Raleigh

There is a Raleigh Street in Nottingham, and if you stand on it today you would have no idea that a mechanic named R.M. Woodhead and a designer named Paul Angois once ran a small bicycle shop there that would grow into one of the largest cycle and vehicle manufacturers Britain ever produced. Motorcycles were never the main event for Raleigh. They were a long, strange, occasionally brilliant detour — one that produced some genuinely well-built machines, put riders on the Isle of Man, and then quietly ended, more than once, while the bicycles kept rolling out the factory gates.

Origins on Raleigh Street

Woodhead and Angois started their bicycle business on Raleigh Street in 1886, financed in part by William Ellis. The following year they crossed paths with Frank Bowden, a British lawyer who had made a fortune in Hong Kong and relocated to San Francisco before returning home. Bowden bought the company outright in December 1888, and it was formally reorganized as The Raleigh Cycle Company, registered as a limited liability concern in January 1889. Sources differ on the precise founding year — some cite the 1886 origin on Raleigh Street, others the December 1888 acquisition and subsequent reincorporation — but there is no dispute about what happened next: under Bowden's direction, Raleigh grew with startling speed. By 1913 it was, by most accounts, the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world, a scale that would later make its ventures into motorized transport almost an afterthought against the volume of pedal bikes rolling out of Nottingham.

The First Motorcycles

Raleigh's first motorcycle appeared in 1901, built around an imported Schwan engine and mounted, belt-driven, over the front wheel — a fairly typical arrangement for the era, when motorcycles were still bicycles with an engine bolted on as an experiment. A sturdier machine followed shortly after, with a 3hp engine set vertically ahead of the pedals. The marque's reputation got an early boost when G.P. Mills used one to set a record on the Land's End to John O'Groats run, then about as demanding a test of reliability as existed on British roads.

In 1903 came something odder and more memorable: the Raleighette, a belt-driven three-wheeler with the driver seated at the back and a wicker passenger seat wedged between the two front wheels. It was a strange-looking thing, closer in spirit to a motorized bath chair than a motorcycle, and it lost the company money steadily until production stopped in 1908. By 1906 trade had turned poor enough that Raleigh abandoned motorized vehicles altogether and went back to bicycles exclusively, a business that carried the company comfortably through the Great War.

The 1920s: Raleigh's Motorcycle Years

Raleigh returned to motorcycles in 1920 with a new flat-twin design, the engine mounted in line with the frame rather than across it. Two conventional single-cylinder models followed in 1922, offered with two or three speeds and belt final drive — modest, sensible machines aimed at riders who wanted dependability over drama.

Through the rest of the decade the range grew considerably. By the mid-1920s Raleigh was building everything from a 175cc unit-construction lightweight up to a large V-twin, with both sidevalve and overhead-valve engines across the lineup. The best-known model of the era was the Model 12, introduced in 1924 as the flat-twin's replacement: a sidevalve 798cc 60-degree V-twin paired with a Sturmey-Archer three-speed gearbox, built until 1927. The early flat-twin had already introduced chain drive and swinging-arm rear suspension, features that spread across most of the range once chain drive became standard after 1924 — genuinely forward-thinking chassis engineering for a British manufacturer at that point in the decade, even if the company's fortunes never quite matched the sophistication of the hardware.

Behind these machines was D.R. O'Donovan, Raleigh's chief designer through the 1920s and into the early 1930s, who later moved on to Carlton motorcycles. O'Donovan was responsible for the Sturmey-Archer racing engines that powered not just Raleigh's own competition machines but those of other marques too, and Raleigh brought him in specifically, in 1926, as a Brooklands-honed tuning specialist to sharpen the firm's TT effort.

That reputation for solidity rather than speed served Raleigh well in the trials that mattered to ordinary buyers. The marque built a name in reliability trials through the 1920s, and that same dependability got it into service roles that had nothing to do with sport: rural postal workers and police units rode Raleighs because they started, ran, and kept running.

