From our Old Bike Archives – Issue 97 – first published in 2021.
Story Jim Scaysbrook • Photos M33 Productions, Elwyn Roberts, Craig Greene.
The motorcycle media called it “Brilliant… one of the highlights of the Show”. The fact that the new Douglas 90 Plus even appeared at the 1949 London Motorcycle Show was brilliant in itself, because the company was in the midst of yet another dalliance with bankruptcy; a receiver had been appointed in late 1948.
By law, the insolvent company was prohibited from doing certain things, such as exhibiting at the annual Motor Cycle Show, so a separate company was formed – Douglas (Sales and Service) Ltd. However to envisage production, even limited production, of a customer racer while the bailiffs were virtually banging on the door took some determination. Mind you, Douglas had been in this position before, but the days of their illustrious racing history were now many years back.
It was an abbreviated range that greeted punters at the Earls Court Show in November; just the Vespa-Douglas scooters built under licence, the MkV roadster, the Competition – a stripped, rigid framed model aimed at the weekend trials rider – plus two others. The 80 Plus and the 90 Plus (with the numerals in each case referring to the claimed top speed in miles per hour) were, by current Douglas standards, fairly avant-garde. Douglas must have been feeling somewhat ebullient, as the 90 Plus was presented not in the traditional blue and silver, or the sombre maroon of the 80 Plus, but in striking, vivid gold with purple accents on the tank, and with sparkling polished aluminium mudguard blades and wheel rims. The price of £222/5/- put it just a fiver over the fancied 350 BSA Gold Star.
Within the company at Bristol, there were those who saw the benefit of offering a Clubman racer in the hope of snaring a new generation of Douglas customer. An all-new model was out of the question, but a heavily tweaked model was possible… just. All the models in the four-stroke Douglas line up shared the 348cc flat twin ohv valve engine that began life as a WW2 fan-cooled generator unit.
The 90 Plus that was displayed at the Show was stripped and ready for action, but there were actually two versions of the 90 Plus offered. The road-going model was equipped lighting, mufflers, teardrop-shape toolboxes on each side at the rear, a speedo, Amal Type 6 carburettors and a Lucas Magdyno, weighing in at 393lb (177kg). The display model was stripped of road gear, with a tacho in place of the speedo, a Lucas K2F Competition magneto, and Amal TT carburettors mounted on extended inlet tracts; the reduced component inventory saving 43lb (19.5kg). Unlike the other models in the range, the cylinder head and barrels of the 90 Plus were cast in aluminium. Each engine was bench-tested and came with a guaranteed 28bhp, while the 80 Plus was listed at 25bhp. According to the official handout, alternative gear ratios were available and could be ordered by the customer. Mufflers were available for the 90 Plus at no extra cost. One little nicety on the ready-to-race 90 Plus was a bracket on the gearbox that held two spark plugs and a plug spanner.
Up front was a very impressive looking 9-inch front brake, which could also be ordered on the 80 Plus, laced to a 21-inch rim. The familiar Douglas leading link front forks, called Radiadraulic with a claimed 6 inches of travel, took care of front suspension, while the rear springing was swinging arm controlled by torsion bars. These ran in steel tubes with end caps, one on each side of the frame, and were connected to the swinging arm by short links. The torsion bars controlled both springing and, in a form, damping and those on the 90 Plus were stiffer than the other models. The practice of using a front mudguard, usually heavily valanced, that was bolted to the underside of the lower fork crown (quite common practice with leading link front suspension), was dispensed with on the 90 Plus. Instead, the thin alloy blade hugged the front tyre and was connected to the front brake plate on the left and to a cast floating bracket on the right. The 80 Plus was supplied with the normal high-mounted guard and 19-inch front wheel, but could be ordered with the 21-inch wheel and low mudguard.
