It’s not every day that a private collection of motorcycles spanning back almost 100 years is put on public auction, but the Austrian professor Fritz Ehn (for they were his) had decided he needed to clear some space in his garage and top-up his retirement fund.
The result was a beautifully-executed auction at the RAF museum in north London, the only trouble being that I was getting far more excited about the Me109 and Lancaster than I was about the Vincent Black Shadows going under the hammer.
I’d come suitably equipped to the auction, of course. To my right sat James Whitham, erstwhile racer and second-hand bike nut. James is a proper punter in the old-fashioned sense of the word, he loves nothing more than to buy bikes, fix bikes, turn them over for a neat profit. He’s been to many a bike auction in his time (although admittedly nothing as grand as this) and he would be our guide through the pits and traps of buying a classic motorcycle at auction. And to my left sat Grant Leonard, the publisher of this very magazine and a man who has stood oak-like at the top of the motorcycle magazine ladder for a full two decades now. What he doesn’t know about bikes of a certain age (being a certain age himself) possibly isn’t worth knowing.
The Professor, now 73, started collecting his bikes back in 1961. “I began my collection with a 1929 Brough Superior that had belonged to my father,” he says today, keeping close vigil on the auction unfurling in front of him. “I didn’t really know I was collecting bikes back then, but if there was something fascinating about the bike and it touched my heart or emotions, I had to have it! I just love bikes, I suppose.
Even today I am working as a motorcycle journalist for a German newspaper, and I’ve ridden bikes all my life.” I ask the professor why he’s now decided to dispose of his extraordinary collection of 400 bikes, a lifetime’s collection being sold off in the space of a few hours. “It is just too much for me now,” he admits. “There’s no use in growing old when the vultures are sitting and waiting in the trees with such a wonderful selection of machines. My health is not really good and it’s time for other people to enjoy these bikes. This auction is like losing children for me, but it is like seeing them get married to a new partner, and for that I am happy as well.”
It’s clearly a very much a bittersweet auction for the old man, and it’s obvious to see where his taste in motorcycles lies: proper old-school vintage bikes, pre and post-war, the kind of bikes, which to be honest, I neither know nor care anything about. I’ve just never been into old bikes, old cars are interesting (not that I know anything about them) but I can see the timeless appeal of an old car, whereas an old bike just looks like a bag of oily bits.
Continue Bonhams auction
