Dave’s passion for scooters and surfing
A young Dave with his Vespa in Newquay
For two summers as the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s, Dave Andrew would strap a surfboard to his Vespa and make the 300-mile journey to Cornwall.
The now 74-year-old from Leytonstone discovered his love for the surf on a lads’ scooter holiday in Newquay in 1968.
He took to it like a duck to water, so the following summer he loaded up his Vespa SS180 with board and belongings and went to work as a porter and wine waiter in a family run hotel in the town.
“My idea behind this was to serve a sort of surfing apprenticeship, not to learn the hotel trade,” he says. “I had four free hours between 2pm and 6pm, and one day off a week, so I had that time to surf.
“I’ve been surfing for 55 years now, so suffice to say I got hooked.”
Teenage scooterist
And none of it would have happened if Dave, who now lives with his wife Sue in Chelmsford, hadn’t bought a Vespa and joined the Foresters Scooter Club as a teenager.
He bought his first, a 1959 Vespa 125 Sportique, in 1966 at the age of 16 when he was still at school, thanks to a £20 loan from his grandad.
“I practised in a car park across the road before I passed my test, and then I got what they called ‘scooter permission’ to ride it to school,” he says.
“I also did a bit of my paper round on it, and I had jobs at Woolworths and then Fine Fare to pay my grandad back and keep it running.
“It was the mod mode of transport. You saw the lads go by on theirs and I just fancied a scooter.
“At the end of the road, we had a little crew of rockers, and they were forever repairing their bikes, because of course the good old British bikes couldn’t hold oil. But Ready Steady Go was on the telly, with all the mod gear, and I just preferred that to the rockers.”
Joining the Foresters
The following year, Dave joined the Foresters, which was affiliated to the Vespa Club of Britain, and which met every Tuesday evening at Wanstead House community centre.
At a Foresters wedding, Dave second left
By now, he’d upgraded to a Vespa SS180 bought on hire purchase with his dad acting as guarantor.
At the time, he was working in the ladies hosiery department at Selfridges on Oxford Street.
“I didn’t earn much, so my parents were very much subsidising me,” he says. “I think dad must have paid most of the HP for the scooter. But it was exciting, because it was down the road from Carnaby Street and I remember the Beatles opening the Apple shop – I went up there to see that.
“They were exciting times, the swinging sixties, although by the time I got there it wasn’t so much swinging as dangling, but you still felt part of it.”
The Foresters meetings were “typical ‘60s” affairs, says Dave.
“There was ping pong, music, and sometimes people were outside having a tinker with their scooters if they had a problem,” he adds. “On weekends we’d go out together as a group, and I started to go to some of the rallies, up to Goole, near Hull, and down to Torquay and Weston-super-Mare – we got about.”
Vespa Club rallies
The Vespa Club rallies were very different to the later scooter rallies of the ‘80s, with a gymkhana comprising an obstacle course with ramps, and various other skill-related events.
At an event with the Foresters
“You’d have to pick a tennis ball up from here, and put it over there, that kind of thing,” says Dave. “You tended to arrive on a Friday night, have the event on Saturday, then you’d have a meal and a dance in the evening, and go home on Sunday.
“There was a bar, but people didn’t get smashed, it was all quite civilised.”
The Foresters club was very much into the mod look, but the Vespa club rallies attracted a mix of scooterists.
Having fun in Torquay
“We were all in parkas, but you had some people who looked more like they’d stepped off a motorbike, the old school crowd that were still in their long macs and corker crash helmets, with a great big windscreen on the scooter,” he says. “There was a mix, but there was never any trouble. It was a good time, a bit of respect for everybody.”
The UK’s Vespa dealer, Douglas of Bristol, would bring a van along for running repairs and breakdowns, which proved very handy for Dave on one trip to Goole.
“I seized it going to a rally in Goole, and I was very grateful for the Vespa people, who put a new barrel and piston in for me,” he says. “They said it would cost a fiver! I said ‘I haven’t got a fiver’ so they billed me and, again, my dad paid for it.
“I only had a week to run it in before the Foresters’ trip to Newquay, and every night I rode from Leytonstone to Epping and back, which was 20 miles, and I thought if I did that five times it would help, but it didn’t, it needed running in properly.
Long trip to Newquay
“It took me about 22 hours to get from Leytonstone to Newquay, because I was still running it in. I had to stop for petrol and the toilet, but I didn’t eat and I don’t remember drinking anything. I was absolutely knackered when I arrived – I’d had enough as you can imagine.”
The next day, Dave and his mates went to the beach, where they were persuaded by the car park attendant to try their hand at surfing, for 10 shillings for the day.
