New Hudson
There's a particular irony sitting at the heart of the New Hudson story: a company that spent three decades chasing speed records at Brooklands and building some of the more capable side-valve and overhead-valve singles of their day ended up remembered, commercially at least, for a brake patent. That patent kept the lights on long after the motorcycles stopped. It's a very British kind of survival story, and it starts not with an engine but with a bicycle works in Birmingham.
Origins in Birmingham
The New Hudson Cycle Co. traces back to 1890, when George Patterson set up shop in Birmingham building "safety" bicycles — the chain-driven, two-equal-wheel machines that had just made cycling a mass pursuit rather than a daredevil's hobby. Birmingham was the natural place for this. The city was already thick with metalworking trades, small engineering shops, and the kind of skilled labor that would soon turn bicycle frames into motorcycle frames almost by accident of proximity.
Patterson's operation was based around Summer Hill Street, Icknield Street, and Goodman Street — solid Birmingham industrial addresses, unglamorous and productive. The company's first tentative step into motorized transport came in November 1902, when New Hudson showed motorized bicycles at the Stanley Show, then the trade's most important annual gathering. Two machines were on display: one running a De Dion-Bouton engine, the other a Minerva. Both were bought-in Continental engines bolted into New Hudson's own cycle frames, which was standard practice for British firms dipping a toe into powered transport at the time.
It didn't take. The first motorcycle, built in 1902, wasn't a commercial success, and New Hudson retreated to what it knew — pure bicycle manufacture — for the better part of a decade.
The False Start and the Restart
That retreat lasted until around 1910, when New Hudson tried again, this time fitting JAP engines from J.A. Prestwich of Tottenham, the London firm that supplied engines to half the British motorcycle trade in this period. By 1911, New Hudson had enough confidence to show at the Olympia Motor Cycle Show with a 3.5 HP "Colonial" model — a single-cylinder side-valve machine of their own design, with a bore of 85mm and stroke of 88mm, offered optionally with a JAP engine instead. Alongside it sat a smaller 2.5 HP model built specifically around a JAP unit.
The range grew through the pre-war years: a 293cc machine in 1911, a 500cc Model 3B in 1912 built around a 3½ HP single, and further touring models by 1914. That same year New Hudson added a 6hp V-twin and a small 211cc two-stroke to the catalogue — a spread that shows a company trying to cover every likely customer, from the commuter to the sidecar man. The 3.5hp single and the two-stroke carried on in production into 1916, by which point the war had already reshaped everything.
The war years were hard on the Patterson family specifically, not just the business. One of George Patterson's sons died in the conflict; another lost a leg. Between the personal cost and the wartime shift to munitions and bicycle work rather than motorcycles, the family sold the factory to H.J. Bructon after the war, and in 1920 the business was reformed as New Hudson Ltd. — a new legal entity carrying an old name into a very different decade.
The Interwar Years — New Hudson's Real Peak
If there's a golden era for New Hudson, it's not any single glamorous model but the sustained, workmanlike production run through the interwar years, interrupted only by the war years of 1915 to 1919. Across that span, motorcycle output averaged something like 2,000 machines a year — not spectacular by the standards of the largest British makers, but steady, and steady is what kept a Birmingham engineering firm solvent through some genuinely difficult decades.
The postwar range rebuilt around four-stroke singles. At the 1921 Olympia Show, New Hudson unveiled its first four-stroke design since the war: a 4.5 HP single-cylinder machine intended for sidecar use, running a side-valve engine of 86mm bore and 100mm stroke for 594cc. The following year brought new 346cc and 498cc side-valve solo models, filling out a range that by the late 1920s covered 250cc, 350cc, 500cc, and 600cc machines in both side-valve and overhead-valve form, plus a full line of sidecars. This was a company competing seriously in the mid-market British trade, going head to head with the likes of Triumph, Norton, and BSA on machines that ordinary riders could actually afford to buy and maintain.
Then, in 1929, came the decision that would ultimately outlast the motorcycles themselves: New Hudson purchased the Girling brake patent from its inventor, Albert Girling, and began supplying brake systems to Ford, Austin, Rover, and Riley. At the time it probably looked like diversification. In hindsight it was a lifeline.
By the turn of the decade the motorcycle side was struggling. Inclined-engine designs, fashionable earlier in the era, had fallen out of favor; enclosed bodywork experiments hadn't caught on with buyers; and newer engine designs were giving the factory reliability headaches. New Hudson ceased motorcycle manufacture in 1933, according to Grace's Guide and VMCC records, and wound down to lean fully into Girling brakes, a business that would go on to have a long, largely separate life of its own.
Racing: Brooklands, the TT, and Bert le Vack
New Hudson's competition record is thinner on early glory than the firm's engineering ambition might suggest. The company entered its first Isle of Man TT in 1911, and for well over a decade afterward, real headline success stayed out of reach. What changed things was the arrival of Bert le Vack as the company's racing development man later in the 1920s.
