Tandon

In the summer of 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru stood for a photograph astride a small two-stroke motorcycle at Caxton Hall in London. The bike was a Milemaster, and the man who had built it, Devdutt Tandon, could not have asked for better publicity. Here was the prime minister of India, newly independent, sitting on a machine made by an Indian-born engineer in a London workshop. It is the single most famous image connected to the Tandon marque, and it says a good deal about the ambitions behind a company that most people today have never heard of.

Founding

Devdutt Tandon was born in India in 1902 and came to Britain to work in the aircraft industry, employed for a time by the General Aircraft Company before he turned his attention to motorcycles. He set up Tandon Motors Ltd in 1947 at 29 Ludgate Hill in London, in the heart of the City rather than in any of the traditional Midlands manufacturing towns, with production of the first machines getting underway the following year. It was in this way an outsider's venture from the start, planted far from the established motorcycle towns and only later moving into an actual production site: within a couple of years the operation had outgrown its London premises and moved to a larger site off the Watford Bypass on Colne Way in Hertfordshire, where the bulk of Tandon's production would actually take place.

It was, in every sense, a postwar British motorcycle story: an outsider entering an industry still dominated by long-established names, backing two-stroke simplicity over four-stroke tradition, and betting on export markets that Britain's cash-strapped government was desperate to see succeed.

The Early Machines

Tandon's first model, announced on 1 July 1948, was the Milemaster — a basic, part bolt-up-framed lightweight capable of around 45 mph. Sources differ on the exact displacement of its Villiers 9D engine: most classic-bike references cite 122cc, while Villiers' own technical documentation lists the 9D at 125cc. Whichever figure is correct, the bike's character is not in dispute: a hand-change gearbox, a bicycle-style saddle, and no rear suspension at all. It was about as unpretentious as a motorcycle could be.

That simplicity was deliberate. Tandon had designed the Milemaster with an eye on export, intending to ship the bikes abroad in Completely Knocked Down form for assembly overseas. The factory apparently got remarkably good at the knock-down side of things — it reportedly took one worker only eight hours to fully assemble four machines from crated components, which says something about how straightforward the design really was. The wider export scheme, though, never came together the way Tandon had hoped, and the Milemaster ended up being sold mostly at home, remaining in the catalogue until 1952 despite its increasingly dated specification.

Tandon moved quickly to address the Milemaster's shortcomings. In 1949 came the 122cc Superglid (sometimes spelled Supaglid in period literature), which brought a conventional foot-change gearbox and a new frame with swinging-arm rear suspension — a real step forward from the rigid-framed original, and evidence that Tandon was listening to what riders actually wanted rather than just what was cheap to build.

The Golden Era

The company's most interesting years came in the early-to-mid 1950s, when the range was substantially reworked. An engineer identified in period accounts as Dicky Wright is credited with modernizing the lineup, though there is conflicting information about when he actually joined the firm, and his exact role isn't something that can be pinned down with confidence from surviving records. Under this new direction Tandon introduced the Imp, a 122cc economy model built around the Villiers 10D engine and, notably, still without rear suspension — proof that the budget end of the market never entirely went away. Above it sat the Imp Supreme, a 197cc machine with proper swinging-arm rear suspension, and above that again the four-speed 224cc Villiers 1H-engined Sprite, a beefier machine that quickly became better known by its alternative name, the Monarch.

The Supaglid, meanwhile, kept selling into certain export markets even as newer models arrived, which tells you something about how price-sensitive those markets remained.

The real departure came in 1954, when Tandon unveiled a twin-cylinder two-stroke, the 242cc British Anzani-powered Twin Supreme, fitted with a leading-link front fork. A season later the same basic machine grew into the 325cc Viscount. Both the Monarch and the Viscount arrived with Armstrong Earles-type front fork arrangements rather than the telescopic forks used on earlier Tandons, along with stronger frames and, at last, rear suspension as standard rather than an afterthought. For a small independent firm, this was a genuinely ambitious spread of engineering — conventional lightweight commuters at one end, a twin-cylinder roadster at the other, all built in Hertfordshire rather than farmed out.

Alongside the roadsters, Tandon also built the Starlett, a 98cc Villiers-engined machine that sat somewhere between a scooter and an autocycle — a reminder that the firm never entirely abandoned the cheap-and-cheerful end of the market that had got it started.

Racing

Tandon was never a factory-backed racing operation in the way that some of its bigger rivals were, but its machines did turn up in competition, and occasionally embarrassed better-funded opposition. The 122cc Kangaroo trials model, built between 1951 and 1953, earned a following for its generous ground clearance and light weight, and was followed by a 197cc Kangaroo Supreme with proper damper units in its swinging-arm rear suspension — a serious enough attempt at a trials mount for a company with no real competition department.

On the scrambles side, Tandon's chief fitter John Babb worked with Dicky Wright to develop a 197cc scrambler based on the Villiers 8E engine. Babb is known to have raced the bike himself, though the exact dates of his outings aren't well documented. What is better attested is a 1956 result in Ireland, where a 200cc Tandon scrambler beat a factory-entered 500cc BSA in a handicap race — the kind of giant-killing result that small manufacturers lived for, even if it never translated into wider commercial momentum.

There is also a more intriguing thread connecting Tandon to one of the more remarkable figures in British motorcycling: Beatrice Shilling, the aeronautical engineer better known for her prewar racing on Nortons, is recorded as having ridden a 197cc Tandon in a postwar Southern Centre trial. It is a small footnote in a distinguished career spent mostly on other machines, but it places a serious rider on a Tandon at a serious event, which is more than most lightweight marques of the era can claim.

Ownership and Survival

Tandon Motors Ltd was wound up in 1955 at the instigation of the UK Commissioners of Customs & Excise. The company's difficulties were not really about the bikes themselves so much as distribution — its dealer network had never extended much beyond London, which left it badly exposed once the immediate postwar seller's market began to cool and competition from larger manufacturers with national coverage intensified.

Devdutt Tandon did not simply walk away. He kept motorcycle production going through another of his companies, Indian Commerce & Industries Limited, and the Tandon name reappeared in 1956 on a pair of road models using Villiers 8E and 1H engines. Production continued in this form until 1959, by which point the British lightweight market had changed considerably and the appetite for small independent two-stroke builders had thinned out considerably. The firm never passed to outside owners and was never sold on — it began and ended under Devdutt Tandon's direct control, which makes its story unusually self-contained compared with marques that changed hands repeatedly before disappearing.

There has been no revival of the Tandon name since, and none of the usual patterns of marque resurrection — a name bought for nostalgia value, a small workshop reviving old model numbers — have applied here. When Tandon closed, it closed for good.

Tandon Today

Tandon is remembered now as one of the smaller, more resourceful players in Britain's crowded postwar lightweight scene: a company that built honest, affordable two-strokes for people who needed cheap transport, occasionally punched above its weight in competition, and briefly enjoyed a moment of genuine national attention thanks to a prime minister's photograph. It never had the scale or the dealer network to compete with the larger Midlands manufacturers, and its collapse in 1955 was as much about distribution as design.

Surviving examples are scarce today, and the competition models — the Kangaroo trials bikes, the Babb-developed scrambler — rarer still. For collectors of British two-strokes, a genuine Tandon, whether a humble Milemaster or one of the later Anzani-powered twins, represents a specific and largely overlooked corner of the industry's history: proof that not every good idea in British motorcycling came out of Birmingham or Coventry, and that a small firm on the Watford Bypass could, for a few years at least, build something worth remembering.