Off to The Island
Unlike the 80 Plus, which was marketed as a sporty road bike, the 90 Plus was primarily aimed at the Clubman road racers, and specifically at the Isle of Man Clubman’s TT. At the time, a curious regulation from the TT organisers, the Auto Cycle Union, required that exhaust pipes finished at the same point. On a parallel twin this was not a problem, but a flat twin, with one cylinder offset to the other, was a different story. This dictated that the radius bends of each pipe were slightly different, and high mounted pipes, running over the engine rather than underneath and thus giving greater ground clearance, could be specified as an option. With racing TT carbs fitted with long bell-mouths, there was precious little space between the sharp edges of the trumpets and the rider’s shins. An optional larger fuel tank without knee rubbers was listed as an option for racing.
Under the regulations for the Clubman’s TT races a minimum of fifty examples of any model had to be produced (or ordered and paid for), and for a company in such dire financial straits as Douglas, this was indeed a significant hurdle. Fortunately within the organisation was the head of Douglas’ London operation, Eddy Withers, who was an avid racing enthusiast. With some vigorous campaigning, Withers managed to secure the required fifty deposits, and the rush was on to build the machines in time for the 1950 TT races. To circumvent the problem of Douglas overtly entering racing, Eddy Withers took the racing activities under the wing of his own company, Withers of West Norwood.
At the 1949 event, Douglas rider Bernard Hargreaves had posted a very respectable practice lap of 76.72 mph (although his engine blew up in the race), so there were high hopes for the new model. When the Junior Clubman’s TT lined up in June 1950, a quarter of the 100-strong entry was mounted on the 90 Plus. Four laps later, behind two BSA Gold Stars and a Norton, Douglas riders John Clark and R. Robinson finished fourth and fifth in a race where almost half the field failed to reach the chequered flag.
That result proved to be the apogee for the 90 Plus at the TT, for the Gold Stars progressively swamped both the grid and the results. Compared to the increasingly sophisticated frames of the opposition, using swinging arm rear suspension controlled by hydraulically-damped spring units, the Douglas’ torsion bar system was crude and practically devoid of damping. This was not such a problem in normal road use, but under racing conditions, especially at the notoriously bumpy Isle of Man, it was a major impediment.
As well as the rapid ascendance in popularity of the BSA Gold Star, the decline in popularity of the Douglas as a Clubman mount was basically down to reliability, or lack of it. An inherent problem was unequal expansion of the alloy heads and barrels compared to the steel through bolts securing the top ends to the crankcase. As the engine heated up and expanded, the tension would snap the through-bolts, often pulling the bolts out of the crankcase and causing serious damage, while oil would find its way out of the pushrod tunnels. Douglas addressed these major problems by reverting to iron barrels for the 1952 production, which appeared to work to some degree. Legendary Douglas exponent Freddie Dixon developed his own version of the motor, using cast iron heads and barrels, and in this form the engine developed 31 bhp and would soar to 1o,000 rpm while remaining oil-tight. At the Isle of Man, a 90 Plus with the Dixon engine was timed at 108mph on the Sulby Straight; very impressive for a 350 push-rod motor. Dixon had done much work on the standard T35 cylinder heads, relocating the spark plugs to shallower angle, with a new rocker cover which had a recess in its top surface to clear the spark plug.
The vast majority of the 90 Plus models built were delivered in road-compliant form, leaving it to the owners to strip the machine for racing. By the time a halt was called towards the end of 1953, 218 of the 90 Plus had been built, and few survive today. Those that began as road models usually retained the headlight mounting ‘ears’, to which the front racing number plate was affixed on a bracket, and can be identified among survivors by the fact that the left side bracket has a circular recess where the British tax disc was originally located. For 1953, the Douglas range had shrunk to just three, the basic Mark V, the 90 Plus, and the Vespa-Douglas scooter. By this stage Douglas was fully committed to the completely redesigned Mark V-based Dragonfly model, the styling of which was universally lambasted. The Dragonfly was destined to become the final model in the company’s illustrious history, remaining in production for just three years. The doors finally closed at the Douglas plant in Kingswood, Bristol, in 1957.
You don’t see many of these.
