Aberdeen 

Aberdeen Vespa Club (VCB Branch No. 82)

August 1956 and John Henderson from Banchory was looking to start a Vespa Club in Aberdeen - but for one reason or another nothing materialised. However nine months later Albert Herd, a young engineer from the granite city stepped in and became the person responsible for creating the fifth Scottish branch of the Vespa Club of Britain.

As reported in the May / June edition of Vespa News in 1957 Albert Herd had bought a Vespa eight months earlier, “but as he sped around the countryside, he felt something was missing - good company! So Albert wrote to headquarters in London who suggested he should form a Vespa Club. He advertised in the local Press and Journal and at the club’s first meeting fourteen members were enrolled.”

And that’s how it all started! However the enforced petrol rationing (at the time of the Suez crisis) and a serious lack of spares and servicing available had already contributed to the demise of two of the other four Scottish clubs (Edinburgh and Ayr) and the granite city branch didn’t last much longer.

Two years later though, with the number of active clubs in Scotland having doubled (Stirling and Perth had joined Glasgow and the revived Edinburgh branch), the VCB appointed Margaret Farquhar as ‘Vespa Club of Britain Representative in Scotland’ and she wasted no time in helping to get the Aberdeen club back up and running - as well as overseeing the reformation of the dormant Ayr branch and putting in place arrangements to start new clubs in Dumfries and Falkirk.

The reformed club held their first get-together on November 12, 1959 initially meeting each week at the Princess tearooms on Union Street, but they later made use of the scout hut at Ardarroch Road by Pittodrie. During the summer months there would be an organised country run every Thursday evening - leaving Gordon’s College and stopping off at a café somewhere for, as club members called it, “a cup and carry-on”.

The local Vespa dealer, Messrs. J Furneaux Motors, helped the Aberdeen club tout for new members by giving up window space at their Castle Street store for a large club display. With numbers swelled and becoming one of the more ambitious and adventurous branches they went on to organise hill climbs, competitions, treasure hunts, and concours events before hosting their first rally on May 21, 1961 - on the grassy area next to the Brig o’ Dee.

Hailed as a great success, according to a write-up in the next edition of Vespa News, the forty five entrants enjoyed the day’s fun and navigation, skill tests, etc, amidst lovely scenery although the Aberdeen club had clearly felt let down by the “absence of many Scottish Vespists” and were glad that they’d decided to call it an open rally. The AVC rally thereafter became an annual fixture which after 1961 moved out to the Brig o’ Balgownie.

The club was thriving, its members relishing the change in the type of club of events that were taking place around the country. As well as being seen to be supporting the other Scottish Vespa Clubs they were enjoying the opportunity to test their competencies against the others. Through the more competitive nature of road trials, hill climbs and gymkhanas a fair number of skilled riders began to emerge from the North East club.

The Scots’ challenge at the annual Isle of Man international scooter rally (or ‘the holiday week for scooterists’ to give it its other name) had been led by the Glasgow Vespa Club over a considerable number of years, but the steady progress made by the Aberdeen club members was evidenced no better than at the 1969 event.

Just over two hundred scooters started the ‘Manx 400’ that year - seventy five of them finishing with gold medals and D. W. Bain and T. J. Tobin from the AVC were part of that elite group. There would have been a third gold for the Aberdeen club but David MacDonald suffered a puncture on the first lap, putting him into silver with seventeen others. Another seventeen won bronze.

Together with the Glasgow club, the Aberdeen Vespa Club (and Stirling as well) did their bit in helping to put Scotland on the map when it came to competitive riding. And it wasn’t just the men - there was Miss A McEwan from Inverurie, one of the finalists in the Ladies Gymkhana Championship at the VCB’s national rally at Billing Aquadrome in 1967 and who had put in a good performance at the Manx rally two months earlier.

In the late sixties, when (Vespa) Douglas Ltd ceased UK scooter production, membership started to dwindle but a new generation of scooterists soon emerged to take on the mantle and the shot in the arm saw the club thrive once more. Membership numbers were on the slide again, come the mid-seventies, and by the end of the 1976 rally season the remaining members had decided to call it a day. There was another brief revival of Branch No. 82 in 1981 but it was very brief.

Fast-forward to 2014 and thanks to another generation of keen Aberdonians a revival of Vespa Clubs in Scotland just might be underway! Aberdeen Vespa Club (Branch No. 82) is back up and running and membership’s already into double figures. Fifty seven years after Albert Herd started the most northerly branch of the Vespa Club of Britain a new chapter is ready to be written.

Paul Hird