Larry Lawrence | November 19, 2019
Archives: A Man and his Norton
In 1969, Neil Tolhurst took a year off college to travel Europe with a buddy. When his friend bailed on the trip at the last minute, Tolhurst called an audible, spent a couple of months in England and then decided to buy a motorcycle before he came home. The motorcycle he bought was a gorgeous red Norton Commando, one of the best sports bikes of its era. Amazingly a half-century later Tolhurst still owns the Norton. That in itself is a rarity, but it’s even more improbable when you consider the Norton survived a theft attempt, being put up for sale, a garage fire and its owner’s road racing career. But through it all the Norton stayed in Tolhurst’s possession and as a result today he has a really sweet British classic with a great story.
Archives: A Man and his Norton
Neil Tolhurst and his 1969 Norton Commando have 50 years of stories together.
The story begins in the summer of 1969. It was an epic summer as summers go. The Stonewall Uprising, the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Manson murders and Woodstock all happened that summer. For Tolhurst the end of the summer was to be the start of a trek through Europe.
“I was 20 and had taken a year off between my sophomore and junior years in college and decided to do some traveling,” Tolhurst recalls. “I went over to England. I had the intent of meeting a friend of mine in France and going around Europe. That didn’t work out, so I spent two months in England.”
To get around Tolhurst had a Vespa scooter he’d gotten in a trade with an American tourist he met. In exchange she got his plane ticket back to America.
“I rode that Vespa around London for several weeks until the rear wheel was about to fall off and I ended up trading it in for the Norton,” Tolhurst said.
Buying the Commando was another last-minute change of plan. Tolhurst explains.
“I was planning to by a BSA Royal Star for two reasons. One, I always loved the beautifully sculpted crankcases, cylinders and cylinder head on those BSAs, and it was the lowest cost big twin option.”
Going into a London dealership to buy the Royal Star, Tolhurst was stopped in his tracks when he walked in and before him was this shiny red Commando.
“I knew about Commandos because they had been importing them to America for a couple of years and I had friends who had them,” Tolhurst said. “But the red version, they called it grenadier red, wasn’t in the states yet. I saw that and it was ‘Boom!’, love at first sight. I spent so much money on it, I didn’t have enough money to get back home, so I had to borrow money from my dad to get home.”
Flying on Aer Lingus, Neil didn’t even have to crate the bike. They simply rolled it on a pallet, cinched it down and covered it up.
Tolhurst’s Norton survived a garage fire with mostly cosmetic damage.
“It was a 100 bucks air freight,” Tolhurst recalls, before adding with a laugh. “As a naïve 20-year-old I thought I’d land at JFK, get my motorcycle and be able to ride out of JFK! Well, no… customs had it for a few days.”
The Norton was Tolhurst’s daily rider for many years when he lived in Boston going to college and even after college. He rode all over New England and even did a cross-country trip in ’72 on the bike from Boston to San Francisco.
“That was quite an adventure,” Tolhurst remembers. “Me and the Commando and one of my co-workers from the motorcycle shop in Boston, Herb Scheffer, on a [Honda] CB750. And of course, his bike didn’t have any breakdowns, mine had several. We had a great time, visited a lot of friends and sometimes just stopped and set up camp in some random field off a side road.”
Once in California, Tolhurst was visiting a buddy in college in Palo Alto. Together they crated up the bike and had arrangements with a trucking company to pick it up the next day. “The next morning these guys were attempting to pick up the motorcycle, but it was not the company I had hired,” Neil explained. “We’re looking at this from Mark’s dorm room window and we go running downstairs to confront these guys and turns out they’d been hired by somebody who’d observed the bike being crated and sitting outside the dorm and they were trying to steal it.”
That was the first survival story for the bike.
Then, in a moment of weakness in ’73, Tolhurst decided to sell the bike. “The buyer didn’t come through with the money and then I changed my mind. I decided if it ever came down to needing money for food, then I’d sell it. It never came to that.”
Survival No. 2.
In 1974 the Norton was in a garage that caught fire, but fortunately it suffered mainly just smoke and soot damage, along with melted control cables and various other rubber and plastic bits. Tolhurst was a motorcycle mechanic, so he was able to restore it back to nearly showroom condition. It survived once again.
“And then I got a job with a rider’s ed program in Northern Illinois and I didn’t ride the bike much because the roads there were flat and straight and I’d been spoiled by New England roads. So, the bike sat.”
Then yet another fortuitous survival episode. Tolhurst began road racing, which often drains bank accounts and causes racers to unload all non-essentials. “Fortunately, at that time I was married, we had a two income and no kids situation, so I didn’t have to sell off stuff to go racing.”
The Norton was stored for years, but being an experience mechanic, Tolhurst gave enough attention to the machine to keep it in good running order. The bike even got camera time in a film Tolhurst had a hand in producing for Northern Illinois University called “Ride Safe”. You can see the Norton at the beginning and end of the video in this YouTube link, ridden by none other than TV personality Dave Despain. https://youtu.be/IcXHS63wHdo
Today Tolhurst is living back in New England and occasionally takes the Norton out for a ride. It’s 80-90 percent original and has never been crashed. “I’ll pass it along to my son. He keeps saying he wants to come over and learn out to take care of it, but he hasn’t followed through with that.”
Here’s to hoping Neil and the Commando have a lot of good years left together. It’s not that uncommon to find people who are fortunate enough to own a 50-year-old Norton Commando, but it’s undoubtedly rare to find someone who is the original owner and has the kind of story Neil has with his machine.
