Martyn Guest’s two BSAs may look like they’ve just ridden through a ploughed field, but that’s the way he likes them.

“When other people are sitting indoors toasting crumpets in the winter, I’m out getting my bikes dirty,” he smiles, pointing out that he has other bikes that he does clean, including a pair of Nortons.

“I like to polish my Nortons, but I like to keep my BSAs dirty.”

Martyn, a self-employed electrician, bought both the 1952 M21 combination and 1953 B31 in 1984 and, despite periods off the road, they’re still in regular use today.

“I’ve never thought of selling them,” he says. “I’ve had a couple of offers for the combo, but I’m not really interested.

BSAs have “lots and lots of memories”

“I’ve acquired more bikes, and I have sold some, but not many. I tend to keep them. Those two bikes have lots and lots of memories of taking children out on them and in the sidecar.”

It was the birth of his eldest daughter Rhea that prompted Martyn to buy the M21, a post-war descendant of the rugged wartime M20 and known for its prowess as a combination bike.

“I decided it would be a good idea to get a combo, and I fancied an M21, so I set about looking for one,” he says. “In those days, it was looking at adverts in Motor Cycle News, unless you knew somebody locally who had one, which didn’t seem to be happening.

“There was one abortive attempt, when I hitchhiked from Norwich to Glossop and got the train back. I left early in the morning one day and got back late in the morning the following day. It already had a sidecar on but it wasn’t quite good enough for me.”

Another one came up in the equally distant Bristol, but this time Martyn got a lift on the back of a friend’s BSA B40.

“We left early in the morning in January 1984,” he says. “It was well cold – we were absolutely freezing. We went on the motorway just so we didn’t get lost, and the bike was struggling on any incline.”

On arrival, this time the M21 was in “lovely condition, all original looking” and, after a quick test ride, Martyn handed over about £300 and the pair set off for home.

Taking the scenic route

“We set off out into the country, on a more scenic route, and looked for somewhere to stay for the night,” he says. “We found a village and there was one of those barns with no sides on, but it was full of straw bales so we made ourselves up a little house out of bales.

“I’d brought two survival blankets with me and some sandwiches, and there was a pub nearby so we went there and had a pint or two, and then settled down to sleep the night.

“There was snow, and loads of wind. The next morning the weather had changed, the snow and wind had stopped and it was really mild for a winter’s day.”

Martyn, who was 25 at the time, then found a sidecar chassis locally, bolting it on and riding it home in the snow.

“Not having ridden a sidecar before, and with it not being set up properly, it was quite difficult,” he remembers, his friend who had given him a lift to Bristol offering to set it up for him.

“I thought ‘can he do that?’ He did tend to tell tall stories sometimes, but I thought he can’t make it any worse so I’ll let him have a go.

“I went round to his house, he got all these bits of wood and bits of string, messed about for a while, and it was set up perfectly.

“The next thing was to build a suitable box to fit my partner and child in, so I had a carpenter friend help me do that. At the time I had a Ford Granada, and I took the front passenger seat out of that and put it on this big bit of ply.”

The carrycot also went on the plywood base, which was then cut to size and surrounded by wooden sides and a lid beneath which the cot would sit.

“Car with no front passenger seat”

“I then had a car with no front passenger seat, but it didn’t get used much once I’d got the combo working. Later on as she came out of the carry cot my partner would sit with her on her lap, and if I took her out on my own we tied her in a child’s car seat. She used to love it.”

As a teenager too young to ride, Martyn remembers dreaming about the Norton Commandos and Triumph Bonnevilles in the local motorcycle dealer, but he sidestepped two wheels at 16 to wait a year until he could drive a car.

A small Vauxhall was more convenient a vehicle at the time to carry his tools around while working as an apprentice electrician, and it was followed by a Vauxhall Victor and a Ford Zephyr before the Granada.

He didn’t buy his first bike until he was 21, and got a date for his test before he even knew how to ride.

“I got a date through, but I didn’t even have a bike and I couldn‘t ride one,” he laughs. “Luckily one of the guys I knew had just passed his test and he had a Honda 250 Dream for sale so I bought that off him, got on it, rode it and two months later I had my licence in December 1979.”

Next came a Triton, a Triumph engine in a Norton frame, which was significantly quicker and handled much better.

Martyn still had the Triton when he bought the M21, but not for much longer.

“I was riding it and a car pulled out in front of me, and the front wheel got stuck in the wheel arch and I went flying over it,” he says. “I was unhurt, but the bike was damaged. By the time the insurance was all sorted out I’d got the combo and I’d got used to riding slowly.

