FEATURE – 1938 BMW R51
Words: Mike Ryan and Stephen Carson Photos: Philip ‘Mouse’ Veivers - Blast from the Past Motorcycle Museum
When this bike, a 1938-model BMW R51, was delivered new to Australia, we were less than a year away from war with Germany. It’s a sobering thought, and given the sentiments of the time, it’s surprising this bike survived. But survive it has and that survival is only part of this bike’s story.
32 to 51
BMW – Bayerische Motoren Werke – is best known today for their cars and motorcycles, but the Munich-based firm started as an aircraft manufacturer, specifically military aircraft for what was then Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Imperial German Flying Corps.
After the end of World War One, the Treaty of Versailles barred BMW and other companies from manufacturing aircraft, so alternatives were sought and BMW – eventually – settled on motorcycles.
Their first attempts failed, but building proprietary engines for other marques gave BMW the grounding to relaunch their own motorcycles in 1923.
That motorcycle was the R32, featuring the horizontally-opposed twin-cylinder engine, aka Boxer Twin, that has endured in BMW’s catalogue to this day.
Of 494cc capacity and featuring a side valve design, the R32 engine was air-cooled, like most of its contemporaries, but the design, with the engine and gearbox in unit and using a recirculating oil system, was unusual for the period.
By the time the R5 was released in 1936, the boxer twin had gained overhead valves and chain-driven camshafts that delivered more power – around 24hp compared to just 8hp from the R32 – even though the actual capacity was unchanged.
As an update of the R5, the R51 arrived in 1938, with its chief distinctions being rudimentary plunger-type rear shocks in place of the R5’s rigid back end and the addition of telescopic forks up front - both uncommon features for the period.
A stable and nimble machine on the road, the R51 was also fast, with a top speed in the region of 85mph (135km/h), making it attractive to racers and record-setters.
BMW built less than 4,000 R51s before World War II intervened and of that total, a handful found their way to Australia as new motorcycles, including the bike featured.
Jazz and Tommy
With a name like ‘Jazz’, the BMW importer for Cairns and North Queensland in the 1930s was hardly going to be a shrinking violet! Such was the case with Jazz Lowery, a local identity who also owned the Queens Hotel; one of the oldest buildings in Cairns.
The feature bike was delivered new to Jazz in late 1938, having rolled out of the BMW works that August. A Cairns local, Thomas Tung-Yep, is believed to have been the first owner.
Part of Cairns’ strong Chinse community (which at one point accounted for 30 per cent of the town’s population), Tung-Yep made Queensland history when he, along with mates and fellow Cairns locals Leslie Fang Yuen and William Wong Hoy, were the first Chinese accepted for air crew training by the RAAF in the state.
Given he was likely to be deployed overseas, Tung-Yep had no use for the R51, so sold it to another Cairns identity – Emrys ‘Rusty’ Rees.
Rusty’s Story
Cairns locals will be very familiar with ‘Rusty’s Market’ - a landmark in the town since 1974, but the man behind it was Rusty Rees.
A builder, engineer, boxer, wrestler, visionary and gentleman, Rusty’s resume was hardly thin! His first business, however, was buying and selling motorbikes. When he was still a teenager, the mechanically-talented Rees started buying damaged motorcycles in and around Cairns, repairing them and reselling them for a profit.
From a simple shopfront in Cairns’ Draper Street, Rusty’s business grew and through this business, it’s believed he came across the R51 then still in the possession of Tung-Yep. Whether the bike was functional or not when Rusty got it is unknown, but it was soon put to work in one of Rusty’s other sidelines – stuntman.
Rusty made his own “Wall of Death” on the back of a truck and rode the BMW and other bikes in this improvised set-up at agricultural shows and local events.
As well as a showman, Rusty was also the backbone of club-level motorcycle racing in Cairns, being active in scrambles, speedway and sidecars.
The same R51 used for loop-the-loops was also campaigned on improvised racetracks in Cairns, like the Old Smiths Creek Mudflats, the Ranchero Speedway at Clifton Beach north of Cairns and further north at 4 Mile Beach in Port Douglas.
Never one to miss an opportunity to race, it’s rumoured that to enter 250cc-class competition, Rusty simply pulled one of the BMW’s spark plug leads!
Buying up various properties in Cairns’ Chinatown area, Rusty later added car dealerships and boat yards to his portfolio, and as that business and property portfolio grew, the BMW was used less and less, eventually parked up in one of Rusty’s workshops and forgotten by most people – with one exception.
Rusty’s Revival
Phil Galvin, a mechanic working for Rusty in Cairns, had been in the town long enough to remember the BMW when it was still being used and always wanted it.
Galvin spent decades trying to persuade Rusty to part with it, but it was obviously a favourite bike and it seemed like it would never leave Rusty’s possession.
When Rees passed away in 2000, Galvin found he had been gifted the R51 in Rees’s will. What Galvin got, though, was far removed from what he remembered back in the 1950s and ‘60s. Galvin nevertheless set to the task of restoring the bike to its former glory.
Two years in the making, the results of Galvin’s detailed restoration were seriously impressive. A keen and successful racer himself, Galvin would display the freshly-restored bike alongside his own trophies and sashes, all won over many years of racing locally in Cairns.
In 2016, Philip “Mouse” Veivers, curator at Cairns’ Blast from the Past Motorcycle Museum, visited Phil to discuss purchasing the bike for the museum. A competitive racer himself back in the day, Mouse later found that he and Galvin were second cousins, proving the motorcycle racing gene runs deep and strong in Cairns!
Unfortunately, Phil passed away not long after selling the BMW to Blast from the Past, but the quality of his restoration is a fitting legacy to the man and his abilities. Now it’s time for this rare motorcycle to go to a new custodian (see breakout).
Given its strong local history, it would be great if this bike stayed in the Cairns area, but no matter where it goes from here, it’s sure to add interesting new chapters to what’s been a fascinating story so far.
