Dunstable Yesteryear: A 1905 motorcycle ride.
When this shot was first published in 1930, the headline read, “A Pioneer of Motoring in Dunstable.”
The Dunstable Gazette that year reported it depicted “a well-known Dunstable resident, Mr. H. S. Knowles, with a pushchair motorcycle on which he was a familiar figure in the town about 25 years ago”.
He was probably certainly Harold Sheridan Knowles, a keen racing cyclist who built both his own and other competitors’ machines.
During World War I, he served as a motorcycle dispatch rider with the 1914 British Expeditionary Force and later became strongly involved with the Dunstable branch of the Old Contemptibles Association – the “Chums”.
He served as Vice-President of the Dunstable Sea Cadet Corps, for which he handed a ship’s bell to the Canadian Sea Cadet Corps during a visit with his wife in 1954.
He relocated to Dunstable from the City of London in the early 1900s and established a rabbit farm after World War I. He was a lecturer for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries during WWII.
Dunstable street directories show him living on West Street in 1913, Houghton Road in 1922, and 7 Victoria Street from 1924 until his death at the age of 82 in April 1959. It’s likely that this photo was taken on West Street, but it’s hard to say for sure.
Yesteryear was compiled by John Buckledee, chairman of the Dunstable and District Local History Society.
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