Café Racing: Rockers, Ton-up Boys and the 59 Club

Not long ago I was doing some research on the UK’s Rockers and Mods of the early 70s and in the course of investigating I came across a site selling café racer (properly pronounced ‘caff racer’ by intimates) T-shirts printed with various logos and designs. One of them was a black T-shirt that said simply (in white lettering) “More speed, Vicar!”

That was intriguing for several reasons, not least among them being my status as a nontheist, but mostly due to my intense curiosity over what possible relationship a church could have with leather jacketed bikers (excluding the not-uncommon ‘Christian biker club’ fundamentalist types who usually belong to a conventional American evangelical or ‘born-again Christian’ Protestant denomination), since the term Vicar denotes a cleric in the English Anglican Church (Vicar being a uniquely UK/English term), alternately known in its various forms as the Episcopal Church or the Church of England.

I quickly discovered that this particular phrase (“More speed, Vicar!”) was linked to one of the largest motorcycle clubs in the world, known as the ’59 Club’. Although I tend to be quite well-read and culturally aware considerably beyond the usual level of familiarity most have with recent social history, I had never before heard of the 59 Club. It’s always a humbling thing for me to stumble across an aspect of our culture I lack any knowledge of…