This is history, but it isn't just the history of Triumph. It places motorcycles in a context that ranges from "the old world, more closely related . . . to that of Napoleon and Nelson," to the post-Japanese world of Hinckley multis.
David Minton salts the years with tasty and surprising titbits, such as the fact that the bicycle was responsible for everything from modern graded highways, through road maps, to advancement of feminism.
Into this social and political new world of the bicycle step Siegfried Betteman and Mauritz Shulte. Yes, the founders of this archetypal British motorcycle, in the bellicose age of the Kaiser's Reich, were German, and with Teutonic thoroughness they embarked on "the type of painstaking development that was to make . . . Triumph a symbol of two-wheeled virtue."
Minton equates their 3HP of 1905 with the 1968 Honda Four as a "milestone model," because it "formed the . . . motorcycle as reliable transport," thanks largely to its then revolutionary roller-bearing engine, with an incredible 10,000-mile life expectancy.
In similar vein he traces the development of Triumph from Edwardian motorised bicycle to the sad, penultimate "triumph of sheer, damned, blundering corporate imbecility" that wrecked the once all-powerful British industry, to John Bloor's rescue and the current Hinckley-based revival.
Along the way, perhaps the most intriguing detail he gives is of an extraordinary prototype, the military 3TW, which he claims might well have displaced the Speed Twin as progenitor of a generation of popular motorcycling, had it not been lost to Luftwaffe bombs. The TRW, used by the Irish and many other armies into the 1970s, is a flatulent fatso by comparison.
I've always reckoned Triumphs to be overrated, but this about far more than Triumphs. It's about history and biking.