Excelsior
A Bicycle Shop on Stoney Stanton Road
Start with a bicycle. In 1874, a partnership going by the names Bayliss, Thomas and Slaughter began building penny-farthings out of premises on Lower Ford Street and later Stoney Stanton Road, in the Hillfields district of Coventry. It was an unremarkable trade for the time — Coventry was thick with cycle makers — except that this particular firm did something nobody else had thought to do: they put the word "Excelsior" on a bicycle. By most accounts it was the first time the name had been used this way, and the company went on to become one of the first in Britain to build and sell cycles at real commercial scale, under both the Excelsior and Eureka names. That single decision, a trademark chosen more than two decades before there was an engine to attach it to, is the reason there's a page for this marque at all.
The partners simplified to Bayliss and Thomas as the business grew, and for a long stretch that was the name on the letterhead even as "Excelsior" carried the products. It's a detail worth sitting with, because it explains something about the company's whole later history: the brand name and the corporate owner behind it were never quite the same thing, and they would part ways and rejoin more than once over the following century.
The First Motorcycles
Excelsior didn't wait around once the internal combustion engine became a practical proposition. In 1896 the firm took a single-cylinder Minerva engine, imported from Belgium, and bolted it into one of its own bicycle frames. That machine was shown at the Crystal Palace Show the same year, putting Excelsior among the very first companies in Britain to build, run, and publicly display a motorcycle — and, more importantly for the balance sheet, the first British firm to actually sell one rather than just tinker with one.
The early 1900s were a period of borrowed engines and homemade ambition. Bayliss, Thomas & Co. fitted proprietary units from Minerva, De Dion, and MMC into their own cycle-based chassis, and the firm quickly built a name for itself in competition. In 1903, works rider Harry Martin covered a mile in 59.8 seconds at Phoenix Park in Dublin, breaking the mile-a-minute barrier — a genuine landmark for British motorcycling, and one that's well documented. Excelsior's speed exploits are sometimes overstated in the retelling: the company is occasionally credited with the first officially timed 100 mph run by a motorcycle in 1912, but that record belongs to the American Excelsior company, timed at Playa del Rey with Lee Humiston aboard. The two firms shared nothing but a name, and it's an easy claim to garble — so it's worth being clear that the British Excelsior's real strength in this period was on the track, not the timing strip.
Through the 1910s the backbone of the range was the Model BigX, a 1000cc V-twin with inlet-over-exhaust valve gear, belt drive, and a gearbox that grew from two speeds to three as the decade wore on. It was a big, straightforward machine built for a market that still thought of the motorcycle as a slightly wild alternative to the bicycle, and it kept Excelsior solvent through the war years and into the difficult trading conditions that followed.
In 1910 the company formally became the Excelsior Motor Co Ltd, dropping the Bayliss Thomas name from the motorcycles — though it was revived for machines exported to the United States and northern Europe, where confusion with the American and German firms also trading as Excelsior was a real commercial headache.
Birmingham, and the Walker Years
The corporate history around 1919 to 1921 is genuinely tangled, and it's better to say so than to invent tidiness. What's clear is that R. Walker & Son — a Birmingham firm that had made its name manufacturing ship's lamps — took over Excelsior in the years after the First World War, with the Walker family, Reginald and his son Eric, running the business from then on. Sources differ on exactly when the takeover was completed, with dates given variously as 1919, 1919/20, or simply "after the war," but the physical move is easier to pin down: by 1921 motorcycle production had shifted to the Walker site on Kings Road in Tyseley, Birmingham, and that address is where Excelsior would remain for the rest of its manufacturing life.
The Walker ownership turned out to be the making of the marque. Reginald and Eric Walker had motorcycling in their blood rather than just an accessory business to diversify, and under their stewardship Excelsior stopped being a competent also-ran and became a serious competition force.
The Golden Era and the Manxman
The late 1920s were when it all came together. In 1928 Excelsior's 250cc machines won the Dutch TT outright, along with the German, French, and European Grand Prix races and the Brooklands Grand Prix, and the firm collected three gold medals at the International Six Days Trial. A year later came the result that mattered most commercially: Sid Crabtree won the 1929 Lightweight TT on a B14, a model that went on to become Excelsior's best-selling machine of the era.
Through the grinding years of the early 1930s depression, the company did what a lot of British manufacturers were forced to do — it built down as well as up, turning out inexpensive, low-running-cost small machines, many powered by Villiers engines, aimed squarely at riders who needed transport rather than glamour.