“We had five minutes of tutorial and we were off,” he says. “We had no surfing wax, so you slipped all over the place, no wetsuit, just a vest and shorts.
“I seemed to be a natural. I had good balance anyway, because I’d done a lot of sport and it just sort of took off. This picture is proof of the pudding, my first time on a board.”
Like a duck to water
The experience in the summer of ‘68 left a lasting impression, and back home – now working for a company delivering plane tickets around London on a company Lambretta Li150 – Dave started planning the following summer’s adventures.
He bought a 6ft 3in long Bilbo surfboard from Jay Surfshop in Putney, added a sidecar to the SS180, by now painted autumn gold, and attached the board flat to the sidecar with bungees, and headed to Newquay for the summer season.
Jay Surfshop in Putney
“I worked in a good hotel, family run and with no Fawlty Towers characters I’m afraid,” he laughs. “We all got on well, and I could surf between 2pm and 6pm.”
New season, new scooter
Dave sold the sidecar and scooter down in Cornwall and caught the train home in September, but then bought a Vespa 150 Sportique the following year for the summer season of 1970.
This time there was no sidecar, so he strapped the board to a side rack, along with a front rack holding a Dansette record player with 25 LPs, and a back rack carrying a 1950s cardboard suitcase. Plus the side blister full of tools and spares.
“With the board mounted sideways, when lorries went by you went all over the place, it was like a little sail,” he smiles, once again selling the Vespa at the end of the season and travelling home by train.
Dave’s fully loaded Vespa 150 Sportique
And that was pretty much it for scooters for the best part of 30 years.
From scooters to bikes and back
“By 1971 I’d seen the film Easy Rider, so I built a chopper, a T110 Triumph,” he remembers. “It was a real jerry-rigged thing, with ape hanger bars, slugs in the forks to extend it, a straight through exhaust, and I made my own seat.
“For me, it was more about the hippy element with the Easy Rider influence. I’m easily influenced! When the mod scene was about, ‘I’m going to be a mod’, and then ‘now I’m going to be Peter Fonda’. That’s the way it went for me. I liked The Eagles, and it led me to a more hippy type California style.
“I was mostly on motorbikes until 2000, when I sold my Harley 883 Sportster and bought another Vespa.”
Dave with his current PX150
The switch was prompted by a convoluted redundancy process from his job as a buyer for a steel fabrication company.
“They promised me redundancy payment but they didn’t honour it, so all I got was the government minimum,” Dave explains.
“I sold the Harley and bought a van, but I wanted to keep on two wheels so I bought a Vespa PX200, which I felt was more manageable.”
Back on the scooter scene
He got in touch with his old friend from his Foresters days, Peter Burley, joined the Essex Vespa Club and the Vespa Club of Britain, and started again.
Since then, he’s travelled to events across Europe, including trips to Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Turin, Northern Ireland, and the Vespa factory in Pontedera, as well as rallies closer to home, including the Isle of Wight.
Packed and ready to go
“The ride to Turin took us four days I think, and it was fantastic,” he says. “The ride there and back eclipsed the rally, because it was all new to me. We rode over the Alps, where they’d had the snow ploughs out clearing the way. I’d never done anything like that before, and it was really exciting.”
Dave still rides with Peter, now 83, and plans to keep on going for as long as he physically can.
“As with some of the other riders, I suffer from rheumatism, and I suppose I should be looking at an auto, but I’d much rather stay with the gears for as long as I can,” he says. “I’ve no real aversion to the autos, but I do call it the dark side. We’ve been on holiday and hired autos, but I just like the idea of the old two strokes.”
His current two-stroke is a 2012 Vespa PX150 he bought new, painted in the red and white colours of his football team, Leyton Orient.
A recent addition is a sidecar frame made by K2 Custom Classics, and a home-made box so that Dave can use the scooter for his handyman work.
“I can put my tools in it, and also I’m getting a little bit older – you can’t really put stabilisers like you do on a kids bike, so this isn’t a bad idea,” he says. “I don’t have to worry too much, I’ve got three wheels now, not two.”
Purpose-built sidebox
So after nearly 60 years of an on, off, and on again relationship with scooters, what does it mean to him now?
“It’s a way of keeping in touch with the past,” says Dave. “Somebody said to me I was reliving my youth, and I said ‘I haven’t finished with it yet, I’m still doing it’.
“There’s hardly been a period in my life when I haven’t had a scooter or bike, and it’s important that I keep going. It gives me a bit of purpose, and I enjoy it.”
Scooter stories is a series of articles exploring the lives and experiences of scooterists and collectors. Click on the Scooter Stories category link to read more.
