Local historian: A Sidmouth motorcycle tragedy

This is a sad but interesting account of Mr Albert Benjamin Smith, owner of the Radway Cycle Works in the early 1900s.

A news article reports that Bert Smith died on 31 May 1909 after suffering terrible injuries received in a motorcycle accident near Trow cottages on Salcombe Hill.

Apparently, Mr Smith had ridden to Chard in the morning to visit his brother in law, a Mr Parnell.

Whilst travelling back to Sidmouth with Mr Parnell on a separate machine and in thick fog, Mr Smith, who was carrying a lad called Earland as a pillion passenger, suffered a puncture and they were both thrown off.

Young Earland suffered three broken ribs and Mr Smith injuries to his head.

Mr Parnell rode on to Sidmouth to summon help and returned with Dr Bingley Pullin in his carriage along with his coachman, Mr Grimalby.

Unfortunately, little could be done for poor old Bert, and although they got him home and he regained consciousness, he passed away at 2am in the morning, leaving a wife Matilda and several children.

L: The garage (Graham Symington). R: Rincon coffee shop in modern day (Google)

It appears that a few years later Mrs Smith teamed up with her lodger and motor mechanic Claude Martin and they set up a garage in what is now Rincon coffee shop.

The Cycle Works premises was enlarged and became Scofields (later Percivals) and is now part of the the Sue Ryder shop.

More by Graham Symington:

1. The history of the now-demolished Blackmore Hall
2. The history of Sidmouth's Connaught Gardens
3. A dancing bear, girls of bad character and smuggling: The history of Sidmouth's The Old Ship Inn
4. Sidmouth, Jane Austen and ITV's Sanditon
5. The history of The Byes, in pictures
6. Tar Barrels... in Sidmouth?
7. Remembering Pike's Cottages
8. Sidmouth's old toll houses
9. Policing in Victorian and Edwardian Sidmouth
10. The history of The Ham
11. Early Sidmouth houses
12. Fishing in Sidmouth, in pictures
13. Catching smugglers in 19th-century Sidmouth