Brough Superior
In a workshop off Haydn Road in Nottingham, sometime around 1920, a customer would arrive not to buy a motorcycle off a shelf but to be measured for one. George Brough wanted to know his height, his weight, his reach, even his riding habits, before a machine bearing his name left the works. That habit of building to the individual rider, rather than to a catalog spec, tells you most of what you need to know about why people still chase these motorcycles a century later.
Origins
George Brough did not invent motorcycle manufacturing in his family — he inherited it, then rebelled against it. His father, William E. Brough, had been building engineering products in Nottingham since the 1880s, running W.E. Brough & Co. as a general engineering and bicycle-components business before turning to motorcycles. William built a car powered by a De Dion engine in the 1890s, and there is conflicting information about exactly when he built his first motorcycle, with some accounts placing it around 1902 and production machines following later in the decade. He went on to produce his own V-twin Brough motorcycle by 1910, and George worked in his father's business, learning the trade from the frame up.
George wanted something faster, sportier, and more finely finished than what his father was building, and the two men reportedly disagreed on the direction of the business. In 1919, George struck out on his own and founded Brough Superior in Nottingham. The name was a deliberate jab as much as a brand: "Superior," chosen to signal that his machines would surpass anything wearing the Brough name that came before, including his father's. William Brough is said to have remarked that George's bikes ought to be called "Brough Superior" if he was so convinced they were better — George took him at his word.
The Early Machines
The first Brough Superior appeared before the press in December 1920, and it announced its intentions immediately: a big, confident, curvaceous machine built around a 986cc overhead-valve JAP V-twin, running through a three-speed Sturmey-Archer gearbox, fed by an Amac carburetor and sparked by an ML magneto, all held in a frame with Montgomery forks. The finish was the point. Nuts, bolts, and fittings were hand-worked to a standard that had more in common with coachbuilding than with the mass-production motorcycle industry taking shape around it.
Early catalog names — the Mark I Sidevalve, Mark I Overhead, Mark II Standard, Mark II Sports — gave way quickly to the models that would define the marque. The SS80, a Super Sports machine built around a JAP or Matchless 1000cc side-valve V-twin, arrived in 1922 and remained in the range for close to two decades, with roughly 1,086 built before production ended as war approached in 1939. Every SS80, like every Brough Superior that followed, was assembled and tested individually. George Brough inspected the machines himself, and only those that met his standard were allowed to carry the Brough Superior name plate. This was not a company chasing volume. It was a workshop chasing a standard, and pricing itself accordingly.
The Golden Era
By the mid-1920s, Brough Superior had found its defining machine in the SS100. Built around a JAP or Matchless 1000cc overhead-valve V-twin, the SS100 carried a guarantee that few manufacturers of the era would have dared offer: every example was certified capable of at least 100 mph, a genuinely startling figure for a production road motorcycle in the 1920s and 1930s. Around 383 were built between 1924 and 1940. The frame was a duplex cradle, available with either a rigid rear end or, on the Deluxe version, Brough's own patented sprung rear suspension, and the front end used a modified Harley-Davidson-style Castle fork that Brough had developed and patented with Harold "Oily" Karslake. From 1936 onward, the company shifted its engine supply over to Matchless V-twins.
It was H. D. Teague, writing in The Motor Cycle, who gave Brough Superior the tag it has never shaken off: the "Rolls-Royce of Motorcycles." It stuck because it was defensible. Across roughly twenty-one years of production, the works turned out around 3,048 machines across nineteen models — a tiny output by industry standards, but one built with a consistency of quality that meant a remarkable proportion, something on the order of a third, survive today.
The most famous rider of a Brough Superior was not a professional racer at all. T. E. Lawrence — Lawrence of Arabia — owned a succession of Broughs, reportedly eight of them over the years, and regarded the marque with something close to devotion. In May 1935, riding an SS100 near his cottage in Dorset, he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles and was thrown from the machine. He died six days later, on 19 May 1935. The accident is one of the most written-about incidents in British motoring history, and it has become permanently entangled with the SS100's reputation — a machine capable of genuine speed, ridden by a genuinely restless man, on roads that were not built for either.
