CarBrandLogos archive · BSA · 1948
A German two-stroke taken as war reparations, and the bike that put Britain on two wheels.
Discover the storyPhoto: Ch vik · CC BY 3.0
The story
Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the BSA Bantam, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.
01
The design was not BSA's. The DKW RT125 was among the industrial assets distributed to the Allies after the Second World War, and copies of it were built on three continents — as the Harley-Davidson Hummer in America, the Moskva and later Minsk in the Soviet Union, and in Britain as the BSA Bantam. BSA's engineers mirrored the drawings so the gear lever fell on the right, as British riders expected, and put the bike into production in 1948.
BSA Bantam D7 175cc · SG2012 · CC BY 2.0
02
It was a simple thing: a single-cylinder two-stroke of 123 cc in the original D1, growing to 148 cc in the D3 and 173 cc from the D5 onwards, with three speeds initially and four on later models. Early machines had rigid frames and telescopic or plunger rear suspension arrived over time, but the fundamentals stayed unchanged for two decades because they did not need changing.
BSA Bantam Bushman · SG2012 · CC BY 2.0
03
What made the Bantam matter was economics. It was cheap to buy, cheap to insure, easy to maintain with basic tools, and returned fuel consumption that made a car look absurd in an era of rationing and rebuilding. It became the machine on which a very large share of British riders passed their tests, and the General Post Office bought them by the thousand for telegram delivery, which is why so many surviving examples are red. Off-road clubs adopted them for trials and grass track because a wrecked one cost almost nothing to replace, and a whole racing class eventually grew up around tuned Bantams that survives to this day.
BSA Bantam D10A Sports · SG2012 · CC BY 2.0
04
The engineering never really moved on. BSA kept enlarging the engine and adding gears rather than replacing the design, so a late model shared its basic architecture with a set of German drawings from 1939. That was tolerable while nothing better was affordable, and fatal once something was. Production ran to 1971 and totalled several hundred thousand machines, making it comfortably the best-selling British motorcycle of the post-war period. By the end it was hopelessly outclassed by Japanese lightweights that were faster, cleaner and better built, and BSA had nothing ready to replace it. But for more than twenty years the Bantam was the default first motorcycle in Britain, and its influence is measured in licences rather than lap times.
At a glance
Produced
1948–1971Engine
single-cylinder two-stroke:Technical specification
Contemporaries from the 1940s
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