1938 BSA M24 Gold Star
No Reserve - Older concours-standard restoration

Registration No: DVO 703
Frame No: JM24-209
MOT: Exempt

• Original frame and engine, as authenticated by the Gold Star Owners' Club
• Recipient of a 1980s concours restoration, which was refreshed in 2004
• Interesting history involving trials rider Jim Wayte and an Australian sugar cane millionaire

• The Road and Race Collection

Birmingham Small Arms was established in Small Heath, Birmingham, in 1861 to manufacture weapons. Around the turn of the century, they started making bicycles and progressed onto motorcycles a few years later. By the 1920s, BSAs were often at the front ranks of competition, and when Wal Handley received a Gold Star award for lapping Brooklands at 100mph on his Empire Star model in 1937, BSA was justifiably proud; Gold Star duly became the designation for BSA’s top performance models from 1938. The first iteration was the M24, a 496cc single with an aluminium head and, for 1939, close-ratio gears.

This superb first-year Goldie has some intriguing early history, as engine test records show that JM24-209 with engine 204 underwent testing at Russells Garage in Chatham, Kent, before receiving its ‘DVO’ registration in Nottinghamshire. By 1978, it was owned by Geoffrey Brandon of Hersham, Surrey, who stripped it and half restored it, intending to race it. Before he finished, it was bought by Jim Wayte of Woking, who had trialled a ’55 Gold Star in the ’50s and ’60s and thereafter become a serial Goldie restorer. He restored ‘DVO’ and showed it widely with the Gold Star Owners’ Club in the 1980s, when it won numerous concours prizes and appeared in John Gardner’s BSA Gold Star Super Profile (1985). At one Stafford Show, it was spotted by a Halifax, Queensland, sugar cane millionaire who claimed to have every BSA model except a ’38 Goldie, and pestered to buy it, money no object. It duly departed for Australia but was reimported in 2004 by our vendor, an enthusiastic motorcycle collector, following light refurbishment and detailing by Mitchell Barnes. After years on static display, it will now require recommissioning. It is sold with its 1978 logbook, much correspondence with Wayte and Gardner, photographs from Wayte’s ownership, a Gold Star Owners’ Club certificate of authenticity, and a 1938 BSA sales brochure.

For more information, please contact:
Mike Davis
mike.davis@handh.co.uk
07718 584217