survivor

Swiss

30 :OLD BIKE AUSTRALASIA

UNIVERSAL B50 METEOR

Out in the wilds

of rural England,

Andy Westlake

unearths

a rarity...

One of my best sourcesof interesting bikes is via my local MOT station and

it was thanks to a conversation with the examiner Tony Clark I was put in touch

with the owner of this incredibly rare machine. The bike in question is a Swiss –

made Universal B50 Meteor and it’s believed that this particular model is one of

only six from a production run of a thousand left in the world. The owner of this

BMW lookalike is West countryman Gareth Burnard who invited me along to take

his 570cc horizontally opposed twin for a spin through the Wiltshire lanes.

However before we fired the big four stroke into action his father Jim told me

a little about the day in 1997 he bought the bike.

“At the time I had a Harley-Davidson Sportster but it wasn’t my sort of machine

so I put an advert in the classic press offering it in part exchange for something

‘interesting’. In response I had a call from a chap who lived on a farm near Chel-

tenham who told me that he had the ideal thing in the form of a B50 Universal; a

manufacturer I’d never heard of. It transpired that the horizontal twin had originally

been imported to the UK some years earlier and was still in its original livery but

StoryAndy Westlake

PhotosGary Chapman,

Jill Westlake and

Jim Scaysbrook