Rickman
Origins in a Hampshire Workshop
Start with a garage in Hampshire, and two brothers who grew up around it. Don and Derek Rickman's father ran a commercial garage and raced motorcycles himself, and by the late 1940s his sons were doing the same, first in trials, then in scrambles and motocross. Derek, born in 1933, and his younger brother Don both rode BSA Gold Stars into local competition, and at one meeting they were handed the race numbers 73 and 74 — numbers that, with few exceptions, stayed on their machines for the rest of their careers.
What set the Rickmans apart wasn't raw speed so much as a mechanic's frustration. British factory frames of the period were built for the road first and adapted for the dirt as an afterthought, and the brothers thought they could do better. In 1959 they set up a workshop in London to build the frames they wanted for themselves. The following year the operation moved to Rayleigh, Essex, and by 1962 they had established a dedicated frame-manufacturing business in New Milton, Hampshire — the town that would remain synonymous with the Rickman name for the next two decades. The company was formally incorporated that year as Rickman Bros Ltd.
The Metisse: A Mongrel With a Purpose
Their first "special," built in 1959, combined a BSA duplex-loop frame, a Triumph T100 engine, a BSA gearbox, and Norton forks — parts from four different manufacturers stitched into one machine. They named it Metisse, a French word meaning roughly "hybrid" or "mongrel," and the name stuck to everything that followed. It was an honest description: the brothers believed British manufacturers made good engines and good frames but rarely bothered to combine the two well, and they set out to prove the point themselves.
The Mark I was followed a year later by the Mark II, and in 1962 by the Mark III — the frame that would become the backbone of the company's reputation. The Mark III was designed to accept a range of engines from BSA, Matchless, and Triumph, and this was itself a small commercial revolution: none of the big British factories would sell engines separately to customers, so Rickman filled the gap by selling frame kits designed around those units, letting racers and enthusiasts build a Metisse around whatever powerplant they could source. It was scrambles-focused at first. Road racing frames followed, and by 1966 — working with tuner Tom Kirby — the brothers had built their first true road racing motorcycles, which led in short order to street-legal machines, the first using a Triumph Bonneville engine.
The Peak Years
The 1960s and into the 1970s were Rickman's high-water mark, and the engineering during this stretch moved fast. Rickman frames were among the first to feature front and rear disc brakes, and the company built its reputation further with oil-in-frame (OIF) construction, where the frame tubing itself carried the engine oil — trimming weight by something in the range of 30 to 40 pounds compared to conventional frames of the era, while improving handling. Fiberglass fairings and fuel tanks became another signature, lightening the machines further and giving them a look that set them apart from anything coming out of a factory line.
That combination of nickel-plated frames, disc brakes, and hand-laid glassfibre bodywork reached its fullest expression in the two big road bikes of the 1970s: the Rickman CR750, built around the Honda CB750 engine, and the CR900/CR1000, built around Kawasaki's big fours. These weren't kit-bike curiosities — they were some of the best-looking and most coveted motorcycles of the decade, prized as much for their finish as their performance. At its peak the company was turning out close to 4,000 machines a year, the great majority of them bound for the American market, and the New Milton works employed around 130 people.
Racing: Where the Reputation Was Built
Rickman's credibility as a manufacturer was earned on the start line, not in a showroom. Both brothers rode for Britain in the Motocross des Nations through the 1960s, and in 1963 and 1964 they raced on the same national team. Derek's competition record included a win in the 1966 FIM Coupe d'Europe 750 series aboard a Rickman Matchless Metisse. Don, meanwhile, took the British Motocross Grand Prix the same year. Jeff Smith, one of the era's most capable scrambles riders, found success on Rickman machinery at the 1964 Motocross des Nations, and on the road side, Alan Barnett brought a Rickman Triumph home in second place at the Isle of Man in 1969.
