A new documentary film about Phil Vincent takes the great designer’s daughter and grandson back to where the story of his magical motorcycles began
This feels like my spiritual home,” says Philip Vincent-Day,looking around a timber-beamed room in Stevenage, where his grandfather’s glorious 998cc V-twin motorcycles were once made.
“It’s totally Vincent here,” he adds. “So much of our family history is associated with this place. It gives me a much better understanding of what it must have been like, having met some of the people who worked here. I bet it was a great place to be.”
Dee Vincent-Day, his mother and the daughter of the great designer Philip Vincent, adds: “I feel as though the whole Vincent story is ingrained in these buildings. It’s surprised me how much they have changed on one side, and how little on another. This section here is more or less identical, apart from the removal of a loading ramp. But on the other side, the packing department, the garage where my father used to put his Bristol car, the sheds where the workers put their bikes – they’ve all gone.”
The site on the town’s High Street is where some 11,000 Vincents, mainly Rapides and Black Shadows, were assembled in the 1940s and 1950s (the manufacture of parts took place in a nearby works at Fishers Green).
Dee was only one year old when the day came, in 1955, that her father had to tell his workforce that motorcycle production was finishing. The money was exhausted and demand for the hand-built machines was falling. That same year, the 26-year-old Russell Wright made the Vincent the world’s fastest motorcycle when he averaged 185.15mph on a narrow road in New Zealand lined by gravel verges, wire fences and, on one section, a hedge. It didn’t help; one week before Christmas 1955, the last of the twins came off the Stevenage production line.
“It’s like snapshots – it’s as if I’m going through an album,” says Dee as she walks around the old factory buildings which are now part of the Thomas Alleyne Academy school. The Great North Road, the old coaching route between London and Scotland, used to run past the Vincent works, and factory personnel would use the two-lane highway as an unofficial test track.
“When my father met ex-factory workers in later years, he would say: “Do you remember how we used to race up and down the A1, the Great North Road?” They would say: “Yes, I remember the grin on your face when you got back to the factory yard.”
“The police would be up there waiting to catch the Vincent test riders for speeding,” Dee explains. “But the Vincent was way faster than any of the vehicles the police had, and the testers would be full of glee coming back into the yard, saying they had beaten the speed tr