Then, in November 1934, came the Manxman. Designed by Eric Walker together with H.J. Hatch, it arrived as a 249cc two-valve single with an overhead camshaft — a genuinely sophisticated engine for a mid-size production motorcycle at the time. A four-valve version followed in 1936, and the Manxman family eventually grew to include 348cc and 498cc versions as well as a fully enclosed, water-cooled 250. It's the model most people mean when they say "Excelsior" today, and it earned that reputation honestly: fast, well-engineered, and raced with real success for the rest of the decade.
Racing: TT Wins and the Mechanical Marvel
Excelsior's competition record through the 1930s is the strongest argument for taking the marque seriously alongside the better-remembered British names of the period. Syd Gleave won the 1933 Lightweight TT aboard the extraordinary Mechanical Marvel, a four-valve, Blackburne-engined works racer that took the win in its very first outing. It went on to further success on the Continent over the following season but was retired at the end of 1934 — it was, by every account, too complicated and too expensive to ever turn into a machine Excelsior could sell to customers, which is as good an explanation as any of why some of the most interesting racing motorcycles of any era never made it past the works team.
The production-based Manxman carried the racing flag through the rest of the decade. Denis Parkinson, riding for the Wakefield camp, put together a run of Lightweight Manx Grand Prix wins on the Manxman, and the model finished second in the Lightweight TT in 1936, 1937, and 1938, and third in 1939. Its finest hour arguably came away from the Isle of Man altogether: a Manxman won the European Grand Prix at Chemnitz, Germany, in 1936, in front of a reported crowd of 200,000 people — a scale of spectacle that's hard to picture for a British single-cylinder production racer today.
War Work and the Welbike
Excelsior's most widely recognized contribution to the war effort had nothing to do with its road-going range. The Welbike was a tiny, single-seat folding motorcycle developed for use by the Special Operations Executive and, later, airborne troops — designed under the pseudonym John Dolphin and powered by a 98cc Villiers two-stroke engine, small enough to be dropped by parachute in a purpose-built container alongside the men who'd ride it. Production ran through the war years, though the precise number built and the exact dates of manufacture are not consistently reported. It's an odd, charming footnote to a serious business — a proper motorcycle shrunk down to something a paratrooper could sling out of an aircraft — and it remains one of the most collected wartime oddities associated with the Excelsior name, whatever the exact final production numbers turn out to have been.
Peacetime, Decline, and Closure
Civilian production resumed in 1946, but the postwar Excelsior was a smaller, humbler proposition than the firm that had won at Chemnitz a decade earlier. The immediate postwar range leaned on small, cheap machines like the 125cc Universal, aimed at a public that needed basic transport more than it needed a sporting single. The Talisman followed in the 1950s, using Excelsior's own 243cc twin-cylinder two-stroke engine with a four-speed gearbox, and the 98cc Consort covered the budget commuter end of the market.
None of it was enough to hold the company's position as British motorcycling contracted through the late 1950s and into the 1960s, squeezed by cheap cars and, increasingly, by Japanese imports. Excelsior built its last motorcycle in 1964, and by 1965 the firm was in enough financial trouble that it was taken over by Britax, the car accessory manufacturer — a company with no interest in continuing motorcycle production. Britax kept making car accessories at the old Excelsior works in Tyseley, and the marque, as a maker of motorcycles, effectively ceased to exist.
The Excelsior name didn't vanish entirely. There is conflicting information about exactly when and how it resurfaced, but by most accounts Britax's motorcycle division took up the Excelsior name again later in the 1970s, producing a limited run of machines under the Britax-Excelsior badge, though the details and exact dates of that episode are thin and not well corroborated — treat it as a footnote rather than a true second act.
The Marque Today
There is no British Excelsior factory, no active production, and no realistic prospect of one. What remains is the collector market, and it treats the marque with real seriousness: pre-war Excelsiors, and the Manxman above all, are sought after by British classic bike enthusiasts, with originality and matching numbers commanding a genuine premium. Racing-associated machines and anything connected to the Mechanical Marvel or the works TT effort carry particular weight with buyers who know the history.
It's also worth being clear, for anyone searching the name, that this Excelsior — Coventry-born, Birmingham-built, Manxman-famous — is an entirely different company from the American Excelsior-Henderson, which had its own separate history and its own brief 1990s revival before passing eventually to Bajaj Auto. There were German and Belgian firms trading under the Excelsior name too. The British Excelsior's claim on the name is the oldest of any of them, dating back to that first penny-farthing in 1874, and its motorcycling record — from Harry Martin's mile at Phoenix Park to Syd Gleave's TT win to a Manxman crossing the line at Chemnitz in front of 200,000 people — stands on its own without needing to borrow anyone else's history.