Glasgow 70

HOW IT ALL STARTED…

Glasgow Vespa Club (VCB Branch No. 70)

A year and a half after the Edinburgh Vespa Club was formed a second Scottish branch of the Vespa Club of Britain was launched. Formed in October 1955 the Glasgow Vespa Club would go on to become one of the most active and revered branches of the VCB - an early sign of their enterprising and ambitious outlook being the raffling of a brand new Vespa for club funds barely six months after they were formed.

After a promising start turnout for club runs did start to dwindle a bit towards the end of 1956, hampered no doubt by the country’s fuel rationing at the time of the Suez crisis and the serious lack of spares and servicing available to Vespa owners in Scotland. But the GVC bucked the trend of other branches that went to the wall. As the club’s secretary reported in January 1957 “Gloom and despondency have not descended on the Glasgow vespists because of the petrol rationing. It may cramp our style a little but the committee has arranged a lively list of social activities for the coming months”.

Sure enough, by the spring of 1957 membership of the club was a very healthy 62 - forty five of them full VCB members.

Over the next twenty years the GVC would become renowned and highly respected throughout the scootering world but one of the first times they’d have come to the attention of fellow VCB members south of the border will have been June ’57 when one of their members “Bill Woodhouse from Paisley” won the trophy for furthest travelled at the Vespa Club of Britain national rally down at Woburn. A huge deal it would have been at the time and possibly the first time anyone from Scotland had ridden to a scooter rally.

(By the way, I see in the same month’s edition of Vespa News that a certain Bill Woodhouse had recently joined the Glasgow Vespa Club - having moved up from West Middlesex. Stewards enquiry?)

The year continued for members of the GVC with a large influx of GS’s “laden with accessories”, comfortable clubrooms at the Possilpark Lawn Tennis Club, and the publication of their magazine ‘monthly buzz’. Club captain Brian Hooker helped raise their profile further by winning a first class award at the Esso ‘Scoot to Scotland’ in 1958 and also took first prize in the plank race that year at the VCB’s national rally at Billings Aquadrome near Northampton.

But the success of the Glasgow branch and the growth of the Vespa movement in and around the city wasn’t indicative of the scene elsewhere in the country. Other cubs were struggling to halt a slide in membership numbers. The GVC stood out from the rest but weren’t for standing still. The matter of there being a lack of spares and servicing available was raised with Douglas (Kingswood) Ltd and the Bristol firm’s General Secretary, William Bond, headed north to attend a meeting of the Glasgow club - an “on the spot” enquiry.

And by April of the following year Scotland, and Glasgow in particular, had its own Vespa Centre and Depot. Ross McManus who had been the Glasgow Vespa Club’s secretary during its first three years relinquished his post to become an agent for Vespa and took charge of running the showroom at 130 Renfrew Street. A Mr A Hill, the Douglas representative in Scotland at the time, was in charge of the Depot.

So the spares and repairs issue was a thing of the past, as Tom Brown the VCB Council Member for Scotland reported in the July 1959 edition of Vespa News “There was now a well stocked spares department and fully equipped workshops with a first class mechanic. They have all the equipment for testing the various parts of a Vespa, including a machine for testing and adjusting the ignition”.

As for the GVC, Ian Kirkpatrick took over as secretary as the club went from strength to strength and started out on the road that would see them recognised as one of the big players in British scooter sport. The new secretary was himself a particularly active competition rider - his achievements from around that time included being part of the VCB team for four European regularity championships (at Monza, Namur, Rheims and Nurburgring) and a number of notable accomplishments at the Isle of Man rallies.

But Ian Kirkpatrick’s competencies weren’t confined to his scootering abilities. A born leader and organiser (he would later become General Secretary of the Vespa Club of Britain) together with fellow GVC member John Alexander he was instrumental in the introduction of road trials, hill climbs and gymkhanas north of the border. The type of club events taking place around the country was starting to change - the ones of a more competitive nature becoming more regular. Members of the other Scottish Vespa Clubs relished this new found challenge and as a result a good number of proficient riders began to emerge from Scotland.

The GVC had started to make a name for itself. As well as John Alexander, who won the Premier Award (formerly the Scooter King title) at the 1962 Manx International Scooter Rally, there was Bob Young, a highly respected and accomplished competitor over many years on the Isle of Man and whose trophy haul from the mid-sixties would also include high placings at the VCB nationals - first place in the road trial at Woburn Abbey in 1964, third place in the slalom at Bulwell Hall the following year, and third place in the grasstrack event at Billing Aquadrome the year after that.

And there was more, such as John Clark, Gordon Roper, and Norrie Kerr who would go on to win a shedload of national sprint titles, the VCB National Championship (ten years in a row) and the big one - the British Scooter Championship in 1983.

The rest, as they say, is history. The Highland Scoot, the Campsie Fells hill trials, the VCB’s first Scottish national rally… the club ran from 1955 until ‘78 but by then the GVC really had seen it, done it, and bought the t-shirt. There was a revival of the Glasgow club in 1985, which was to last a good ten years, with Steve Barbour at the helm as he reintroduced scooter sport to Scotland with simple semi-sporting trials on a regular basis. A story for another time perhaps, but for now that’s how it all started!

Here, it would be great to see another strong Glasgow branch of the Vespa Club of Britain - all it takes to form a club is for three VCB members to get together and seek agreement from the committee. But as for the GVC, like many a good thing, maybe it’s best just to leave it as a memory of what it was.

Paul Hird