Peter Fereday rotates the pedals and the little Mobylette whirrs into life.

He’s taking a couple of trips up one of Norwich’s steeper hills – no, Norfolk is not all flat – after chatting about nearly 50 years with the French moped that’s firmly “part of the family”.

It’s a bit of a struggle because, he remembers later, after fitting new tyres he’d forgotten to fully pump them up.

Although the 49cc AV89 has spent much of the last half a century tucked away in the garage, when called upon it’s always done its duty – with a few mishaps along the way.

The 1970 bike, manufactured by Motobécane, was bought by Peter for his now-wife Ann in 1974 to help her get about after she moved from Dudley to Norwich to be with him.

The Mobylette AV89 gave Ann the mobility she needed

At the time, she was living in a shared house and working as a teacher while he lived at home with his parents, and the Mobylette gave her the mobility she needed.

“There was a little bike shop in St Augustine’s and they had a line of mopeds,” he says, sitting in his front garden with a perfect view of the spire of Norwich Cathedral.

“My experience of owning mopeds was from seven or eight years before, so I just went up and down the street and thought ‘it seems fine, we’ll have this one’, not really understanding at the time that it was actually the better Mobylette model in its day.”

Ann’s house share was a few miles away from Peter’s parents, and she would often make the trip over on the moped.

“She’d have food and quite often used to leave at about 10:30pm and ride off into the darkness and cut across country,” he says.

“There were no streetlights, nothing. My mother and father didn’t have a phone – my father was a teacher as well and he refused to have one because he didn’t want phone calls.”

“Ann’s broken down again”

“So if anything happened to Ann on the way back late at night – obviously there were no mobiles or anything – she’d somehow struggle to a house or a pub or whatever and phone my parents’ neighbour, who’d come round, quite often in a dressing gown, and say ‘Ann’s broken down again’.

“So I’d have to throw all the various tools in the car and go over and sort it out. I always knew what it was going to be – it was nearly always oil.

“It’s a two-stroke and she hadn’t mixed the petrol and oil enough, and the oil would settle downwards until it sucked on pure oil. I used to take a little bowl with me, drain a bit of fuel off with the oil, take the float thing off, clean the carb out, put all the oil back in the tank at the top end, shake it up, and it’s off again.”

This happened about five or six times in the mid ‘70s, but one night lives long in the memory, when Ann broke down in the middle of nowhere a few yards from the entrance to a driveway lit by a single bulb.

“She got there, coughed and spluttered the last few yards, and that was it – completely stuck,” he says. “Then somebody comes along in a car, stops and says ‘are you all right dear?’

“She gives them the phone number to call, and is completely reliant on this person doing what they said they’ll do – but they did phone the neighbour.”

Finding Ann and the Mobylette outside a turkey farm

Peter got a second hand description of where, exactly, Ann had broken down, but they had an agreement that she take the same route home every time, so he had a fair chance of finding her if she was ever stranded.

“I followed this route, and was thinking ‘where is she?’ but then I saw this little figure standing under this bulb, so I pulled up in the car,” he says, finding Ann outside what turned out to be a turkey farm.

“Off comes the side cover of the moped, but the trouble was, with the clanking off the spanners, one turkey went ‘gobble gobble’, then another one went ‘gobble gobble’, and before you knew it the whole farm was erupting.

“It was getting on towards winter, and I thought ‘turkey rustlers’, right? So then all the lamps start coming on, blazing at us. Quick! I was furiously trying to put the covers back on and scarper before the farmer came out with a shotgun.

“She learned in the end that she had to thoroughly mix in the oil…”

Storing the Mobylette away after passing the driving test

Ann rode the moped for about 18 months until she passed her car test, when it got stored away in the back of the garage of the couple’s first home together.

“Her first car was a 1200cc Mk1 Cortina, complete with the Mach 1 stripe, which was quite funny,” says Peter. “Poor Ann driving around and getting some mickey taking.”

The Mobylette was moved to their current home in the 1980, in the back of a Luton van, and remained in storage until sometime in 1984.

That was when it was Peter’s turn to use the little bike, having taken his moped test in his younger days and ridden a Phillips Panda followed by a Phillips Gadabout.

“I started work in a drawing office when I was 15 and, after pedalling to work six miles or so from my mother and father’s place and getting absolutely fed up with it, I decided to get a moped,” he remembers.

“The Panda was a single gear pedal and go, and after about a year I decided I needed a better one and went to a Gadabout. With the Panda on its last legs, the final straw was on the way to do a part exchange; having organised a price, I got a puncture on the front tyre and I ended up walking into his workshop with a completely flat tyre hanging off the rim.

The Gadabout was like a Rolls-Royce

“The Gadabout had three gears so it was like a Rolls-Royce compared to what I was used to.”

As anyone who took a bike test back in the day will know, Peter’s was a rudimentary affair. 

“I did all these silly things going in and out through cones, and then he said at some point along this road I shall step out in front of you with a clipboard,” he says.

“As I turned into the road I saw the corner of his clipboard behind a tree, so as I approached him I obviously knew and brought it safely to a halt before I took him out. ‘OK, that’s it, you’ve passed’.”

After passing his car test, Peter got a sidevalve Ford Popular and, later an MGB, in which he travelled all over Europe. Over time, it became seriously rusty.

By 1984 it had been parked up for some major work, and the couple was by then trying to survive on one car: a splitscreen Beetle.

