Clyno Motorcycles: Wolverhampton’s Wartime Factory Story
Before Clyno became one of Britain’s largest car makers, two cousins brought an ingenious motorcycle transmission to Wolverhampton. War transformed their factory—but peace exposed just how fragile success could be.
There are motorcycle companies remembered for a famous racer, a beautiful petrol tank or an engine note that still turns heads at a classic show.
Clyno is remembered for something rather more unsettling: a motorcycle and sidecar built to carry a Vickers machine gun.
It is a striking image, but it can also obscure the more important story. Behind the military outfit stood two ambitious cousins, a fast-growing Wolverhampton factory and hundreds of workers whose fortunes changed with events far beyond Pelham Street. Clyno’s rise shows what the Midlands engineering ecosystem could achieve when demand, skills and suppliers aligned. Its fall shows what happened when that alignment suddenly disappeared.
This was not simply a motorcycle marque that failed. It was a company enlarged by war and then asked to find a place in peace.
An Ingenious Pulley and Two Ambitious Cousins
Clyno began in 1909 at Thrapston in Northamptonshire. Its founders, cousins Frank and Ailwyn Smith, initially built an adjustable pulley intended to improve belt transmission. The company name was reportedly derived from the pulley’s inclined design.
At a time when many motorcycles still drove their rear wheels by belt, a device that made transmission more controllable and adaptable had obvious value. Yet the Smiths did not intend to remain merely component suppliers. In 1910 they began making complete motorcycles and moved to Wolverhampton.
The move mattered. Wolverhampton offered far more than factory space. It placed Clyno inside a concentration of motorcycle knowledge, metalworking businesses, transport connections and skilled labour. The company acquired premises in Pelham Street previously occupied by Stevens Motor Manufacturing, which had already supplied engines to Clyno.
One Midlands engineering business had effectively stepped into the industrial footprint of another.
Clyno appeared at the 1910 motorcycle show at Olympia with motorcycles, its adjustable pulley and a telescopic stand. The company also used demanding trials to demonstrate that its machines were practical rather than theoretical. Orders began arriving faster than the original works could comfortably satisfy them.
In 1912, Clyno expanded into the former Humber cycle factory across Pelham Street. Fort Works and the premises opposite became part of a rapidly developing industrial operation. By 1913 the company had introduced an affordable 250cc motorcycle that strengthened its appeal to ordinary riders.
For a young manufacturer, the future must have looked exceptionally promising.
When War Changed the Factory
The outbreak of the First World War disrupted civilian motorcycling, but military contracts soon changed Clyno’s scale and purpose.
Working with Vickers, the company developed a motorcycle combination capable of carrying a machine gun. This was not simply a gun bolted casually to a sidecar. A complete outfit had to carry the weapon, ammunition, cooling water, fuel, tools and spares while remaining mobile over difficult roads and rough ground.
The National Motor Museum explains that an armed Clyno outfit normally operated with two supporting combinations: one carrying additional ammunition and another available as a replacement gun carrier if the first machine failed.
In 1915, Clyno became a supplier of the standard combination outfit for the Motor Machine Gun Service. An archaeological assessment of the Wolverhampton works records that convoys of roughly 20 to 25 outfits were driven from the factory to Kempton Park at weekends over a period of several months.
Imagine that journey beginning at Pelham Street: newly completed combinations leaving Wolverhampton under their own power, ridden by men who knew that these were not ordinary customer motorcycles awaiting a Sunday outing.
By the Armistice, an archive history records 1,792 Clyno motorcycles in British military service. Clyno also supplied the Russian Army and manufactured ammunition carriers, aero-engine work and other material required by the war effort.
The Workers Behind the War Contracts
Company histories tend to follow founders, directors and contracts because their names survive in official papers. The transformation happened on the factory floor.
One Wolverhampton history account records a Clyno workforce of 660 during the war, including 250 women. These employees were part of the enormous wartime movement that brought women into engineering work previously treated as male territory.
Their jobs could involve repetitive production, inspection, fitting and machining carried out under the pressure of military demand. The motorcycles may now appear as fascinating museum exhibits, but to the people making them they represented long shifts, wages, acquired skills and the anxiety of a country at war.
