Scooters a family affair for Sam

A brand new car at 17, or a “crappy scooter” now?

That was the offer Sam Gee’s parents made her as she approached her 16th birthday back in 1988.

“I think they thought ‘we’ve got her’, but I turned round and said ‘a scooter’,” says Sam, chatting at her home in Skegness. “I think they were really disappointed. But on my birthday I still have visions of them coming over to me with this really shitty Vespa PK50 and going ‘there you go’.

Sam’s first Vespa PK50

“I think I rode it twice and then it wouldn’t start again. It turned out it had a holed piston and needed a rebore and everything.”

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A minor setback

It wasn’t the most promising start to a life in scooters, but it proved to be just a minor setback and Sam is still riding all over the country more than 35 years later with her husband Simon.

“My mum had the work done on the PK, and went back to the guy in High Wycombe she’d bought it off and told him he could knock the money for the rebore off the price of a new scooter,” says Sam, 52.

“So a few weeks later I had a brand spanking new little PK50 XL delivered, and I absolutely loved it. It did its job and it was a fabulous little scooter.”

Sam on the new PK

Growing up in Thame, Oxfordshire, Sam’s first dalliance with scooters came at 14 when a school friend asked her round to his house to watch Quadrophenia.

“He said ‘my brother’s just got a Lambretta’, so I went round and we had a really good day,” she remembers. “I don’t remember an actual Lambretta being there, but I do remember lots of bits and him going ‘I need to get rid of this crap, do you want it?’ So I had a massive Lambretta wheel as my ashtray for probably 10 years, and also a headset top or something ridiculous.

“I got a little bit hooked then.”

Northampton mods

Sam was a regular visitor to Northampton, where her parents had a caravan, and she’d spend the weekends hanging out with mods from the town.

“When I was about 15, I got together with a lad from there who had a scooter,” she says. “I remember we were riding back from a pub in Wellingborough and he stopped at traffic lights.

“He decided to give it some beans and the next thing I know I’m sitting on the floor in the middle of the road. His mate came back and picked me up. But the whole thing really sparked my interest.”

Once she had her brand new Vespa PK50, Sam’s dad put her in touch with a chap he knew who was part of the Aylesbury Scooter Club.

“This guy put her in touch with Simon’s brother, Colin, and then Simon came along and I remember thinking ‘you are an arrogant so and so, stay away from me’,” she laughs. It wasn’t long after that I got together with Simon. He won me over…”

Once she was 17, the PK gave way for a Vespa PX125, which brought her into contact with a now long-term friend, Tortie.

Sam’s Vespa PX125

“I remember riding it to one of the Aylesbury Scooter Club meetings, and this big guy came over, right in my face and said ‘what the fucking hell are you doing with my scooter?’” she says. “Being new to the scene I was shit scared, and I said ‘I bought it from Aylesbury Two Wheel Centre’. ‘I’m only kidding’, he said, ‘I sold it to them and I’m just surprised to see my scooter back here’.

“I loved that scooter so much, it rode beautifully, and it was a really nippy 125.”

Next up: a PX200

Another year on, and Sam passed her bike test and bought a virtually new Vespa PX200 on hire purchase.

“That did do some miles but it seemed to rot very quickly,” she says. “Only a couple of years later Simon said ‘it’s all rotting down the front, so before it gets any worse we’ll take it off the road, sort it out, get it resprayed and put it back on the road for the season’.

Margate scooter rally

“It should have taken us about five hours and it took us 12,” Sam remembers. “I was going through London on the South Circular, got to a junction, pulled my clutch in and it just went ‘donk’.

“Oh, OK, my clutch is gone. We didn’t carry many spares because in those days the RAC or AA carried enough spares to get you home, but we did have spare cables.

Sam in Margate in 1991

“Simon changed the cable and off we went again, but three more cables seemingly went.

“So we called the RAC, who replaced the clutch cable, and we’re probably on hour seven by now. It went again…and by this point I’m trying to get as far as I can without a clutch, but still on the South Circular. It was dark and freezing cold, so in the end I went with this scary RAC guy and actually beat them to Margate.

Still in Margate

“It turned out the clutch cable was slipping out of the hole where it sits in the headset, so we had to bodge it and put a washer in there to stop it coming through.”