Racing and the Isle of Man

Raleigh's most sporting overhead-valve road models grew directly out of the company's interest in road racing, and the clearest expression of that interest was its entry into the 1928 Isle of Man TT. The results never rivaled the factory efforts from Norton or BSA — Raleigh's best finish was seventh in the 1931 Senior TT — but the TT presence shaped the look and specification of the roadgoing range, pushing the ordinary bikes toward a sportier stance than they might otherwise have had.

Away from the TT circuit, Raleigh's reliability claims were backed up in more eccentric fashion. Hugh Gibson rode a Raleigh combination around the entire British coastline, and in 1924 Marjorie Cottle covered the same kind of ground solo, riding in the opposite direction. These were the sort of endurance stunts that meant more to prospective buyers in the 1920s than a lap record — proof that a Raleigh would simply keep going, mile after mile, without drama.

Retreat, Return, and a Second Retreat

Raleigh's motorcycle business did not survive the early 1930s. Production stopped in 1933, and the company turned its full attention back to bicycles — by far its larger and more profitable line regardless of the era. Raleigh had also built three-wheel cars alongside its motorcycles during part of this period, and when that side of the business wound down in the mid-1930s, it fed into the formation of Reliant Motors, the company that went on to build small three-wheeled cars for decades afterward. Sources differ on exactly how long the three-wheeler line ran and how directly it connects to Reliant's founding, but the link between the two companies is well established.

Motorcycles were not quite finished with Raleigh, though the next chapter was really about mopeds rather than motorcycles proper. Late in 1958, Raleigh introduced a moped built around a 49cc Sturmey-Archer engine manufactured by BSA. That arrangement did not last: by 1960 Raleigh had switched entirely, replacing its own design with a model built under license from Motobecane, essentially a rebadged version of the French Mobylette. Small lightweight mopeds carried the Raleigh name through the 1960s and up to 1971, at which point that chapter, too, closed for good. It is worth being precise here, because sources often blur the two eras together: the motorcycles ended in 1933, and the mopeds were a separate, later venture that ran through the following decade — not one continuous production run stretching across both.

Ownership, Triumph, and the Long Corporate Afterlife

Frank Bowden died in 1921 and his son, Sir Harold Bowden, took over as managing director, steering the company through the motorcycle years and beyond. The corporate history after that gets complicated, in the way that century-old British manufacturing companies tend to. In 1954, Raleigh acquired Triumph and Three Spires. Raleigh also took over BSA's bicycle operations at some point in that same general era, though sources give different dates for exactly when, and the record is not settled enough to pin to a single year. In 1960, Tube Investments bought Raleigh outright, folding it into a much larger industrial group. Ownership changed hands again in 1987, when Derby International acquired the company, and in 2001 its own management bought Derby Cycle Corporation and renamed the business Raleigh Cycle Ltd.

Today the Raleigh name belongs to Accell, the Dutch bicycle group, which uses it across European markets and licenses it elsewhere — to Canadian Tire in Canada, and to Suncross in India, among others. Design and manufacturing no longer happen in Britain. The Nottingham factory floor where flat-twins and V-twins once took shape has long since given way to a licensing arrangement spanning continents.

Raleigh Today, and What Survives

Raleigh is, without qualification, a bicycle company now — and has been, in practical terms, for most of its history. The motorcycle years amount to two relatively brief windows: a scattered early period from 1901 through 1908, and the more substantial 1920 to 1933 stretch that produced the Model 12 and the rest of the sidevalve and overhead-valve range, followed decades later by a completely separate moped program running from 1958 to 1971.

What survives from the motorcycle years has become a small, genuine collector's market. Vintage Raleighs from the 1920s and 1930s turn up at auction with some regularity, and recent sales data shows a top result around $14,000, spread across a few dozen listings and a total sale volume in the low six figures over five years — modest numbers next to what a good Brough Superior or vintage Vincent commands, but respectable for a marque that never chased performance headlines. Raleigh never ran with BSA, Norton, or Triumph in racing prestige, and it never tried to. What it built instead were dependable, sensibly engineered machines that postal workers and police rode without complaint, and that a determined rider could take around the coast of Britain and back. For a company whose real business was always bicycles, that is not a bad motorcycle legacy to have left behind.