Velocette
A Name Change and a Small Workshop in Birmingham
Start with a German immigrant who became as English as the machines his family would eventually build. Johannes Gutgemann arrived in England in 1876 at the age of nineteen and took the name John Taylor. There is conflicting information about exactly when and how the family came to be known as Goodman — some accounts tie the change directly to his naturalization as a British citizen in 1911, while others place the formal surname change some years later, around 1917. Sources differ on the exact sequence, but the outcome is not in doubt: by the time the company that would become Velocette was building serious motorcycles, the man behind it was known as John Goodman.
The firm's roots go back further still, to a frame-building business called Taylor, Gue Ltd., founded in Birmingham in 1905 with a partner named William Gue. Before that, Taylor Gue had built frames for another manufacturer, Ormonde, taking over that business late in 1904 and using the experience to produce a machine of its own the following year. That first motorcycle carried the name "Veloce." A separate company, Veloce Limited, was set up the same year to handle sales, and it's that name, not Taylor Gue, that would carry the business forward through the twentieth century. An early 276cc four-stroke, producing something like half a horsepower, went nowhere, and the first Veloce was quietly dropped.
Goodman's sons, Percy and Eugene, trained as engineers and for a time pursued a separate ambition, founding New Veloce Motors to build cars. A prototype was made; no orders followed. The brothers instead joined the family motorcycle business; several sources put their arrival at around 1911, joining after a five-year gap since the firm's founding, bringing with them the engineering instincts that would define the marque for the next fifty years. Around 1910 the firm had already produced a more advanced machine with a 2½hp engine, overhead inlet and side exhaust valves, mechanical lubrication and a two-speed gearbox — a sign of the technical ambition that Percy and Eugene would soon push much further.
The Two-Stroke Years and the Velocette Name
The name Velocette itself dates to 1913, applied to a small two-stroke machine designed by Percy Goodman. It was a genuinely clever piece of engineering for its size: a 206cc single with a deflector piston for better scavenging of the combustion chamber, and pressurized, metered lubrication fed from a wet sump under pressure from the engine's own exhaust. It appeared as the Model A, offered in direct belt-drive form with a two-speed chain-drive option, and it set the tone for everything the company would build afterward — small, precise, and thought through in a way that larger, cruder rivals often weren't.
War intervened, as it did for most of the British motorcycle trade, and the factory turned to munitions production. When motorcycle building resumed, Veloce refined the 250cc formula through the early 1920s: a longer wheelbase, the engine lowered in the frame, twin exhaust ports, an aluminum head with deep finning, and an aluminum piston replacing the old cast-iron item. In 1922 came the clutch design that made the company's name a byword for mechanical neatness among people who cared about such things — compact enough to fit into the existing engine and gearbox layout without disturbing it. Between 1913 and 1925, Veloce built nothing but these high-quality two-strokes, of nominally 250cc, and earned a reputation for quality that punched well above the company's modest size, helped along by respectable showings at the Isle of Man TT.
The Overhead-Camshaft Breakthrough
The machine that changed Velocette's standing in the industry was the Model K, an overhead-camshaft four-stroke that arrived in the mid-1920s — most accounts place its design in 1924 with production following in 1925, and the exact dating is not entirely settled, but the significance isn't in question. Percy Goodman had drawn up a 348cc single with a vertical shaft and bevel gears driving the camshaft, and a recirculating oil system that pressure-fed both the camshaft and the crankshaft. It was an elegant, purposeful design, and it became the template for a generation of Velocette engines.
Eugene Goodman handled the tool-room work that turned his brother's drawings into reliable production reality, and in 1927 the firm took on Harold Willis, a racer with a sharp engineering mind who pushed the marque hard into competition, mostly in the 350cc class but with 500cc efforts too. It was Willis, working with the K-series racers, who is credited with developing the first positive-stop foot gear change on a motorcycle, in 1928 — a piece of engineering that would eventually become standard practice across the whole industry.
The 1930s brought a shift toward more affordable pushrod machines. The MOV, a 250cc overhead-valve single with square 68mm x 68mm dimensions, arrived in 1933 to bring Velocette's engineering down to a price ordinary riders could meet, and it succeeded immediately. From it came the MAC, a 349cc machine launched around 1933-34 capable of a genuine 75mph, and the 500cc MSS — both strong sellers that kept the factory solvent through the decade. Later in that period, engineer Phil Irving, who worked at Veloce from around 1930 to 1942, contributed to the K and M series machines and was given the job of turning "The Roarer," Harold Willis's supercharged 500cc racing twin, into something resembling a road machine — a project that never reached production but speaks to the ambition inside the factory even as war approached again.
