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Sounds good, doesn’t it? The problem is there are just twelve seats and you’re a few years too late! Seventy-five years ago in April a group of friends with a common interest in motorcycles got together and decided to form a club. Responding to an advert placed by Eric Cave in the window of a cafe in Chorlton, their first meeting was in the April of that year. The question of what to call the new club apparently took some time to settle until someone suggested they count the number present and use that as the name. With an attendance of seventeen prospective members your favourite club came into being.
That first Christmas Dinner cost 2/- (10p) per person and was held at a cafe in Rainow on January 19th 1936 with a sledging session beforehand. Starting from the Princess Hotel, Mauldeth Road at 2.00pm, most of twelve present were on bikes with the toboggans being taken along in a van. The actual dinner commenced at 6.30pm and finished with two helpings of Christmas pudding around 7.15pm. Leaving at 8.30pm and finally getting all the bikes going at 9.15pm, they started for home “expecting some trouble as it had been snowing hard and blowing a blizzard …. the roads were not too bad, non of the snow drifts more than two feet deep”.
So where do those poached eggs of the heading fit in then? Well, it seems that the vast majority of the Club’s weekly runs in those early years either passed by or ended up at Mrs. Tinley’s Cafe/Poached Egg Shop in Rainow for dinner or tea; whatever the weather and wherever they’d been. Touring round Dovedale and the Manifold valleys - poached eggs afterwards. Trip to a grass track meeting at Delamere - poached eggs for tea at Rainow. Trial at Washgates; too close to Rainow to resist. Looking through the Log Books, they were there most weekends in the first couple of years, come rain or shine or snow or fog.
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