Peter had left the drawing office, and was doing “all sorts of stuff, including helping restore an old farmhouse – anything not to go back in the drawing office”.

Taking the Mobylette out of storage

“Then I got this phone call: ‘Please Pete, come and help us out.’ So I got sucked into a job out on the ring road,” he says.

“I was stuffed because we only had the one car, so then this got pulled out of the garage, where it was buried under a pile of stuff.

“It was then I put Hammerite on the bits that were in need of something. This, of course, would be very frowned upon these days, but back then – what the heck! At least it has kept the rust away till even now in 2021.

“I also rigged up extra front and rear lamps powered by a bicycle rim dynamo, to improve the chance of me being seen. I used it for about a year or so, backwards and forwards to work, and it performed fine.”

Once he was earning a little more, the couple could afford a second car, and the Mobylette was once more out of favour and parked up in 1986 – where it remained for just over 30 years.

Parking the Mobylette up for over 30 years

“It had done its job,” says Peter, now 73, who never had any intention of selling the moped.

“I would probably only have got £50 for it, and I wasn’t desperate for £50, so it just wasn’t sensible to sell. It’s probably worth a lot more now than it was then.

“I also had a two-car length garage, and it was buried at the end, not taking up a lot of space.”

Come 2017, and Peter was persuaded to resurrect the bike after chatting to friends at the “Old Man’s Memory Club” – four mates who meet in the pub on a Thursday night, and so named because they spend their time racking their brains remembering old films and music.

“We’re all into bikes and cars and things, and one of the other guys has got a 2CV van and various mopeds, and really it was the interest of that,” he says. “He’s got a shed full of stuff, and it made me think ‘I wonder if… although I knew it would still fire up.”

Getting the French moped running again

The bike was uncovered from its tomb, and Peter set about getting it running again.

“The worst thing I had was the petrol tank – it was a nightmare because it’s part of the frame so you can’t remove it,” he says. “Unless the bike is devoid of everything you can’t pick it up and shake it upside down, so I must have spent three days just constantly filling it with every solvent I could think of, and then draining it into bottles.

“I kept doing it until the lumps stopped coming out, then put a filter in the line and it was still another two to three weeks of use until finally I got it all out.”

So how did it feel, after 30 years, to be back on the moped he last used in the 1980s?

“It was hilarious really,” says Peter. “The main thing I noticed more than anything, apart from avoiding the extra cars that are around, was potholes and the damage to roads.

“I was swerving around stuff I never would have had to have done in the 80s – it just shows you how bad the roads have got. We’re talking holes you could drop half a front wheel in. You have to be so careful. You think things would have improved, but they haven’t.”

Peter was pleasantly surprised at the reaction to the AV89 when he first took it into the city on a trip to the bank.

“I went to the bike park, and there were all these superbikes and sportsbikes,” he says. “I go pop-popping in there, and I think I’m going to get the mickey taken out of me something rotten.

Superbike and sportsbike owners really appreciated the Mobylette AV89

“I park the bike up, trying to be as cool as I can, take my helmet off, chain the bike to one of the hooks, and walk back past these guys all sitting on the wall.

“‘Come on then, let’s hear it, take the mickey’. And they are ‘no mate, good on you, nice to see it’s still on the road, what is it, how old is it?’ They were very appreciative of it, which surprised me, but it does seem to be a biking thing. It doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s on the road, you’re OK.”

Peter does still get some strange looks, however, especially when he uses the pedals to give him a little extra oomph on uphill roundabouts.

“People must think ‘what the hell is that?’” he says, “when they see somebody doing a couple of turns of the pedals to give you that extra boost at a roundabout or a junction.”

Pedal power is sometimes necessary because of the nature of ‘Mobymatic’ transmission, where the engine springs back to change the ratio between the engine end and the drive chain end.

When accelerating even slightly uphill, it wants to change into a lower gear too quickly, and “if you’ve got someone behind you in a car that’s expecting a bike to go zooming off…”

That’s why Peter added a ‘Heath Robinson” device to prevent the engine moving backwards, and thus keep it in a lower gear for longer, aiding low-speed acceleration.

Mobylette AV89 “brilliant fun”

“The longer you can prevent that variation the longer it keeps it in a lower gear,” he explains. “But it’s still much easier to give it one or two pedals and you’re up to 10-15mph and off.”

Peter is a member of the Norfolk section of the EACC, a club dedicated to mopeds, autocycles and cyclemotors, and “keeps threatening to go on one of these strange weekends where about 50 blokes all get together and ride around the country lanes, with a support van behind”.

“We haven’t done it yet, but my pal at the Old Man’s Memory Club has been threatening to stick a couple of them in the van (Peter’s VW camper) and join the end of the queue.”

Given her breakdown traumas with the Mobylette in the 1970s, you would be forgiven for thinking that Ann would have less than fond memories of the bike, but she takes a break from looking after the couple’s grandson to lay that to rest: “No, I love it.”

“It gave me my freedom, and I had brilliant fun on it,” she says. “I only fell off once, on an oil slick on a roundabout, and the garage opposite took the blame, saying they should have cleared it up.”

So what does the future hold for the bike that’s been part of the family for 50 years?

“I’ll use it for now, and pass on to my son or something,” says Peter, “It just puts a smile on your face, and I think he’d keep it, just because…”