YOUR LETTERS
FURTHER TO YOUR plea for contact from the Suzuki Owners Club members who rode three-cylinder two-strokes around the coast of mainland Britain to win the 1974 Maudes Trophy (page 64, January issue), I write to say my brother Roy Bedson and I participated in that event. I am 71 now and was 22 at the time, but it feels like yesterday! We were both members of the Manchester branch of the SOC. The club was only formed about a year before this by a vicar in Manchester called Tony Lloyd who ran a youth club in a church hall in the ’60s that morphed into a bike club. Other bike clubs started using the premises on different nights, and when Tony bought a Suzuki GT750, he formed a club to take up a spare night. Very quickly a London branch was formed and others followed.
Tony then thought up the whole Maudes Trophy idea, as he had seen BMW win it the year before by riding some of their twins round and round the Isle of Man TT circuit. He sold the idea to Suzuki GB as a publicity stunt to launch the second generation of two-stroke triples – 380, 550 and 750cc. He set up an office at the premises of Sports Motorcycles Ltd in Manchester (later to become the Mike Hailwood comeback TT-win people) and meticulously planned the bid. Riders were SOC volunteers from Manchester and London, with some Suzuki GB employees and some others from the motorcycle trade. Suzuki GB bought a Range Rover to stay with the bikes for back-up and rented three Bedford Bedouin camper vans to