Racing: The TT Years and World Championships
Velocette's competition record was built patiently, starting when the firm was still purely a two-stroke maker — Stan Jones took third in the 1922 250cc Lightweight TT — and gathering real momentum once the overhead-camshaft four-strokes arrived. Dealer and rider Alec Bennett asked to ride one of the new K-series machines in the 1926 Junior TT and won outright, giving Velocette its first TT victory after roughly a year of development work by Percy and Eugene Goodman on the racing version of the Model K. There is conflicting information about the rest of the factory's result that year; some accounts credit Velocette with the team prize as well, with other riders finishing well up the order behind Bennett, while other sources place the supporting machines further down the field, so the team result is best treated as real in outline even if the finishing details have blurred over time.
The marque's finest hour on the world stage came after the Second World War. In 1949, Freddie Frith won the 350cc World Championship for Velocette, taking every round of that year's series — a clean sweep that remains one of the great achievements of British racing in the period. Teammate Bob Foster kept the title at the factory's Hall Green base the following year, though by most accounts his 1950 campaign involved winning three of the six rounds rather than repeating Frith's perfect run. Either way, back-to-back world titles marked the peak of Velocette's works racing effort, and the KTT production racer that underpinned it — built over the counter for privateers for more than two decades, through Mark I to Mark VIII versions with steadily improving specification, ending with swinging-arm rear suspension on the final pre- and post-war versions — kept the marque's name in results sheets long after the works team had wound down.
Later in the Venom's life, Velocette riders and machines set endurance records at high average speeds, and the Venom's reputation for durability at sustained speed became part of the model's mystique among owners, even if the precise figures quoted for any specific 24-hour record are difficult to pin down with certainty today.
The Postwar Models: LE, Venom, Viper, Thruxton
The postwar era produced Velocette's most unusual machine and its most sporting one. The LE, introduced around 1948, was a complete departure — a small, quiet 149cc flat-twin with shaft drive, designed for the austerity years as cheap, reliable transport, and adopted in numbers by police forces looking for a docile, easy-to-maintain machine for urban patrol work. It never sold in the volumes the factory hoped for, but it stayed in the range for a long stretch of the company's later history, into the years leading up to the firm's eventual closure.
Far more exciting was the Venom, a 500cc sports single that grew out of the touring MSS, running higher compression and considerably more power. By most accounts it was introduced to the public around the mid-1950s, at one of the British motorcycle industry's big annual shows, though the precise date is not consistently reported. A 350cc companion, the Viper, wasn't simply a warmed-over MAC but a genuinely de-bored Venom, sharing the sportier chassis and cycle parts. Both became the backbone of Velocette's reputation among enthusiasts through the late 1950s and 1960s, and the factory's Clubman versions, introduced around 1959, proved particularly effective in endurance events at the Thruxton circuit, finishing second in class several times before winning outright in 1964.
That Thruxton result gave its name to the ultimate development of the line, the Velocette Thruxton, essentially a Venom fitted with a new cylinder head, larger valves, and higher compression, producing significantly more power than the standard road bike. Sources differ on exactly when the factory announced the model and for how long it stayed in production, but it arrived in the mid-1960s and remained available into the early years of the following decade, right up to the end of the company's manufacturing life. It became, and remains, the model most associated with Velocette at its best: a big single doing everything a big single could reasonably be asked to do, built by a small firm that never stopped refining an idea it had first sketched out in the 1920s.
Decline, Closure, and What Survived
Velocette stayed in the hands of the Goodman family from the founding of the business until the end, without ever being bought, merged, or absorbed into one of the larger combines that swallowed so much of the British motorcycle industry. That independence was also, in the end, a vulnerability. Commercial pressure built gradually through the second half of the 1960s as the market shifted toward cheaper machines from Japan and toward larger multi-cylinder bikes from home and abroad, and the company's finances deteriorated. Veloce Ltd. went into voluntary liquidation in February 1971. The closure marked the end of motorcycle production at the factory, and, by most accounts, the Goodman family made a point of settling the company's outstanding debts rather than leaving them unpaid — a detail that says something about how the firm had conducted itself for sixty-odd years.
The name didn't disappear entirely. Rights to spares and to the Velocette name passed to Matt Holder and later to his son David Holder, who kept parts supply alive for owners of existing machines. Permission was eventually given, by a member of the Goodman family, for David Holder to build and show a complete machine under the Velocette name — a revised Thruxton-engined bike appeared at a Classic Bike show in Stafford in 1998 — but this was a one-off exhibition rather than any real return to manufacturing. There was no formal revival of Velocette as a going concern, and the marque has remained defunct as a manufacturer since the 1971 liquidation.
Velocette Today
What remains is a genuinely committed following. Velocette's surviving machines — the overhead-camshaft K-series, the MAC and MSS, the LE, and above all the Venom, Viper, and Thruxton — are sought after by collectors precisely because the company never built anything careless. Owners' clubs, specialist restorers, and a steady trade in original parts keep these singles running on roads across Britain and Europe, and values have held up accordingly for well-preserved, correct examples. Velocette never built motorcycles in large numbers, and it never tried to be anything other than a small, family-run firm from Hall Green in Birmingham making machines to its own exacting standard. That, as much as any single race win or record, is the reason the name still means something to anyone who has actually ridden one.