Go
to the Archive indexWho was Rex Hake... and where did the name come from? I can't remember when the name Rex Hake first appeared. The earliest example I've found is as the author of a piece about the Coast to Coast ride in the August 1998 edition of Buzzing. However, I seem to remember that the name was first used in connection with a piece of verse...
Anyway, Rex Hake was a peudonym used by Colin King, who was one of the stalwarts of the NACC Thames Valley Group. Colin wanted a poem published anonymously in Buzzing (his story is that he had already written some other articles in that issue and didn't want to look as if he was monopolising the magazine). Rather than have no author credited, I invented the name "Rex Hake" - colin is the French word for a hake and ... the "Rex" bit is more obvious.
Colin decided that he rather liked the name and subsequently
used it on a number of othe pieces, including:
A Christmas Warning - [December
1999]
Christmas by the chimney - [December
1998]
Daft Trevor - [April
1999]
Motorised Tandems - [October
1999]
Mr & Mrs - [August
1999]
Old Brown Rudge - [June
1999]
Son of Coast to Coast: Aftermath - [August 1998]
All these article used to be available in this archive until October 2009, when Colin asked for them all to be removed [*].
Later, Colin acquired a Rex cyclemotor engine and decided to build a 'special' around it. Well, there was only one name he could give to the completed machine, wasn't there?
Colin's Rex 'Hake'
[*] When asked why he wanted his articles removed, Colin cited his disapproval of certain activities on eBay. The perpetrator of these happens to be the brother of one of my friends but, other than that, has no connection at all to this archive.
Andrew Pattle