John loving Lambrettas again after 40-year break

John Weaver was 70 when he decided to get back into the scooter scene after a four-decade break, much of it spent on motorbikes.

As part of a cafe crowd in Lowestoft in the late ‘60s, he was drawn to the scooters his friends rode.

“I liked the look of them, and several of my mates had them, as well as a lot of my friends from school I was still knocking about with,” he says, chatting at the Great Yarmouth Scooter Weekender.

Contents

Teenage scene

“They were also cheap, and a fairly easy thing to get around on, and comfortable – well, I thought so. It was just the teenage scene at the time.”

Having sold his last scooter in 1980, he took the plunge again in the summer of 2023 and bought the immaculate Lambretta, badged as a TV200, you see here.

“For many years, if I’ve seen there’s something going on, like this scooter rally today in previous years, I would always try and get to them because I’ve always loved Lambrettas,” he says.

“It’s not Vespas for me, sorry, or Royal Alloys, or Scomadi, those scooters are not for me. I just wanted a Lambretta in TV200 livery with a bit of chrome on it, with racks and stuff.”

First Lambretta

John cut his two-wheeled teeth on a Honda 50 at 16 before opting for a 1965 Lambretta GT200 in 1969, on which he passed his test.

First Lambretta GT200

The mods and rockers era, and the aggro it sometimes brought, had largely passed by then, but John does remember seeing skirmishes in his younger days in Yarmouth.

“I can remember being out with my parents and seeing some of it in the mid ‘60s just before I was old enough to ride,” he says. “We came over to Yarmouth for a Sunday afternoon on a bank holiday to go to the funfair. We walked along the front, my parents, me and my sisters, and there were a few scraps sporadically breaking out. It was nothing really bad, and I never experienced the aggravation they’d had in Clacton.”

‘Stupid thing to do’

“Of course, had he had to pull up pretty sharpish he’d have had about 10 splats on the back, like flies on a windscreen. It was a stupid thing to do, but it was just what we did.

“I can also remember going past a load of greasers on the opposite carriageway. They’d stopped in a layby, and they were all sitting on a grass bank jeering at us as we went past.

“They had a kind of grasstrack circuit at the rally and I can remember going on it and quickly falling off, then my mate Robbie had a go and crashed too. In the end you think, ‘well, I’ve done enough damage for one day, I’d better stop as I can’t afford a big repair bill’.”

After enrolling on an electrical and mechanical engineering course at Lowestoft technical college, John served his apprenticeship in a local shipyard from 1970.

He was still messing about on the GT when disaster struck on an outing to the disused Ellough airfield near Beccles.

“We were racing up and down the redundant runways when the flywheel decided to partially detach itself and cause all sorts of damage,” he says. “When I got it repaired it didn’t seem to run the same anymore, so I decided to trade it in for a Lambretta SX200 from a local dealer.”

On the SX200

By the time John got married in 1976, the SX was long gone and he was getting about on his pushbike, having sunk all the couple’s money into buying a house.

He started working in the booming offshore natural gas industry, but couldn’t afford a car.

Lambretta number 3

“We needed to get about, and a mate of mine who I was working with said ‘I know somebody who has got a scooter for sale, are you interested?’” he says.

“I said ‘yeah, how much is it?’ He said ‘it’s £36 including the crash helmet’. I said ‘blimey, what is it?’ It was a Lambretta GP200, and I thought that was cheap. I went and had a look, and basically ripped his arm off.

“I subsequently found out that when his dad found out he’d sold it for £36 he went absolutely apeshit, but he didn’t come after me…it was a done deal.

“Apparently, he didn’t want it because he’d fallen off it twice and he thought they were unsafe. I thought it was more about how you ride it.”

The GP was used as daily transport.

“I used to do the shopping on that on a Friday night, with two carrier bags full of shopping on the inside of the leg shields, feet hanging on the edge on my heels, with my wife on the back,” says John.

‘Eternal shame’

“I had that for the next year, but we then managed to afford a car and the scooter unfortunately, and to my eternal shame, was left on the little patio outside the back of the house and started to rot away.

Sad GP200

“I did eventually pull it all apart, mended it, resprayed it and sold it in about 1980.”

Scooters were then off the radar for many years and, when John was divorced in 1990, he fell in with his work colleagues who all had motorbikes.

“I was working with a guy and he said ‘why don’t you get yourself a bike and come out with us at weekends?’,” he says. “They’d go off to see MotoGP, British Superbikes, and World Superbikes, and I just thought ‘I’m going to get myself a bike’, so I did.

“For several years, I enjoyed the motorbiking scene.” Indeed, he still has a Honda SP2.

But about six years ago, he was again seduced by a Lambretta at the Yarmouth scooter rally.

“I came to this rally when it was held over the road, and a bloke pulled up on this scooter and I said ‘cor blimey, that’s a lovely scooter, I used to have one of these’,” says John, now 71.

“We started yakking, and I said ‘if you ever want to sell it, I might be interested’ and we exchanged phone numbers.

“Six years later, I was going through my phone contacts and came across his number again. I thought ‘if you’re going to get another scooter it has to be now, you will be 70 soon’.

Back on the Lambretta scene

“On the off chance, I rang him up and he’d still got my number and said he’d thought about ringing me a few times. I went and saw him and he said ‘I’m definitely packing up now’, so we agreed on a price and I rode it away.

“I paid just over £4,500 – a lot different to £36, but there is a feeling that prices are starting to go down now because as owners are getting older and giving up their scooters the youngsters don’t seem to be as interested in them.”

Although the scooter is badged as a TV200, it is based on a Lambretta Li150 frame from 1966, rebuilt in 2011 to the previous owner’s specification.

So what’s it like to be back on the scooter scene, several decades later?

“I love it,” says John. “I’ve still got friends who were into scooters from back in the day who still have them now. I met a childhood friend earlier in the year who I hadn’t seen since I was six or seven years old, and he and his elder brother are still in scootering and meet up with a group of likeminded diehards at The Chalet cafe in Gorleston a couple of times a week.”

For John, it’s all about indulging his love of Lambrettas that had lain dormant for more than 40 years.

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.