in the workshop and the bloke had them back within a week.”

Thunderbird was mostly back in one piece

By 1999, the Thunderbird was mostly back in one piece, but Jim didn’t ride it on the road until returning to the UK a few years later.

“Law and order had collapsed,” he says. “The house was broken into five times, you couldn’t go out at night, and we thought ‘this is no way to live’, so we decided to come back, which meant the bike had to be packed up and brought back.”

In 2005, the couple moved to their current home in Northfleet, with Jim working initially as a bus driver before landing a job as a route manager at Dartford.

“I had to work all hours again to get back on a financial even keel,” he says, finally finding the time to finish the Triumph, after plenty more trips to Tri-Supply, and get it registered.

“I had to get it MOTd to get an age-related plate, so I carted it off to Maidstone to get it viewed and checked.”

At last, Jim could start to ride the bike he bought for £80 from a Zulu in the South African bush more than 20 years earlier.

Using the Thunderbird for pottering about and commuting

“I’ve used it for pottering about, and occasionally commuting,” he says, preferring it to the ‘94 Triumph Trident he bought in February 2014. “I enjoy the Thunderbird more – I can chuck it about a bit more because the Trident’s too big.”

On his retirement four years ago, Jim decided to restore more bikes “in order to stay sane”.

“I went on the dreaded eBay, and Tiger Cubs looked like an easy bet,” he says, his winning bit bagging two frames and a box of bits. “I’ve restored the first, and with what was left over I’m building another one.”

Jim’s garage only has space for four bikes, so if he buys any more, something would have to go.

“I’d probably sell the Trident,” he says, with the Thunderbird staying for good.