The East Anglian Cyclemotor Club—the EACC—was founded in 1981 and lasted for slightly less than five years before becoming the National Autocycle and Cyclemotor Club—the NACC. Now (2007) that the NACC itself has been wound up as an unincorporated club, it seems a good time to look back at those early years and to remember what the EACC was all about.
The EACC was not the first organisation set up to cater for cyclemotors as ‘classic’ or ‘historic’ vehicles. That honour goes to the Cyclemotor Section of the VMCC. However, the Cyclemotor Section found itself hampered by restrictions placed upon it by its parent organisation, the VMCC, and this left the way clear for the birth of the EACC.
The EACC started out as a club for young people: three of the four founders were teenagers at the time. Riding cyclemotors was the ideal form of classic motoring for young 'impoverished students'. Lack of money was one of the reasons they had for setting up their own club: the VMCC was relatively expensive to join, in fact the VMCC membership fee was more than the going rate for a Cyclemaster at that time. These three: Andrew Roddham, Simon Whitehead and Kevin Mallone, joined forces with Andrew Pattle (at age 28, they thought he’d give the project an air of ‘mature respectability’!) to create a club of their own. All four came from within fifteen miles of Ipswich but, rather than call it the Ipswich Cyclemotor Club, they decided to think big and go for the ‘East Anglian’ title. As it turned out, they hadn't thought big enough: the club had members in Gloucestershire and Warwickshire before the total membership had reached double figures.
Although the EACC and the VMCC Cyclemotor Section could have become rivals, the opposite was true: there were always friendly relations between the two organisations. The Cyclemotor Section—and Stan Greenway in particular—were most hepful and encouraging in getting the EACC up and running. EACC members rode their machines all the way to Warwickshire each year to support the Cyclemotor Section's Annual Road Run.
As membership of the EACC quickly spread across the country it soon became clear that a monthly meeting in Ipswich was no good for keeping all the members informed. So, early in 1982, the first edition of the club's magazine, Buzzing, appeared. Another early aim of the club was to provide a spares service. This was also up-and-running by the start of 1982 and a look at the first edition of Buzzing shows that a range of bearings, seals, piston rings and drive chains were already available.
Keeping things affordable, while also doing them as well as possible, was another of the EACC’s guiding principles. The first three editions of Buzzing were a rather unusual size—because the very cheap source of photocopying that had been found was only available on foolscap paper. Membership numbers soon became so big that another photocopying source was needed and from the fourth magazine onwards, a more conventional A5 size was adopted.
The first edition of Buzzing also tells us that the first EACC road run had been planned. This East Anglian Cyclemotor Run has remained on the calendar for every year since then (with the sole exception of 2006).
This article was first published in The Moped Archive in November 2007
