Ron Irway takes a sideways glance at
classic contrivances, from Primus to Vespa,
from Aga to Meccano …

The Buzz about Vespa …Vespa Club of Britain members stream along Madeira Drive
at the end of the 1954 Brighton Rally.

Morris, a British champion of hand-craftsmanship, design and socialism, died in 1896, one year after the world’s first internal-combustion powered two-wheeler was unveiled, and the same year in which John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish vet living in Belfast, made £3000 from the sale of patents he’d taken out on the ‘pneumatic tubes' he’d originally invented to make his little son’s tricycle more comfortable to ride on the rough cobbled street.

This was a year of revolution – when horse and steam gave way to the internal combustion engine, and when Morris and his ideals of pure design, hand-craftsmanship, and a luddite simplicity of living were finally steam-rollered by the absolute triumph of the industrial age. It was also precisely fifty years before the first ‘Vespa’ motorcycle would be produced.

For all his antipathy to mass production, I’ve no doubt that Morris would have approved of the Vespa. The combination of iconic form with an intense practicality of function would have ticked all his boxes as far as the integrity of the thing itself was concerned – and with small-capacity engines, all-encompassing enclosures to protect the rider from the worst of the weather and road dirt, user-friendly controls, minimal maintenance, and clever production engineering making for affordable price tags, the machine also complied with his socialist principals.

The 1946 Vespa brochure embodies the modernity of the machine's design. The boneshaker shown in the background is a pointed reference to both how far personal transport technology had already come – and how the purpose of the new machine was to provide inexpensive wheels for all …

Looking back from the vantage point of a full century into the future, it’s hard to believe that Morris’ original motivation in establishing his own design and manufacturing company, Morris & Co, was to bring good design and quality of life to the mass of humanity - at an affordable cost. In this, his major aspiration, he failed – for the retail price of his carefully-made, high quality products was far to high to ever carry them into the homes of ‘the poor’.

The poor of the day had far more pressing things to spend their money on: lard, bread, bacon, soap, lamp oil and sweet tea, for example, were of considerably greater interest to them than la-di-da theories of good design. The Vespa, however, has turned out to be one of the world’s greatest popular successes – precisely because it effortlessly embodied the combination of features which Morris struggled to knit together.

A mid-1960s machine painstakingly restored by Vespa Classics, a specialist dealership formerly based in Newport, South Wales, but now relocated to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It's remarkably similar to the one in the Thai poster (below)!

The Vespa story actually begins during Morris’ lifetime, with the foundation of a luxury ship-fitting company in Genoa in 1884. The founder, Rinaldo Piaggio, lent his name – and all his energies – to the company, and by the end of the century, their activities included the production of railway carriages, goods vans, luxury coaches, engines, trams and truck bodies. All big-time stuff.

With WW1, diversification became the name of the game. The company branched out into aircraft, buying a new plant in Pisa in 1917, where propellers, engines and fuselages were all constructed and assembled. It was here, once the Second World War had come to an end, that Piaggio would diversify still further – into budget personal mobility.

In 1943, the Pisa plant was one of two Tuscan facilities entirely destroyed as a result of the fighting. The company, still managed by the family, took the opportunity to re-work the plant for production of cheap, lightweight personal transport – something for which Enrico Piaggio had spotted a massive untapped market, and which would be brought to fruition by the involvement of aeronautical engineer and inventor Corradino D’Ascanio.

Ten years after the Pisa works was destroyed by fighting,
the 1953 Vespa calendar proudly displays the fruits
of Enrico's cunning reconstruction plan.
Now that's what I call a piece of work …

Now, I’ve already set out my case that the Vespa marque stands for iconic design, as well as basic functionality – but the first machine to see the light of day was so ill-starred in the looks department that it earned the unfortunate nickname ‘Donald Duck’ (‘Paperino’, in Italian). In fact, so unimpressed was Enrico Piaggio with this boxy, uninspiring offering that he set D’Ascanio to work to redesign it straight away.

Asking an aero engineer to design a bike is not necessarily a good plan. Fast-forward twenty-five years, and transport yourself via the waterflume of the imagination to the British West Midlands, where you find yourself in an abandoned motorcycle development HQ which until a week or so ago was occupied overwhelmingly by former aerospace engineers, designers and management. This is the BSA-Triumph Group’s Umberslade Hall, the year is 1971 - and you are witnessing the closing scene in the slow abuse and murder of the British motorcycle industry.

Here it was shown that the ‘fresh ideas’ approach to specialised product design is not necessarily a good thing. Successive BSA and Triumph models created to appeal to the designer, the aero enthusiast, or the prevailing fashion trend, failed to sell to the motorcyclist – and slowly the last vestiges of British motorcycle manufacturing haemorrhaged away. In 1946 Pisa, on the other hand, the first production examples of the ‘Vespa 98’ would illustrate that – given the right aero engineer, and (perhaps more importantly) the right brief – the results of such a risky assignment could be really rather pleasing …

Belfast dealer (and former Norton racer) Artie Bell was an enthusiastic supporter of the marque. Here's a display he put together, presumably in the foyer of a local cinema, promoting the 1956 film 'Loser Takes All'. Stars were the late lamented Robert Morley, Glynis Johns – and a Vespa …

D’Ascanio had completely deconstructed the idea of a motorcycle. He had addressed what he saw as their uncomfortable, precarious riding position and unnecessary bulk.  He had come up with a cunning single-sided strut, based on an aircraft’s undercarriage, to render the wheels quickly detachable and so make changing the tyres after a puncture a quick and convenient procedure. He detested the fact that the greasy drive chain made both riding and maintaining a conventional machine a deeply mucky experience, so gave his creation a stressed-member body and direct-mesh drive train. To make the machine easy to ride, he put the gear-change on the handlebar. And most inspired of all his ideas was the enclosure of all the working parts, and the attachment of steel front legshields, to ensure that the rider would arrive at their destination as shiny and unruffled as when they’d left home.

This otherworldly creation made a splash. Opinion was divided along Marmite lines – some loved it, others were consumed with loathing. Even Piaggio himself was overcome at the remarkable machine his designer had created – and it was at the moment he was presented with the MP6 prototype that the new style of motorcycle gained its name.

“It looks like a wasp!” he exclaimed – and the Italian for ‘wasp’, as you’ll know, is ‘Vespa’ …

In 1946, just over 2,500 scooters were sold – and two thousand of these had already been made in anticipation of demand when the machine was launched. For 1947, the modestly improved Series II’s sales touched the 16,500 mark. The Vespa had arrived.

Vespa enthusiasts knitted their machines into every area of life. As daily transport, holiday wheels - and even as
wedding cars - the scooters carried their owners everywhere, with never a smudge on a white silk dress.
I think that this, though, is more probably an
Easter Parade …

By 1965, the year in which Enrico Piaggio died, a total of 3,350,000 Vespas had been made and sold. All models are what a motorcycling anorak would call ‘lightweights’; that is, their engine capacity is below the 250cc mark. In fact, one of the most popular variants has been the 50cc models – this originally because of an Italian law which meant that sub-50cc machines had the same easygoing legal status as pedal cycles.

The single biggest seller in the history of the marque, however, is the Vespa PX, launched in 1977. This machine, offered in 125, 150 and 200cc variants, combined the classic styling of the 1950s and 60s machines with the convenience and comfort of a really contemporary machine. Really authentic ‘Quadrophenia’ styling, after all, does tend to come with the odd worn bore, rust-pocked silencer and tired-out tread. This series alone has sold more than two million units – all around the globe.