Reading various publications figures quoted for the number of Nortons produced during the war seems to vary considerably...Totals ranging from 80,000 to 100,000 being common.
Do the records detail more accurately how many were made?..and as a matter of interest, how many Big 4s were prodoced in total?....Ian

email (option): ian@wright52.plus.com

Hi Ian,

check this:

http://www.wdnorton.nl/Production%20numbers%20and%20dates.html

I think we'll never know.....

Regards,
Sven

email (option): snvosselman@hotmail.com

Hi Ian

I can have a stab at the big4 numbers but only by adding up the numbers in O&M.

The 10 contracts add up to 4747 or 4779 or 5176 or 5208.

Several big4 contract state in their spare parts lists that they were fitted with "AA type box sidecars".

And in "Jaguar a history of a great British car" by A Whyte the wartime Swallow production figures are.

3751 WD Sidecars
1295 Box Sidecars
3927 Passenger sidecars
335 Special RAF Camera carrying sidecars

The figures in the Sidecar section of O&M don't come anywhere near this, but its possible they were spare sidecars and the rest were listed as combinations in the Nortton & BSA sections?

Its possible that another company also produced WD sidecars, but no evidence has yet appeared.

One WD sidecar was fitted to a Sunbeam, a few others were probably used on other protoypes such as the SWD BSA, so I would guess that nearly 3750 Big4 frontline combinations where built.

Rob.

email (option): robmiller11@yahoo.co.uk

On the Big 4, the highest framenumber (from a regular poster here) is 533X

So they seem to have started with 1000, so that's 4350 bikes alone, then there's the pre 1940 bikes, roughly 350.

So I think around 4700 Big Fours of all types.

Shame the Norton Ledgers are incomplete!

The survival rate of B4's is slightly over 1% have 49 bikes listed from all over the world!

The Royal Northumbrian Fuseliers took 96 bikes to France in Nov 1939, at the end of May 1940 they had 6 left! and gave them to the French troops, there is not much photographic evidence that the Germans used them intensively like the Indian CAV (ex-French Contract), they didn't like the L/H sidecar, so some were used solo.



Cheers,

Lex

email (option): welbike@welbike.net

Ian,

My calculation to the total number of military Norton machines is approximately 92000 plus or minus 10!
250 unconfirmed model 18's for India office claimed but I have not found any evidence for those in the Norton assembly books so not in this figure.
It does include some 350cc models but these have also not been confirmed.
It does include all the India Office/India Stores Department bikes as well as some smaller deliveries to the Aussies and New Zealanders.

The number does not include about 350 1938 model 16H for the India Stores Department made in 1946 and about 600 B4's made for the Egyptian govnmt in 1950.

Number of bikes made between October 1939 and Nov 1945 is about 76223.

On B4 specific I come to a total of about 4780 machines, but not all of them had a driven sidecar wheel! About 660 machines pre october 1939 the rest until Oct 1942.

I am still working on getting the numbers and dates more complete but am afraid that it will never be complete. Much of the Norton history has been thrown away.

This is it for so far.

Cheers,

Rob

WDNorton.nl

email (option): wd16h@telfort,nl

Ian, you've specifically asked about Wartime production which slightly works against Norton as their dominant period was actually the late 1930s, although numbers were relatively low.

Ignoring the Indian army stuff (although effectively many were used by British troops in India), it looks as if there were about 8000 16Hs and Big 4 s made to pre-war WD and RAF contracts.

The wartime numbering system ran from W1000 - W94600 for the 16H and S1000 - S5949 for the Big 4. If there were no gaps, this would give us 93600 16Hs and 4949 Big 4s, a total of 98549 machines.

Unfortunately, there are gaps which cannot be explained by WD contracts (we have the consecutive 'Catalogue Ref'. numbers for those). The RAF and RN contract details are sketchy at best but probably don't account for all the missing. We don't know if spare frames and later spare engines were numbered from the same sequences and in the absence of survivors with verifiable matching numbers, we'll probably never know if complete machines were made.

There is a gap from 11000ish - 14000 which might be RAF/RN/Direct Commonwealth sales and the gap from 22000 - 26000 includes a number of verifiable RAF bikes.

The biggest doubt in my mind is W50000 - W60000 of which there is no trace in any surviving documents and it is too many to be anything other than an army contract or a gap in production.

I'm a little at odds with Rob's wartime total as the total production for WD catalogue refs 15 - 38 (the wartime contracts)seems to add up to 78381 which implies that this was the total supplied via RAOC.

Were the Nortons supplied to Canadian troops listed in the numbers supplied by O+M or were these supplied to them by the British army and included in the numbers, or were the Nortons ever "officially" issued to them?

email (option): davmax@ntlworld.com

The Nortons supplied to the Canadians don't seem to have been supplied direct but via RAOC. I have a list of some 1940 deliveries that all had RAOC census numbers and the vast majority in photographs show them still with the original number, although a few have the 'CC' Canadian prefix and a new number.

If they did take 10000 late in the war, that might explain things but there is a lack of survivors so I suspect that someone turned a page or started a new book and 'lost' 10000 numbers - It happens a lot, on a much smaller scale in those old ledgers.