Le Vack was already one of the best-known speed men in British motorcycling by the time he came to New Hudson — a rider and engineer closely associated with JAP's racing engines and credited with laying much of the groundwork for JAP's speedway engines, though sources differ on how much of the actual design work was his; the National Motorcycle Museum, for one, is explicit that he was not the designer of JAP's well-known single-port engine, whatever else he contributed to its development. What isn't in dispute is what he did on a New Hudson at Brooklands in 1927: riding a race-prepared machine with a special engine, forks, frame, and gearbox, le Vack broke the 100 mph barrier at the famous Surrey banked circuit, setting ten world records along with a Brooklands Championship at 101.43 mph. It's worth being precise about what this was and wasn't — le Vack had already been the first rider to lap Brooklands at over 100 mph back in 1922, on a Zenith-JAP, so the 1927 New Hudson run wasn't motorcycling's first century lap. It was, however, a genuine and hard-won record for New Hudson specifically, on a machine developed in-house, and it remains the high point of the marque's competition history.
That same year, the factory's Isle of Man effort paid off too. The engine le Vack used traced back to New Hudson's own overhead-valve design first raced at the TT in 1924, and by 1927 the works team was running developed versions of that engine on the Island. Works rider Jimmy Guthrie — who would go on to become one of the great names of prewar TT racing on other machines — brought his New Hudson home in second place in the Senior TT. For a firm better known for solid touring singles than works racers, a Senior TT podium and a Brooklands 100 mph record in the same season was a genuine high-water mark, and New Hudson made the most of it commercially with the "Plus Power" model, offered to special order with a le Vack-tuned engine and traded openly on the 1927 season's reputation.
Landmark Machines
Among the machines that survive and get talked about at club events and museum stands, the 1914 "Big Six" — a 6 HP model — holds a place at the National Motorcycle Museum as a representative of New Hudson's ambitious prewar range. The Plus Power, built around le Vack's tuned engine, is rarer still and prized specifically for its direct link to the 1927 racing season. And in the postwar decades, it was the autocycles rather than any full-size motorcycle that kept the New Hudson name in front of the public — some 24,000 of them built, including the JDL model and the later 2F design, small and cheap machines built for a Britain trying to get back on the road on a budget.
Ownership, War, and the Long Afterlife
New Hudson's independence effectively ended in the late 1920s, when the Birmingham Small Arms Company — BSA — took over New Hudson's cycle interests. By the time motorcycle production wound down in the early 1930s, the company's future lay in Girling brakes rather than complete machines, and the Girling name would go on to become a fixture of the British motor trade in its own right, a business that in one form or another continued long after anyone remembered it began life as a bicycle and motorcycle maker.
The New Hudson name itself didn't disappear, though. It resurfaced in 1940 on an autocycle powered by a 98cc Villiers engine — a lightweight, pedal-assisted machine built for wartime and postwar transport needs, produced under BSA ownership. BSA formally purchased the bicycle factory outright in 1943, and after the war, New Hudson-branded autocycles continued in production, updated periodically, through to 1957. The restyled late-model autocycles were a reasonable stab at keeping the format relevant, but they couldn't hold off the moped, which arrived from the Continent in the 1950s and ate the autocycle's market alive. New Hudson's exit from powered two-wheelers came around 1957–58.
Even after that, the name lingered on pedal bicycles. By the 1950s, New Hudson-branded bicycles were essentially badge-engineered BSA cycles, and when Raleigh Industries took over BSA's cycle business in 1957, New Hudson bicycles went with it, continuing to appear as rebadged Raleighs into at least the mid-1970s — a strange, quiet coda for a name that had once been on Brooklands record boards and Senior TT leaderboards.
New Hudson Today
New Hudson has been defunct as a motorcycle manufacturer since the late 1950s, and there's no revival brand trading on the name in the way some British marques have been resurrected for the modern market. What survives is a solid collector base, concentrated around the pre-1933 machines and, above all, the 1927 racing-connected models. Auction results bear this out: a 1928 New Hudson Model 88E has sold for as much as $27,000, while more modest machines — a 1955 autocycle, for instance — trade for a small fraction of that, with the overall market for the marque averaging in the low thousands. It's a spread that tells you exactly where the enthusiasm concentrates: the racing-adjacent overhead-valve singles of the late 1920s, not the utilitarian postwar autocycles, however historically interesting the latter might be.
The Vintage Motor Cycle Club has kept serious documentation alive, including a history written by Eric Londesbrough, the VMCC's longtime marque specialist for New Hudson, published in 1999 and now preserved on CD through the VMCC library after going out of print in book form. Between that scholarship, the National Motorcycle Museum's holdings, and a small but committed following among British prewar collectors, New Hudson hasn't been forgotten — it's simply been filed correctly, as one of the many capable, unglamorous Birmingham firms that built good motorcycles for a couple of decades, had one genuinely brilliant season, and then found its longest-lasting legacy in something that stops a wheel rather than turns one.