Clyno depended upon more than its own workforce. Engines, electrical equipment, tyres, steel, castings and countless smaller items connected the company to the wider Midlands supply network. War encouraged standardisation and volume, but it also placed extraordinary pressure on materials and transport.
Ailwyn Smith left the business in 1916. Frank Smith continued, while works manager Henry Meadows became another important figure in the factory story. Meadows would later establish his own Wolverhampton engineering company, producing engines and gearboxes for other manufacturers. His career is a reminder that Midlands expertise did not remain trapped inside one marque. People carried it with them.
Peace Was Not a Return to Normal
When the war ended in November 1918, peace did not restore the motorcycle market that had existed four years earlier.
The government possessed large numbers of surplus military motorcycles that could be sold cheaply. New civilian machines now had to compete against machines already paid for through wartime budgets. Raw materials remained difficult to obtain and industries accustomed to contracts had to rediscover ordinary customers.
Clyno faced an additional problem: accounts state that payment connected with Russian orders was lost after revolution changed the government and commercial circumstances. The precise financial effects deserve careful archival study, but the wider point is clear. Work that had appeared secure during wartime could become a liability when governments and agreements disappeared.
The original Clyno Engineering Company entered liquidation in 1920.
It is easy to read that date as evidence that the company had built the wrong motorcycles. The truth was more complicated. Clyno had expanded to satisfy an abnormal national emergency and then encountered surplus machines, shortages, unsettled debts and a collapsing post-war market at the same time.
The system that had accelerated growth now magnified every difficulty.
Clyno Returned—but on Four Wheels
Frank Smith was not finished. A new Clyno company emerged in 1922, concentrating increasingly on cars. For a time it achieved remarkable success, becoming Britain’s third-largest car manufacturer behind Austin and Morris according to contemporary historical accounts.
That achievement deserves emphasis. A business that had begun with a motorcycle pulley and moved through military combinations had reinvented itself as a serious motor-car producer.
Motorcycle manufacture ended by 1923, but the Clyno name remained visible on Wolverhampton roads and in the city’s industrial life. The renewed company ultimately failed in 1929 after rapid expansion, heavy investment and difficult commercial decisions caught up with it.
Once again, growth had proved easier to achieve than to control.
What Remains in Pelham Street?
The former Clyno works are important because they preserve the geography of the story. Clyno occupied works on both sides of Pelham Street, adapting buildings already connected with the Midlands cycle and motorcycle trades.
Wolverhampton City Council’s heritage material identifies Fort Works as incorporating the former Humber cycle factory, while the industrial buildings opposite were also absorbed into Clyno’s operation. The site later served other manufacturers, including businesses producing domestic metal goods.
Buildings change, industries move and later uses can make the original story difficult to read. Any present-day photograph therefore needs careful captioning. A surviving wall should not automatically be described as the place where a particular motorcycle was assembled without comparing maps, plans and archive photographs.
That careful approach is part of the purpose of Made in the Midlands. We are not looking for a convenient old brick building to stand in for history. We are trying to reconnect surviving places with the people and work that actually occupied them.
More Than a Machine-Gun Motorcycle
The Vickers-Clyno combination guarantees the company a place in motorcycle history, but it should not be allowed to define every person who passed through the factory gates.
Clyno was also the story of two cousins trying to improve belt drive, trials riders proving new machines, women entering wartime engineering, skilled managers carrying knowledge into new businesses and a workforce confronting the sudden economic shock of peace.
Its rise depended upon the great strength of the Midlands: a dense network of skill, suppliers and factories capable of responding quickly to demand.
Its failure exposed the danger on the other side of that strength. A company built around urgent contracts and rapid expansion could be left with debts, excess capacity and no easy civilian market when circumstances changed.
The motorcycles survived because people preserved them. The fuller Clyno story survives only if we also remember those who made them.
Do you have a Clyno connection? If a member of your family worked at the Pelham Street works, or you have photographs, documents or memories connected with Clyno, Motorbike Mad would be pleased to hear from you.