I have seen a fair few of these frames at the Paris Show over a long period, but have never until last week had reason to try to identify one. Coming back from the south of France I stopped at a "Depot-Vente" - one of those curiosities of the French wayside where one can buy, or sell for that matter, almost anything secondhand, from Second Empire toilets and bidets, to stuffed foxes, customised Ciroen 2CVs, wood-wormed eaten oak panelling, any 12"LP record you could think of almost to... of course, bicycles in all shapes and sizes. It never ceases to surprise me that in France, the land of the "beau velo", "la Petite Reine" where, as one renowned Paris-based cycle-shop owner confined in me "...well, you see, for we Frenchmen, la Petite Reine is like a good woman.. for she must be beautiful, she must be elegant and have good lines.. and most of all ..she must ride and perform well when we are astride her".. that second-hand bikes are discarded, as readily as the flimsy wooden boxes that hold a sweaty Camembert cheese, and that many of these once proud bikes end up in a weed-overgrown plot claiming to be an "outside sales area", closeby the side of a busy RN road.. A second surprise is that almost regardless of the quality of the bike in question, they are priced at incredibly modest cost. And so it was that, leaning against a pile of rusting scaffolding pipes, themselves being rapidly overwhelmed by rampant weeds, I cast my eyes on the tandem.. Even from a distance it clearly wasn't your run-of-the mill Gitane, Lejeune, Peugeot..no it's lines spoke of elegance, perhaps an illustrious past.. even of "haute couture". possibly the P-B-P.. I approached the beauty, no longer proud in its aerosol-can bright orange livery, sprayed somewhat willy-nilly over frame, headset, stem.... The head tube caught my eye - a refined semi-bi-lam structure with delicate art-deco lines, then a twin-plate fork crown worthy of a place in the Eiffel towers lattice-work of girders, from which swept majestically a pair of fork blades with a curve hand-wrought by a unknown master-craftsman who had an eye for that elusive functional elegance.The diagonal strutt of the rear double-diamond was made up of two smaller diameter tubes cleverly braced together. In spite of all this evidence of excellent craftsmanship it was the rear drop-outs that really caught my attention. The rear wheel axle was fixed into a pair of sturdy vertical drop-outs which, at first glance resembled those perforated track ends made by Zeus in the late 70/early80s - almost like a pair of the Spanish product turned through 90 degrees to become perfectly vertical.
By this time my wife was complaining bitterly that we just couldn't get even another bike in the car let alone a tandem because the last 400miles of our journey had seen me buy three Gitane and one Lejeune bikes, and three superb 1950s frames, with yet another Gloria T-d-F- equipped, Azureen-barred "Super Royal" bike to be collected only 2 miles further up the road.
The owner of the Depot-Vente hadn't a clue of the make of the tandem; hadn't even bothered to ask the seller. The price was very modest even though the tandem was equipped with original Cyclo tandem chainsets and some rare cantilevers. Reluctantly I climbed back into my already overloaded break, very disappointed and deflated...but knowing that I had managed to steal one the seller's trade cards into my back pocket without my wife seeing me.. and knowing that I am due back down that same road in less than a month..
I've tried hard to remember the salient points of that tandem frame and to describe them to the List because I wonder if there is anyone out there who might just be able to identify that frame. I have reason to think it might be a Singer because when I got back to my Berrichon cottage a kindly old neighbour had...But that's another story.. and first things first .."doucement, doucement" as my French neighbours so often advise me.
All suggestions extremely welcome.. Who knows, because I just don't need a tandem, I might just offer it to the List.
Norris Lockley, Settle, wondering just where I put that guy's trade card!