Our featured example of the Douglas 90 Plus has been in the same family since 1957, when it was purchased by Ted Tivey for 55 pounds ($110). It was imported, possibly with one other 90 Plus, by the New South Wales Douglas agents W (Bill) Mahler who operated from 27-29 Campbell Street, Sydney, on the opposite side of the street to the somewhat larger Hazell & Moore emporium. Wilhelm Mahler also ran an accessories side under the name of Relham Traders (Mahler spelled backwards). With all of Douglas’ ups and downs post-war, it had been a rough trot for importers in various countries, with uncertain delivery dates and problems with spare parts. In the late 1940s Mahler did push the brand heavily and enjoyed some sales success, but the heady days when Douglas was a feared name on the race tracks was long gone. Nevertheless, Bill Mahler did offer a degree of support to one of his workshop employees, one Henry “Harry” Greene, who was a keen Clubman racer and a very enthusiastic speedway rider and later administrator of the sport on the National Speedway Control Board.
As well as competing at Sydney dirt tracks (“Miniature TT”) such as Blacktown and Wynstanes, and at the airstrip events at Castlereagh, Harry rode a 350 Douglas owned by Mahler at the annual Easter Bathurst races from 1948 to 1951. In early 1952, 90 Plus engine number 9210-90, frame number 9210 arrived at Mahler’s showrooms. It was imported in road trim, with full lighting equipment, valanced rear mudguard, toolboxes, mufflers, steel rims, and a sprung saddle. One of Harry’s final duties on a Douglas was to ride some demonstration laps on the sparkling gold machine at Sydney Showground Speedway, where he had raced sidecars in the 1930s and 1940s.
By this stage Mahler’s attention was focussed on the importation and promotion of the Austrian Puch range, and was soon to cease his involvement with Douglas. The 90 Plus was sold to Gordon Greig, motorcycle dealer in Islington, Newcastle, NSW and was entered at the second of the two 24 Hour Races held at the Mount Druitt circuit, just up the road from the present Sydney Motor Sport Park (nee Eastern Creek). The three-rider team comprised dirt track star Norm Fraser, Rex Dannenberg and Keith Miles. In a chaotic race that started at 2pm and saw the deaths of two riders, the Douglas had plenty of problems, as Norm Fraser recalls. “It was vibrating like mad and we found the frame had broken under the steering head, so we had to weld that in the pits. Then at about 2 in the morning, it threw a piston out the side of the motor, so that was the end for us.”
In Ted Tivey’s hands, the 90 Plus competed in events in the Illawarra region of NSW, placing first in the Junior class at the Wongawilli Hill Climb, before being placed in storage in Bowral in the NSW Southern Highlands. There it remained for 21 years before being sent to Cooma, NSW in 1981 where it underwent a complete restoration. In 1989 it went to Currumbin, Queensland, where it remains to this day. Ted Tivey passed away in 1998 and the 90 Plus is still with the Tivey family. The distinctive gold motorcycle appears occasionally at shows, most recently at the 2021 Ray Owen Classic Bike Show at Canungra.
Specifications: 1952 Douglas 90 Plus
Engine: Horizontally opposed OHV twin, positioned transversely in frame. Twin camshafts located below the crankshaft. Built-up crank mounted on double-row drive side ball bearings and plain bearing on timing side. High tensile steel connecting rods with double-row roller big end bearing.
Bore x stroke: 60.8mm x 60mm
Compression ratio: 7.25:1
Transmission: Four-speed gearbox with single-plate dry clutch
Frame: Tubular steel and lug cradle.
Suspension: Front: Douglas Radiadraulic bottom link forks (Douglas Patent No: 645.565
Rear: Swinging arm with torsion bar springing. Douglas Patent No: 558.387
Wheels: Dunlop alloy rims with 3.00 x 21 front tyre, 3.25 x 19 rear tyre.
Fuel capacity: 3 gallons
Wheelbase: 1383mm
Weight: 393lb (road trim), 350lb (stripped)
Road equipment: Lucas 6-volt Magdyno, constant voltage control, electric horn, magneto cut-out switch on handlebar, 7-inch headlamp, Smiths rear wheel drive speedometer.