American enthusiast magazines took notice quickly, praising the handling of the Rickman chassis in terms usually reserved for factory works bikes. The brothers themselves are among a small handful of people, alongside Jack Brabham in Formula One, believed to have won at Grand Prix level aboard machinery of their own construction — racers who built their own equipment well enough to beat the people who bought theirs off a shelf.
The Models That Defined the Marque
The Metisse Mark III remains the frame most associated with the Rickman name — versatile enough to be built around BSA, Matchless, or Triumph power, and enduring enough that decades later it would become the frame of choice again once vintage scrambles racing set strict date-of-manufacture rules. The 1966 road racers built with Tom Kirby opened the door to street use, and the CR750 and CR900/1000 of the 1970s represented the company's most ambitious and most visually distinctive road machines, wrapping Japanese engines in British chassis engineering and fiberglass bodywork. Alongside these, a run of smaller motocross machines was produced between 1971 and 1975, most of them exported to the American market that had become Rickman's economic lifeline.
Decline, Sale, and a Fractured Legacy
The high point and the warning sign arrived in the same year. In 1974 Rickman received the Queen's Award to Industry in recognition of export sales to the United States running at around £1 million annually — a genuine achievement for a small Hampshire manufacturer. That same year, though, Norton Villiers Triumph collapsed, and the British motorcycle industry that had supplied Rickman's engines for a decade and a half began coming apart at the seams. The company stopped building complete motorcycles in 1975, shifting to accessories, and by 1980 the Rickman brothers had ceased production entirely and sold off their tooling and remaining stock.
What happened next is where the record gets tangled. The brothers looked to sell off their complete stock of parts in the mid-1980s, and engineer Pat French purchased the firm's remaining assets, including the name, in 1982, restarting production around the Mark IV frame. Other ownership dates sometimes attached to the marque, including a later sale to a group called FSV International, cannot be corroborated and do not fit cleanly with this timeline, so they are best left out of the settled record. What's certain is that French kept the marque alive. When pre-1965 scrambles racing became popular and the newer Mark IV frame proved ineligible under the rules, French went back to producing the original Mark III Metisse, which fit the cutoff. He ran the business until his death in 2007.
From there the Rickman story splits into two branches, both still active. Adrian Moss, who ran a shop specializing in Metisse machines, was granted rights to the name by the Rickman brothers and later purchased the trademark outright, restarting production of frame kits under the Rickman Motorcycles name. Moss also had a hand in building the vintage scrambles scene that keeps demand for these frames alive — in 1982 he organized the first specialist motorcycle scramble for pre-1965 machines, at Moorhouse, Brimsfield, Birdlip, Gloucester, and the British Bike Bonanza was born. Separately, Metisse enthusiast Gerry Lisi built a new factory at Carswell in Oxfordshire and took on production under the Métisse name, eventually developing a proprietary 997cc air-and-oil-cooled parallel twin for use in current-generation machines.
The Marque Today
Derek Rickman died in July 2021; he and Don had been inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2007, a recognition of both their racing careers and what they built afterward. Today the name lives on under two separate, unconnected operations. Rickman Motorcycles, run by Adrian Moss out of Stroud, Gloucestershire, continues to produce Mark III frame kits and complete machines faithful to the original scrambles-bred design. Métisse Motorcycles, run by Gerry Lisi at Carswell near Faringdon in Oxfordshire, builds complete motorcycles at higher volume, including modern versions fitted with Métisse's own twin-cylinder engine — motorcycle production there running, by most accounts, as something of a sideline to Lisi's main golf course business.
Original machines from the 1960s and '70s — the nickel-plated Metisse scramblers, the Rickman Hondas and Kawasakis with their glassfibre fairings — remain sought after among collectors and vintage racers, and prices for genuine period examples reflect just how few were built relative to the demand they still generate. Rickman never became a mass manufacturer in the way BSA or Triumph did, and it didn't need to. It built frames for people who cared more about how a motorcycle handled than what badge sat on the tank, and that's still the audience keeping both halves of the marque in business.