Chainblogging: Vintage English Motorcycles

This is the chainblogging post I promised last weekend and never delivered. Oh well, it's still quicker than sending it by Royal Mail. ;-)

In my first year at secondary school, one of the things we concentrated on in history was that of the school itself. At that time, the school was over 430 years old so there was quite a lot of history to go through; from the very beginning when what is now the headmaster's study was the only schoolroom through various stages of growth and expansion to the present day.

One of the periods that was touched upon was the early to mid-twentieth century when one of England's top motorcycle manufacturers built their bikes in some of the school's outbuildings.

The Vincent Motorcycle Company is famous all over the world for it's motorbikes even now, decades after the last one was produced. And I used to have RE lessons in those same outbuildings.

Since those lessons I've been aware of Vincent bikes but it wasn't until about four years ago, when L and I were on holiday in Tuscany that I finally realised how important that part of the school's history was. We were staying in a complex of villas that had been converted (or built) as separate self-catering apartments. It was a lovely place but it was full of French, German and Dutch people, so we didn't mix too much with anyone else for the first week.

In the second week, an American family was also staying there and during a meal that the management put on for all the guests we got chatting to them. They were doing the typical 'European Grand Tour' thing and we over for something like three months or more. We got around to talking about England and the father said that he owned a vintage English motorcycle, a Vincent. You can imagine the look on his face when I told him where I'd been taught!

It really can be a small world at times.

This is part of a chain of posts linked together by word association. The previous link in the chain was here. If you want to write another link here's what to do: Find a word, phrase or theme from this post to inspire your own and go and write it. It's that simple. Try not to write something that's similar to this post. That way the subject of the posts along the chain will vary. E.g. if I write about going to the doctor's, then don't talk about the last time you were ill, instead describe how you used to play Doctors and Nurses with the girl next door. Get the idea? Your post can be in any style you want. Copy this paragraph and tack it onto the end of your post, updating the link to point here, then leave a comment here that points to your new post.