Panther

Stand a Panther Model 100 next to almost anything else built in Cleckheaton, Yorkshire in the 1930s and the engine tells you everything before you've even heard it run. It doesn't sit upright in the frame like a proper single is supposed to. It leans forward at a steep angle, bolted in as a structural member rather than just a lump hung between the frame rails. Riders called the sound it made "firing once every lamp-post," which is an exaggeration, but not by much. That engine, and the company built around it, is the whole story of Panther.

Origins

The company traces back to Joah Carver Phelon, known to everyone as John, who worked with his nephew Harry Rayner on early motorcycle designs around the turn of the century. Phelon and Rayner built what's generally regarded as the first chain-driven motorcycle around 1900, and the sloping stressed-member layout that would define the marque for the next six decades came out of a patent filed in 1901. Rayner died in a car accident not long after, and Phelon went into partnership with Richard Moore. Phelon & Moore — P&M to everyone in the trade — was established in Cleckheaton in 1904.

They didn't build for the mass market from day one. P&M motorcycles built a reputation on that stressed-member single, an engine that doubled as part of the frame's structure, which was a genuinely different way of thinking about motorcycle design at a time when most manufacturers were still essentially bolting engines into bicycle frames. The company sold under the Phelon & Moore name through the early decades, and it wasn't until the 1920s that the name most people know today entered the picture.

The Early Machines and the Panther Name

The Panther name first appeared in 1924, on a 498cc overhead-valve machine called the Panther TT Entrant, built specifically for competition. P&M kept using its own name on other models alongside "Panther" for several more years, with the transition to Panther as the primary brand not complete until around 1929.

The company's engineering ambitions weren't limited to the big single. In 1926, P&M turned up at the Olympia motorcycle show with the Panthette, a 242cc V-twin with a transverse engine and four-speed gearbox designed by Granville Bradshaw — the same Bradshaw behind ABC's more radical designs. It was a genuine sensation on the stand. It was also too expensive and too far ahead of what the ordinary buyer wanted, and it never sold in real numbers. It's a pattern that shows up more than once in Panther's history: the company was capable of real cleverness, but its commercial instincts ran toward the cheap and durable rather than the clever and costly.

That instinct produced the Red Panther, a lightweight machine that in the 1930s became famous simply for being the least expensive complete motorcycle you could buy in Britain, priced at just under £30. Alongside it came the 250cc Model 40 and 350cc Model 45, generally grouped under the same Red Panther banner. This was a company figuring out that its future lay less with exhibition-stand novelties and more with cheap, honest transport for people who needed a motorcycle to get to work.

The Defining Era

The machine that made Panther's name, though, was the big sloping single announced as the Model 100 — a 598cc overhead-valve engine producing something in the region of 23 horsepower, launched in 1932 and remaining in production, in one form or another, through to 1963. Bradshaw's sloper engine design stayed essentially unchanged for around 25 years, a remarkable stretch of stability in an industry that was otherwise constantly redesigning itself.

The Model 100 and its descendants were marketed as "The Perfected Motorcycle," and whatever you make of the slogan, there was something to it. These were low-revving, high-torque machines that didn't care much for being hurried, and that made them very good at one job in particular: hauling a sidecar. A big single with generous flywheels and gobs of torque low in the rev range is exactly what you want when there's a chair and a passenger dragging behind you, and Panther built a genuine following among sidecar families who wanted something that would simply keep pulling, year after year, without drama.

The line continued to evolve. The Model 75, a 348cc overhead-valve vertical single, ran from 1948 to 1962 and sat below the big 600 in the range. Postwar, P&M also built a 197cc lightweight using Villiers engines, offered as the three-speed Model 10/3 and four-speed Model 10/4, which had a production run of around six years and gave the company a genuine entry-level machine to sell alongside the big slopers.

