I'm sure whatever 30's design Triumph, BSA etc were knocking out in the 50's was perfect for the era and would have been thundering past Morris Minors and Austin A30s with ease. By the time I got into bikes in the late 60's though I didn't want something that harked back to "our finest hour" and looked like it was made out of whatever was leftover from the Spitfire production line.

That's how it seemed to me, even in my teenage innocence, at the time - backward looking arrogant complacent management running companies knocking out brand new "retro" bikes with sales buoyed up by semi hysterical press coverage telling us that these British world beaters were better than anything our vanquished "yellow peril" foe could come up with and that not "Backing Britain" by buying one was a betrayal of everything we'd fought for. I wouldn't have been able to state it quite like that back then but whatever patriotic feelings I had wasn't enough to stop me looking at the (second hand) Hondas in the dealers showrooms.

Given a choice between a Kawasaki H1 500 and a Velocette 500 (Venom?) (actually a magazine road test back then - which the Velo won!) I'd have sold my soul to the devil for the H1. The Velo looked, to my teenage eye, like something James Watt could have developed from his steam engines, whereas the Kawasaki looked like something NASA needed for the moon program. Strangely, and even though I have an H1 in my garage these days, I'd probably chose the Velo now. But that's because I don't need it for transport.