“I got on the Triton, which hadn’t been repaired but was rideable, and thought ‘this is just too fast’. I went round to a friend of mine and said this, and he said ‘do you want to do a swap?’”

After paying for replacement tyres for the Triton, Martyn came away with the B31, a 350cc OHV single, which was considerably slower.

He now had the combo for multiple passengers, although his son Jacob never went in the sidecar as a child, and the B31 for solo or pillion rides.

From pubs to cafes

“There were a lot of us at the time with British bikes, and we just used to meet up and go for rides, or meet at pubs,” he says. “Nowadays, we go out and stop somewhere for a cup of tea!”

Both bikes were in regular use until 1992, when the gearbox on the M21 started playing up, Martyn unsuccessfully repairing it a couple of times.

Having split up with his partner, he became a parent for a third time and became a single dad to Alice, which “didn’t give me a lot of chance to be messing about with motorbikes”.

The bikes were garaged as a car became a necessity to ferry around his three children, two of whom lived nearly 20 miles away.

“Then when my youngest started school I decided I could have a motorbike again, so I got the B31 back on the road and used that,” he says. “After a while I had a little bit of money saved up and thought ‘maybe I should get another bike, I could do with something a bit faster’, because the B31 is quite slow, something I could overtake some cars in.”

It was time to realise his boyhood dream of owning a Norton Commando.

“There was a guy who worked at the electrical wholesalers I was going to who was in the Norton Owners Club, and he gave me a pile of old bike magazines.

“They were all out of date, but I was just looking at the bikes for sale with a friend and said I wouldn’t mind a Commando. He remembered that because the next day he phoned me up and said he’d just been somewhere with a mate and there was a Commando for sale there.

“I went and had a look, but because it was the first one I’d looked at, I didn’t immediately buy it. “A few months later I hadn’t seen another one, so I phoned up and it was still there so I bought it. Then I had a slow bike and a fast bike – the combo was still sitting in the garage languishing away.”

Martyn then decided to look for something that “could go a bit fast and a bit slow”, namely a Norton ES2 500 single in a featherbed frame.

Another new bike

Fast forward to 2014, and yet another bike entered the collection thanks to some savings that were lying idle.

“I had some money in an ISA that started off as a TESSA, and it had been sitting there for ages,” says Martyn. “We’d just had the financial crash, I wasn’t putting any money in and I wasn’t getting any interest and I thought ‘there’s no point having that’, I’d be better off getting another bike.”

Another BSA, an A10, arrived from Brighton, taking the bike numbers up to five, which became six with a more modern 1994 BMW R80 RT, for longer distances, and seven with a BMW K75 that Martyn keeps at his niece’s garage in Cornwall and shares with his brother when they go to visit.

In the meantime, the M21 remained out of action for many years, despite Martyn’s attempts at solving the gearbox issue and building a new sidecar.

The old “pretty flimsy” sidecar became damaged and, by 1988, it was in a state of disrepair and needed to be replaced by something more sturdy.

“I started off with just the base from the old sidecar, and put on a plastic bread tray so I could put luggage on it,” he says. “I rode around with that for a while, and someone even had a ride on it. “Then I thought I’d build a box and I bought all the wood. I went for heaviness this time so I could keep the wheel on the ground.”

While the bike was off the road, the new box sat for nearly 30 years in the lock-up garage.

“It had got woodworm, so I just painted it with used engine oil and hoped that sorted it out,” says Martyn, now 64.

“A few years ago I took it down to the guy who I bought the Commando off, and he did all the work that needed doing and got it back on the road. It took him about three years in between other things…

“I got it back here, bolted on the sidecar and finished off the electrics and various little things, and it was ready to go again.”

A mere six bike to choose from

With six bikes at home to choose from, how does Martyn decide which to ride?

“It depends on what I want to do,” he says. “Sometimes I have to force myself to ride ones that don’t get ridden, just so they get used. The Nortons get ridden in the summer, they’re fairweather bikes, and I try not to ride them in the rain.

“I like to just potter about on the B31, going slowly down the little roads. I’ve got a friend who’s got a Sunbeam S7 that also goes quite slowly, so when I meet up with him for a ride it’s a good idea to be on the B31, because they’re speed matched. It’s also a winter bike.

“If I’ve got to move things about I’ll use the combo, or sometimes I’ll take a passenger, or if it’s icy or snowy. It’s good for that because you can’t fall off!”

There is a bike for every occasion, but the two old BSAs mean a little bit more than all the others.