Back to the stricken PX200, and Sam clearly needed a supposedly short-term stop gap while it was being resprayed.

“An old school friend, Mark, mentioned that he was selling his scooter, a PX200 that he’d chucked at a friend of his who was learning to spray,” she says.

“He did it in red metal flake, and I bought it for something stupid like £300 in 1990. I was only supposed to have that for a few months, but I’ve still got it now, still with the practice spray job.

With daughter Maddy on the metal flake PX

“After a certain amount of time I‘d never have sold it anyway. I’m a bit sentimental – I was devastated about selling the PK and the 125.

“The only thing I don’t like about it is the horrendous Lambretta mudguard, which was a ‘thing’ in the ‘80s.”

The metal flake paint has held up well

Sam and Simon were married in 1992, with their first daughter Maddy coming along in 1996. How did that affect her scootering life?

On Simon’s SX a year after their marriage

“About a month before she was born I went to Margate rally in the car, and I remember the doctor saying ‘do not go’ and I said ‘I’m pregnant, not ill’,” she says. “They said ‘if you’re insistent on going, here’s a tens machine, book into a hospital when you get there’. ‘Yeah, whatever’.

“We saw Buster Bloodvessel there and I remember comparing bellies – it’s a shame I don’t have any photographs of that. Two weeks later we went to a Vespa event at Billing Aquadrome.

“When she was a few months old, my dad drove her down to the Isle of Wight while me and Simon went on our scooters.”

Family affair

Son Byron was born in 2000, followed by youngest daughter Elland in 2002.

With Byron in 2012

“When the children were born I didn’t get to go on the scooter as much, but every now and again Simon would have the kids and I’d go off on a little jolly jaunt,” says Sam, “but it’s not the same on your own.

“As they got a little older, friends would have them for a day and we’d go off on a ride out.”

In 2004, Sam and Simon decided they’d make a holiday of the Isle of Wight scooter rally, a 10-day break in the car with a massive tent, with the rally weekend sandwiched between child-friendly activities on the island.

“We were sitting in Ryde and the kids were like ‘wow, I’ve never seen so many scooters’, and arguing over which of our scooters they wanted to go on,” she says. “They were brilliant, they loved it, so from that point on we thought we would involve them wherever we could. It was quite a pivotal holiday. From then on they went everywhere with us.”

With Elland on prom day

Sam became more heavily involved in the scene than ever before when a new scooter club opened in her hometown of Thame in 2009.

The Red Kites Scooter Club met at The Falcon pub and, within a few weeks, Sam was persuaded to become club secretary.

“I felt quite awkward about it, because it was a fairly male-oriented scene and I’d almost felt like a hanger on in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,” she says. “I found it quite difficult back then but it was something I loved.

“I had no clue what I was doing as secretary, but Facebook had come along by then, making networking a lot easier.

Inter-county rideouts

“Aylesbury hosted a ride out and clubs from other areas met up on this rideout and they discussed doing something similar. So we all decided to host one each a month, and that’s how the inter-county ride outs came about. I used to coordinate at the start of the year which club would do their rideout each month.

“It worked amazingly for meeting people, making friends, and networking, and I’m still friends with an awful lot of people I met from those inter-county rideouts. They’re still going, and they were brilliant.”

With Simon on an inter-county rideout

Sam recalls a number of memorable rallies with the Red Kites, not least outings to Camber Sands in East Sussex.

Getting tied up at Camber Sands…

“I loved Camber – we saw some awesome bands, The Beat, Angelo Starr, Who’s Who, brilliant,” she says.

One ride out sticks in the memory, for all the wrong, but ultimately right, reasons.

“We were supposed to be going to Buckingham Palace, and started with 12 of us, which very quickly dwindled with each breakdown,” she laughs. “We hadn’t even got as far as High Wycombe and we’d had three breakdowns.

“We travelled 15 miles and then a small frame broke down in the middle of nowhere with nothing around apart from this one house.

“About eight of us must have sat at the side of the road for about eight hours in the pissing rain waiting for the AA. But it was one of the best days I’ve ever had – we had such a laugh, and we never went anywhere!”

Vespa man Simon

With Simon very much a Vespa man, and Sam never having ridden anything else, one day in Thame she had the chance to try a Lambretta out.

