1917 Powerplus

Indian Powerplus Motorcycle circa 1918 with sidecar.

In WW2 my father served on a submarine in the Royal Navy and my mother served in the ATS.
After the war ended they individually decided to go to Southern Rhodesia in 1946 where they later met and got married.

While on crop inspection for the Imperial Tobacco Company in Nyasaland where he worked in the early sixties, my father discovered the Indian lying derelict in a tobacco barn in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).
He later told me that the old retired Yorkshireman who owned it had shipped it to Central Africa from the UK soon after WW1 ended and had said that when he last rode it, it had developed a bit of a speed wobble when travelling at high speed on the farm road!

As a member of the Nyasaland vintage club my father purchased the bike there and then for a few pounds and transported it back to his house in Limbe in Nyasaland (now Malawi) in the back of a pickup truck.

In 1980 he retired for health reasons just after the Rhodesian bush war ended and moved to the now independent Zimbabwe where the bike was stored in a crate in a garage on a farm.
(My father is in the Guinness book of world records for taking pills after a successful pancreatectomy in 1965 for cancer. He lived for 22 years after the operation and died in 1987).
The farm next door was bought in 1997 and the crate transferred there. Unfortunately the farmhouse attached to the garage where the bike was being kept was burned down in 2006 but fortunately the crate had just been shipped to Scotland where it sat in a shed until 2019.

In early 2019 a group of retired specialists belonging to the Vintage Motorcycle Club in Lanark, Scotland heard about the bike and requested permission to restore it as a retirement project.
This was agreed and they carried out extensive, highly specialised restoration work. (Reports and photographs of which are available on request).
This work stopped in December 2019 when the group leader sadly passed away.
The bike now resides in a shed in Scotland and needs further restoration to be completed. It is mostly all there but is still missing a few parts.