could some kind soul help me to see if my 1941 WM20 was an Aussie bike? It has matching numbers so I'm gonna guess it might have been issued to Aussie, NZ or Canadian forces... frame no 34382

email (option): cas.vanderwoude@gmail.com

Hi Cas, can't see it there, but 34381 is.

Rob

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

WOW Rob, thank you so much.

Nothing in this game is a certainty but ya gotta think probably this is an Aussie bike... Makes sense.

When I first bought the bike it had a Norton gearbox and the chaincase had been altered to mate it to the engine. The previous owner used an old circular saw blade for this purpose. I'm gonna say some aussie ingenuity?

email (option): cas.vanderwoude@gmail.com

Sorry Cas I made a mistake 34381 isn't their, I had forgotten how to interpret my own spread sheet, there isn't anything that close

Book - AIF Serial - AMF Serial - Frame number WM20

189 - 11779 ------ 30830
196 ------- 38591 32109
190 - 18803 ------ 33728
191 - 18905 ------ 33993
192 ------- 13741 34276
191 - 18911 ------ 36185
189 - 11793 ------ 36232
191 - 18895 ------ 36272
189 - 11895 ------ 36345
189 - 11808 ------ 36384
191 - 18903 ------ 36388
199 ------- 30742 36405

But 34382 is in the post war key cards and it finished its Army career in Tripoli in 1960 wearing a rebuild serial.



Rob

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

When Curtin pulled troops from Europe back here to defend Aust from the Japanese supplies from the UK virtually stopped
Big rift beween him & Churchill
Thus in the latter part we principally got US gear till the UK suddenly had surpluses which then got dumped down here in the hope we would pay for them..
Then on to of that post war the UK sent thousands of surplus military vehicles down here for auction.
My own bike has no record other than it fits within a particular contract group.
Not in the Aust ledgers and no record of despatch in the UK that the members here can find ( parallel universes perhaps )
What I have noticed however is there is far more matching engine & frame number bikes down here than any where else .

There was a series of photos in the engineering workshop of SimsMetal showing things like complete Merlins & Griffons being lowered into the furnaces , literal mountains of motorcycle frames waiting to be bailed and these were higher than the new gantry crane which was 60' tall
There was a rotary furnace with a very wide charging mouth which was made purely to melt down thousands of aircraft wings that had never been fitted to a plane sitting now unused in one of the foundry buildings .

A 420cc BSA stationary engine was £ 15
A brand new in the crate WM20 was £ 10
So it was a no brainer particularly as there was a ready market for dynamos
Lots of outstations and machinery sheds that had 6V lighting courtsey of an WM20 driving a bank of various dynamos

What we can say for certain is that WM20 34382 was built under a British War Office contract (C7287 for 17,000 machines...WM20 25001 - 42000) and that delivery of this contract to RAOC Chilwell commenced in August 1940.

As far as I'm aware, there were no wartime "Australian" contracts with BSA, unlike the early war deliveries of Royal Enfields and Nortons which went direct to Australian distributors. All Australian WM20s are likely to have been from War Office (British Army) stocks and therefore somewhat random, rather than in batches.

The surviving Australian records seem to be Australian Army only. We have no record of Air Force or Navy vehicles, nor of any other Government department which means that there could have been numbers supplied for which there are no surviving records. It is known in the UK that WD motorcycles were supplied to the Fire Services and The G.P.O. Only Australian research might indicate if this was also the case there.

The three main routes by which motorcycles arrived in Australia seem to have been either those brought back by units returning from the Far East, a large number of new machines supplied direct or also the "Refugee Cargo" vehicles which were on their way to Malaya before it fell and which were diverted.

A 1941 machine could have fallen within any of these groups. This one doesn't appear to have any surviving Australian Army records and an apparent duplication of the number in hand-written records from the Middle East in 1960 only cloud the issue. It's almost impossible that a bike with a rebuild number could have been sold off in Libya and then reappear in Australia with matching numbers...That said, it would call for careful examination of the stampings to make sure that all are ex-factory.

Most (?) M20's found in Australia have matching frame and engine numbers, so have not been through workshops. Seems the reason probably is that most were 'dumped ' here after the war and did not see any service. Hence a dealer in Perth having 400 M20's for sale after release by DOD in 1956 (ish)

email (option): binnawan@iinet.net.au

In about 1990 I joined the Vintage Motorcycle Club In Victoria, Australia and at that time we had a lot of WW 11 ex servicemen in the club. One guy was a dispatch rider and said that when Darwin got bombed in February 1942 he would ride an M20 from Darwin to Adelaide mostly unsealed road to relay messages. His biggest threat was from US convoys going towards Darwin taking up the whole track and from the dust storm that they created. He loved the M20 so much that after the war he raced them and opened a motorcycle shop in Box Hill. We also had Military Police who rode the Harley Davidson WLA later on in the war. I agree most WM 20 in Australia have matching engine and frame numbers and often are not on the War memorial Transport records from Canberra. On another note a lot of Merlin engines were left here after the war still in crates and some of these soldiers family helped pull them to bits to seperate the steel studs etc from the alloy to be recycled. They said the perimeter fence was 2 crates high with the engines still in them to keep intruders out. Another guy purchased airforce instruments as they were auctioned of in the 1960's at very cheap price and later sold them on mainly to USA. My wifes uncle was a mechanic in Darwin working on Spitfires during the war and later worked on race boats here in Australia which were powered by Merlin engines. One boat called MISS BUD won quite a few races around 1976-1981 with its powerful merlin engine. He later travelled the world working on Merlin engines and when in his eighties knocked back lots of offers to travel to fix Merlin engines.

The enormous standing Army in Australia seems to have been in place for a relativly short period whilst Japan was threatening to invade.

Its possible that the M20s in Australia visited the workshops for repairs just as much as anywhere else but because the workshops only had one or a few machines in at any time they were fixed and returned to their units with original engines, the mass engine changes in the UK, Germany and other places are more likely to be post war or in workshops full of machines where a production line system was used.

Rob

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

We did the same as every other army
When machines came in for major service it was swap the engine / gearbox then back out ASAP
When they sold off the WDB40's about 1/4 of them had mismatched engine & frame numbers which became a problem latter on when we tried to get them registered
Some where I have a copy of the order for B40s.
Went some thing like
495 bikes ( 500 including the 5 test bikes ) + 40 engines + 20 complete frames + 20 complete front ends
The rest of the spares never made it as they got sunk in the Suez canal