Racing
Brough Superior's reputation for speed was not built on advertising copy. It was built at Brooklands, at Arpajon, and on the sand at Pendine, by a roster of riders that reads like a who's-who of interwar British speed competition: Bert Le Vack, Fred Dixon, O. M. Baldwin, Joe Wright, Ron Storey, Ted Baragwanath, Alan Bruce, Eric Fernihough, Noel Pope, and George Brough himself, who by most accounts was as versatile a competition rider as anyone on the payroll.
Bert Le Vack was the standout. In 1924 he took a Brough Superior to 119.05 mph at Arpajon in France, breaking the outright motorcycle speed record and, in the same campaign, setting nine speed records in total. He backed that up with sustained runs at Pendine Sands, averaging 117.13 mph over the flying mile and 116.66 mph over the kilometer — numbers that mattered more than a single peak speed, because they proved the machine could hold pace rather than simply touch it once.
George Brough returned to Pendine in 1927 with a further-developed SS100 and posted an average of 130.6 mph. The company's assault on the outright record continued through the 1930s, and it was Eric Fernihough who closed out the era in dramatic fashion, reaching 169.79 mph near Budapest, Hungary, in 1938 — by some accounts touching 180 mph before the fatal return run that killed him. It was a brutal way to end a remarkable run of record-breaking, and it remains one of the harder chapters in the marque's story.
Landmark Models
Beyond the SS80 and SS100, the 680 OHV filled out the range as a smaller-displacement offering, built around a JAP 680cc overhead-valve V-twin, with around 547 produced between 1926 and 1936. It gave Brough Superior a foothold with riders who wanted the build quality and the name without the outright performance — and expense — of the flagship models.
The most unusual machine to wear the badge never really reached production in any real sense. The Golden Dream, shown at the Earls Court motorcycle show in London in 1938, was an experimental shaft-drive machine powered by a horizontally opposed four-cylinder engine, its cylinders stacked in pairs on each side with geared crankshafts arranged to keep airflow moving across all four heads. Only five were built, in 1939, as the company's attention and the country's industrial capacity turned toward the coming war. It stands as proof that Brough was still willing to gamble on unconventional engineering even as the classic era was ending.
Ownership and Survival
Brough Superior motorcycles, sidecars, and even a small run of motor cars were produced at the Nottingham works from 1919 until 1940. The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 pushed the company toward military production, and motorcycle manufacture in the old sense did not resume once peace returned. George Brough and, later, Albert Wallis kept servicing existing machines and making spare parts into 1969, but for all practical purposes the marque's production life ended with the war. George Brough himself died in Nottingham in January 1970, at seventy-nine, having lived to see his motorcycles pass into legend but not to see the name revived.
The brand went quiet for decades, kept alive mostly by owners, restorers, and the auction circuit. Its eventual return to production is, by most accounts, credited to Mark Upham, a vintage motorcycle enthusiast who acquired rights to the Brough Superior name and set about finding a way to bring it back properly rather than as a badge-engineering exercise. That search led to Thierry Henriette and his design house, Boxer Design — people with genuine experience building high-performance motorcycles, not just an interest in a famous name. The modern Brough Superior SS100 was unveiled at the Milan Motor Show in 2013, marking the marque's public return after more than seventy years away from series production. Sources differ on the exact dates and mechanics of the ownership transfers that followed, but Henriette and Boxer Design are generally credited with subsequently taking full ownership of the brand.
The Marque Today
Brough Superior now operates out of Toulouse, in the south of France, building motorcycles in small numbers under Henriette's direction. The modern range keeps faith with the old names — SS100 and Lawrence among them — alongside newer designs like the Dagger, the AMB001 Pro, and the RMB01, plus a collaboration with Aston Martin that put a limited run of AMB01 machines into build. The modern SS100 runs a liquid-cooled, DOHC 88-degree V-twin sourced from Akira, a long way mechanically from the JAP and Matchless engines of the 1920s, but built with the same insistence on hand-finished quality and small production runs, with contemporary models priced from roughly $66,000 to $195,000 depending on specification.
Original machines from the Nottingham years have become one of the most closely watched categories in the classic motorcycle market, with exceptional examples commanding prices up to $600,000 at auction. That figure says less about nostalgia than about scarcity and engineering honesty — a company that built roughly 3,000 motorcycles over two decades, tested each one before it left the works, and happened along the way to be ridden by Lawrence of Arabia and campaigned by some of the fastest riders of its age. The Rolls-Royce tag was always a bit of marketing shorthand, but a century on, it still holds up better than most.