“I rode it down the street, came back and Simon said ‘you bloody want one of them now don’t you?’ And I went ‘yeah’. He said ‘no’,” she smiles.

“A few days later I was on eBay and he came in and said ‘oh shit, I can tell by the look on your face, you’ve bought a bloody lambretta haven’t you?’ ‘Yeah, you’ve got to go to Sheffield and pick it up’.

“Well, it was a shed – all twisted and knackered and I ended up selling it to a friend who could do something with it.

“I then went to a local rally and Tortie was there on a Lambretta and he said ‘do you want to have a go, it’s for sale?’ I rode round the field on it, and fell in love with it. After some negotiating it was an honour to buy Tortie’s Lammy sometime in 2010, now known affectionately as W*NK (because of the WNK number plate).

Outside the Courthouse in Skegness

“Parts of it came from a skip, and I believe it’s an Italian Li frame with GP panels, runners and headset, with an Indian GP engine,” she says. “It’s a real Frankenstein, but I love it and it attracts lots of attention.”

One thing that could do with upgrading is the seat.

“I remember one day we decided to do the Great London ride out, but we got there and somebody went ‘shall we go all the way to Southend?

‘My legs were bleeding’

“Well, ‘wanks’ made it, but on the way back I got so far and I was in tears. I swear to god, the inside of my legs were bleeding.

“I’ve been trying to replace the seat ever since, and I might have that one recovered with extra padding.”

In 2014, Sam came across a Facebook page called ‘Female Scooterists’, and the following year she was asked to become admin for the page.

“I was asked to design t-shirts specifically for the ladies on this page, which consists of more than 600 ladies who ride all over the country, and in some cases all over the world,” she says.

“These ladies clock up hundreds of miles a year riding their own scooters, and a lot of them do their own maintenance. Between their riding and rebuilding their own engines, some of these ladies can put a lot of men to shame.”

Bringing things right up to date, about five years ago Sam and Simon decided it was time to move away from Oxfordshire, where she had spent most of her life.

Surprise move to Skegness

She was “desperate to live by the sea”, but Skegness didn’t initially spring to mind.

“We did a couple of rallies to Skegness, the first one in 1990 and me and Simon thought ‘oh my God, what a shithole, we’re never going back there again’,” she laughs. “If anyone ever said to me ‘what was your worst rally?’, I’d have said Skegness. It was March, and the weather was rubbish.

“About 10 years later, we gave it another go, but it was still terrible, and we vowed never to set foot in the place again. But years later we gave it another look over and it had really changed from what I remembered.

With the Outcasts at Driffield

“And the scootering scene seemed to be really lively here.”

A group of them became Skegness Outcast Scooterists, one of whom included a surprise cousin of Sam’s, and another who DJ’d at The Courthouse, which became a home from home.

When well-known scooterist and DJ Rob Quartermain moved to the town in 2023, between him and Andy they persuaded Sam to try her hand as a DJ, egged on by Simon and Courthouse owner Gary.

DJing at the Courthouse

“I don’t profess to be a DJ at all, but I am so grateful for their encouragement and faith in me, and I am learning all the time,” she says.

Carry on scootering

After more than three decades in the scooter scene, Sam has vowed to carry on for as long as she can.

“I’ve no intention of giving up,” she says. “Our group might change over the years, but once me and Simon got together in ‘88, we had this common interest and we did everything together.

“We just seemed to want to do the same things, go to the same places, share the same experiences. The one time we did a rally each apart, it was horrendous, neither of us liked it. We decided we’re never doing that again.

“The one thing that always grabbed me about scooters, there’s not one that’s ever the same, there’s always something different about them.

“Every one that’s been altered, it’s somebody’s personality and love that has gone into it.”

And then there’s the freedom, and escapism that the scootering life provides.

“When I get on my scooter there are no problems,” she says. “We’ve always had this rule, that when you get on, whatever problems you have at home don’t exist. It’s our break, it’s our freedom.

“If I’m really angry or upset, I’ll get on the scooter and it just blows it away. It’s a scene like no other – it knits people together whether it’s the scooters, the genres of music, the subcultures – you’ve all got a common interest. They’ve become like a family.”

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.