The final expression of the sloper concept was the Model 120, a 645cc enlargement of the Model 100 launched in 1959. It made around 27 horsepower at 4,500 rpm, respectable numbers for the type, but it never had the reputation for reliability that the smaller Model 100 had earned. Owners and specialists have long pointed to rapid clutch wear, troublesome roller bearings, and heavy oil consumption as the 120's besetting sins. Production ran until 1966, when the company's stock of spare parts finally ran out.

Racing

Panther was never a works racing outfit in the way that some of its Midlands and Coventry rivals were, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The company did enter the first International Six Days Trial in 1913, and fielded three machines in the 1914 ACU six days trial, so competition wasn't absent from its history — it simply never became the center of the brand's identity the way it did for other British marques of the period.

There is one moment worth telling properly. At the 1925 Senior TT, an eighteen-year-old apprentice named Tommy Bullus, drafted into the factory team as a late reserve after another rider crashed, brought his machine home in fourth place at just under 62 mph. It's a small footnote in the history of the Isle of Man races, but it's a real one, and it says something about a company that ran lean enough that a teenage apprentice could end up as a factory rider on race day.

Beyond that, Panther's competition story is mostly about trials and endurance rather than outright speed — machines built to be reliable and torquey rather than fast, which tracks with everything else about the marque. There are stories of specialist track and sprint machines and export racing efforts from the 1920s that circulate among enthusiasts, but the documentation behind them is thin enough that they belong more to folklore than to settled history.

Ownership and Decline

Phelon & Moore ran as an independent concern out of Cleckheaton for most of the twentieth century, and the company that made it was eventually absorbed into IMI plc. The trouble started building in the 1950s and became impossible to ignore by the early 1960s. The Official Receiver was called in during 1962, though production limped on for a few more years afterward.

The reasons were the same ones that killed off much of the British motorcycle industry's lower end. The Mini Minor arrived and gave British buyers a cheap, weatherproof four-wheel alternative to a motorcycle and sidecar, just as Fiat and Citroën's small cars were doing the same thing on the Continent. Panther's traditional market — sidecar families who wanted cheap, torquey transport — simply evaporated. On top of that, the company found itself struggling to source Burman gearboxes and Lucas Magdyno ignition-and-charging units as suppliers consolidated and moved on to serve bigger customers. Production finally ceased in 1966, and the company was wound up in 1967, bringing well over sixty years of Cleckheaton motorcycle manufacturing to a close.

Survival and Revival

For decades after 1967, Panther existed only as a name attached to old iron — machines that had earned a devoted, slightly stubborn following precisely because they were simple, over-built, and easy to keep running without factory support. The sloper engine's low stress, low rev ceiling, and mechanical honesty made it the kind of motorcycle a determined owner could nurse along indefinitely, and a fair number of them are still doing exactly that.

Then, in 2022, the Panther name came back. According to the revived P&M's own account, the brand was picked up by investors with long experience in motorcycle and scooter design, manufacturing, and distribution, and plans were announced for new machines aimed at the premium end of the market. The centerpiece is a 573cc liquid-cooled V-twin, said to produce around 53 horsepower and 35.7 lb-ft of torque, powering a range that includes a model named simply the Panther, styled in modern custom-cruiser fashion — a deliberate nod to the old Model 100 and 120 line, even if the engineering has nothing to do with the sloper concept that made the name in the first place.

The Marque Today

As things stand, the revival remains a project rather than a production reality — as of the mid-2020s, mass manufacture of the new machines has not materialized, and it's the original Phelon & Moore-built Panthers that continue to command real attention. Vintage British motorcycles generally have been enjoying renewed interest from riders who want mechanical honesty rather than electronics, and Panther sits comfortably inside that trend: simple engines, robust construction, and a low cost of entry compared with some of its more fashionable contemporaries.

The old Panthers were never the fastest or the most sophisticated motorcycles Britain built. They were something more useful for most of the people who bought them — dependable, torquey, and built around an engine that did its own job as both powerplant and chassis member for the better part of forty years. That's a strange, quietly clever piece of engineering to hang a whole company's identity on, and it worked for a remarkably long time.