Saving Old Seagulls

As some of you may know, I've been compiling a register of the surviving early Seagulls, up to 1945. These all have in common the first type of Villiers magneto, and each magneto has its own serial number.

We now have 72 motors, and from that a few useful snippets have appeared.

But I also have a mystery.

Throughout the years 1931 to 1945 there is a generally pretty even spread of surviving motors, but when you look at the magneto numbers the series has nothing at all between 2410 and 6519. That's a big hole in the data. 2410 was an SD, and there were 2409 Seagull motors manufactured before it, apart from a few magnetos that must have been used as spares. Then there's this huge gap until 6519 - also an SD.

Simply using the magneto serials you can see that British Seagull's post-war claim to have made over 10,000 motors for the military seems genuine enough, indeed why would they lie? But there are no survivors from this run of over 4,000 motors.

I've been chatting this through with the other Charles. We know that the first batch was ordered specifically to aid the British Army in Burma, where a glance at the map will show a long hilly country with quite a few rivers. Hence the River Kwai, and its infamous bridge. Did they all go there? 4000 outboard motors is a lot of metal. Did they all go in one transport, only to be torpedoed? Did they all get left there after the war? Many motors found there way back to Australia & New Zealand after the war.

Can any of our mates in New Zealand and Australia help here? Could any of you that haven't submitted your serial letters/numbers and magneto number have a look for me? Thanks, guys.

Just to remind you - the magneto serial is only to be found on the four spoke Villiers flywheel type of magneto. The one with the 'coolie hat' cover. the number may be on the flywheel rim, just under the cover, or if not there it'll be stamped on the stator plate and it'll be visible between the spokes if you rotate the flywheel.

Thanks in advance for any numbers or any ideas or theories..

Charles

This brings to mind the case of the missing 3000 Lotus Elans, though admittedly from a different era, the 1960s. Serial numbers had been running consecutively quite happily, when there was a huge jump and an apparent extra 3000 cars had been manufactured over a matter of months. At the time, Lotus only made a few hundred cars a year!

The supposition is that Colin Chapman, the Lotus founder, wanted to demonstrate his manufacturing capability to someone, no-one is agreed as to quite who; the racing authorities, the revenue, the Ford Motor Company?

Although a British engineering genius, Chapman was also known for his ability to sail close to the wind!

Tim

Hi Tim,

we're aware of Marstons and British Seagull's attempts to convince dealers they were shipping more motors than they actually made, and even taking this into account we're still short.

The JM numbers on the magnetos are what we're using, and there's no evidence that Villiers would fib about the numbers. After all it's the only magneto used on the early motors, and Marston/British Seagull were the only customer!

There was a Seagull of the type you described on display in the Fremantle Maritime Museum, Western Australia. It had a brass exhaust. It is now in storage.
You could contact the museum ... freorcpt@museum.wa.gov.au

Thanks for that tip. I do think we have that one, however.

John (of this site) has a theory that maybe all 4000 are still sitting in one of Britain's vast storage dumps left over from the war. Anyone with any experience of our government won't find that at all surprising.

My Father used to pilot Short Sunderland flying boats during WW2,principally in the far east.
He once told me that when we were evacuating Burma large quantities of munitions and equpment were dumped at sea to avoid them falling into enemy hands.
He remembered seeing large numbers of jeeps being driven off cliffs into the sea and barges full of radio and other equipment being scuttled.
I hope that this did’nt include the missing batch of Seagulls but it could perhaps explain the disappearance of such a large number.

Of course if this were a mystery happening today we would all just assume they were lost at Heathrow's Terminal 5!

I like reading this Forum! always something to make me chuckle!

john
SOS

charlesp wrote:As some of you may know, I've been compiling a register of the surviving early Seagulls, up to 1945. These all have in common the first type of Villiers magneto, and each magneto has its own serial number.

We now have 72 motors, and from that a few useful snippets have appeared.

But I also have a mystery.

Throughout the years 1931 to 1945 there is a generally pretty even spread of surviving motors, but when you look at the magneto numbers the series has nothing at all between 2410 and 6519. That's a big hole in the data. 2410 was an SD, and there were 2409 Seagull motors manufactured before it, apart from a few magnetos that must have been used as spares. Then there's this huge gap until 6519 - also an SD.

Simply using the magneto serials you can see that British Seagull's post-war claim to have made over 10,000 motors for the military seems genuine enough, indeed why would they lie? But there are no survivors from this run of over 4,000 motors.

I've been chatting this through with the other Charles. We know that the first batch was ordered specifically to aid the British Army in Burma, where a glance at the map will show a long hilly country with quite a few rivers. Hence the River Kwai, and its infamous bridge. Did they all go there? 4000 outboard motors is a lot of metal. Did they all go in one transport, only to be torpedoed? Did they all get left there after the war? Many motors found there way back to Australia & New Zealand after the war.

Can any of our mates in New Zealand and Australia help here? Could any of you that haven't submitted your serial letters/numbers and magneto number have a look for me? Thanks, guys.

Just to remind you - the magneto serial is only to be found on the four spoke Villiers flywheel type of magneto. The one with the 'coolie hat' cover. the number may be on the flywheel rim, just under the cover, or if not there it'll be stamped on the stator plate and it'll be visible between the spokes if you rotate the flywheel.

Thanks in advance for any numbers or any ideas or theories..

Ten years later. IF you have a look at the updated SD registry I agree those JM numbers are missing but there is a good range of motors to deduce the magnetos went missing, not the motors. Also, so far, there are no SD's in 7000 range.

Cheers, Hugo.

Left click to enlarge, and again.

I wonder what those magnetos could have been used for?

Well let's sum up what we think we know.

The "JM" in the ignition number stands for John Marston.

JM ignitions were used from 1931 until the end of the war.

JM numbers started at probably no 1 or 10, as I've seen JM 12 & Hugo's excellent work tells us that they go up to near 13,000, so that's circa 13,000 ignitions.

Less than 2000 seemed to have been used by the Marston Seagull, British Seagull pre war production, plus an unknown number were used by British Seagull during the early wartime SN, SNP production, then 10,000 were used to fulfill the Ministry of Supply SD series order.

What we don't know was how many were ordered as spares by the Ministry, there is no doubt that the ignition was one of the more fragile outboard components when used by unskilled operators, so it could be as high as 10 %, which could account for Seagull having some for the early post war C's & D's.

I believe the atco mower used the same magneto with different flywheel boss. Was the JM #### peculiar to Seagull? How did they mark the other non seagull magnetos? If the later SD's magneto's were approximately the engine number + 2000 which tallies up with total seagull/marstons built to date, where did the the SD's get their magneto's from that should have had the missing 4000? A mystery! Any WW2 single cylinder motor bikes built using this magneto ie BSA?

Looking at the data again it is not a stretch of the imagination that the JM numbering went up to 11500 around the SD2000 mark and then went back to JM6500 again and climbed back up. Just maybe we are going to see 2 of the same numbered magneto appear. Just a theory.

Didn't the bronze flywheels come from Atco mowers, I've got one somewhere, mark the keyway relationship to the magnets undo the 6 screws & exchange the boss, I think RickUK had one that he modded this way.

We understood that they were numbered so that the clearance between the magnets & the coil cheeks which is close was as set with the matching numbers, otherwise why stamp the numbers twice.

Try swapping the flywheels only, some touch!

By your suggestion that would mean 9500 pre war motors, so some of the serial numbers would be above 1000, no evidence of that.

Let me rephrase that. Two different magnetos matched sets with the same number but a few years apart. No debate about flywheel and plates being paired together.