Stanco Melbourne, Laverd?.

B

Berridale

New member
Stanco Laverda.
I used to go down to Elizabeth St every lunchtime , i was 16, worked in the Public Service in 1969.
Stanco had a few Laverda, SF/GT that were just so different .
They also had an immaculate Ducati 250 which i had to have. I paid off the deposit and the kept the bike until that was completed.
A friend went guarantor for me.
I had no experience but with the salesman instructions and how imagined it would be like to ride the bike i rode off into the traffic.
Elizabeth St was the place i spent my lunch hour at for a long time , Stanco always generous with their time .
Across the road was Pratts, Joe and Frank  Pratt took me under their wing , Frank giving good advice to a young man.

Years later i worked as a mechanic and later Workshop Manger for Peter Stevens across the road.
By that stage Cartwright had taken over as manager of Stanco and the shop collapsed, then closed.
He then went to Pratts and the same thing eventually happened.
Johnny Adriens in the workshop used to spit on the cobblestones as he walked past, Johnny had been a BMW mechanic at Pratts.
Peter Kendall had worked for Stanco and had no regard for him either.

Stanco Richmond closed with Cartwright .
Maurice Quincey, Essendon was the next victim and staff disliked Cartwright .
For sure he had a reputation as "Shit magnet".

Stanco was a great shop, "Old School" perhaps even then but the staff were never pushy or arrogant like some today.
These were great days , good people .
 
Certainly brings back memories. I think it was very early 1975 that I first went downstairs to the spare parts dept at Stanco on the old 'east side', Vic Bognor around the corner IIRTC. There was a '74 SFC parked down there, brands spankers.

I bought a back wheel for my first minibike from Motabitz when I was about 13 (1968). Elizabeth St was a happening joint with all the bike shops. Like you I used to ogle the wares and watch the big boys roar off on their big Brit twins.

Brother Lee will probably pipe in soon - he started as a mech at Stanco when they were just shifting from east to west, I think. This Cartright dude sounds like a right prat!!
 
PB,
yes brings back many memories.
Norton Commando Fastback was sex on wheels .
Vic Bognor was a incredible person .
I heard his son Roy passed away. What happened?

I watched him pin-stripe a Velocette Thruxton tank with two dagger brushes , both sides at once . There is a cut-out on the right side.
Magic. He did the paint repairs for the Rolls Royce dealer. VB can always around.
My brother worked at Quincey's shop... no one had a good word to say about Cartwright.
 
Remember seeing Laverda 750s in the Elizabeth St. store, next to Royal Enfields(?, I remember running lights in the headlamp cowl) around 1970-73.  Dad took me to a vintage exhibition in the Stanco shop in Richmond, must have been '71/'72.  I think that sparked my interest for the old stuff.  Still have the exhibition programm somewhere...

Also remember seeing the newly introduced Suzuki Kettle and Yamaha TX750 in the showrooms, Honda 4s being old hat by then. :D

Yep, Elizabeth St. was the biking epicentre of Melbourne, loads of brit iron parked at the roadside Saturdays.  Always nagged dad to take a walk while mum was getting groceries at the Queen Vic Market.  Bought quite a few of my Bantam and Honda C50 parts at Bikes and Bits.  They also had a store/warehouse in Seaford, once took the train from Glenroy to collect some more Bantam bits from there, quite an adventure for a 13-year-old back then!

piet
 
I can also remember getting taken through Elizabeth street as a boy with my dad dragged through every shop and generally ending up at Pratts, but later on when I was a young motorcyclist Saturday mornings in that bustling street was just magic from Mars leathers to Modak then of course Stanco, where I would take my Laverda shims upstairs and exchange them for the new sizes required, the micrometer was always sitting on the bench.
I have made several attempts to make contact with any of the Evans family that may have some Laverda historical records with no success at all maybe you could help.
 
Berridale is a great little town we have stayed there quite a few times on snowy rallies. Is there a Laverda owner living in Berridale?  There was a bunch of Laverdas there earlier this year having breakfast before a very fast fang to Tumut
 
Yeah they were good times in Elizabeth Street back then. I worked on the east side in the old shop with the workshop on the third floor with Frank the head mechanic, and the spares dept was in the basement with Kees and Ken (and an ever changing assistant invariably got sacked for missing work due to a bike crash!), Joe Cook and Ron King (white haired older bloke who let everyone think he was Stan) were the sales team on the ground floor. The office was on the first floor where John Black the manager worked. He had run a lunch shop up the road where Stan?s daughter June Evans used to get the lunches, and they ended up together so he went from sandwiches to motorbikes. Stanco was Australian importer for Laverda, as most know, but also Victorian Harley distributor - when AMA bowling machine company owned them, total piles of shit in every way that we had to get through the warranty period, as well as having a Honda dealership for the area. There was an iron spiral staircase out the back that some (Frank!) used to slide down the bannister, and a winch to lift bikes up and down from the workshop. We had to move because the entire block was being demolished for updating of the city centre for the new railway station shopping mall, and they bought one of the closed down mc business premises on the other side of the road just by Peter Stevens original shop. The workshop was now in the basement with a steep ramp instead of the winch. Times got pretty slow in the branch, and after a few months poor old John Black had a heart attack and passed away fairly quickly, I left at around this time but remember his really nice Greek funeral we all attended. Stan Evans himself worked out of the Bridge Road shop in Richmond that was primarily Honda, but he was behind the scenes and we rarely saw him. There were lots of known characters from the Melbourne bike scene that went through Stanco, I think that even Gyro of Ecco Engineering worked there once but not absolutely sure. People moved from shop to shop and there was good camaraderie among us. i remember that we could get something like 5% off the price of a new Laverda when staff at Peter Stevens paid landed cost price (less than dealer price) for new bikes - Guzzi, Honda etc, and were limited to two or three bikes a year which they often sold for a profit - we were pretty peeved. Chiodos wanted their staff to be on the product.
Cartwright! I am not surprised to hear your statements regarding that reptile. He was a Honda man and had no interest in Laverdas. He stuffed all the established Laverda sellers in the other states around really badly, trying to replace them with people he had history with it would seem. I was in Queensland and the shop there had to pay a higher trade price for a Jota than what Cartwright's mate on the gold coast sold one retail to a customer. I never heard a good word about him.
Joe Cook and Frank teamed up with John Black?s son (John Jr) and started a shop out at Essendon (or thereabouts). I read now that Peter Stevens, who had moved further up Elizabeth St, is now closing down due to pressure by the council who want to upmarket the area and motorbikes don't fit into their image, they will probably end up with either international chain stores or papered up windows like every other city centre. A crying shame as it has always been such a great scene there and even people with no interest in bikes find it fascinating.
 
Great memory for history, Leeton!! Maybe you didn't waste enough brain cells in your youth  :-*

I've never forgotten seeing just off Elizabeth St in about 1974 a fesity young woman of short stature in a miniskirt on a Z1 Kwaka (very new superbike back then) - she had platform shoes on, the only way she could touch the ground - but she rode the thing with great confidence. An unusual but very satisfying thing to witness - women weren't really taking up motorcycling in droves back then, let alone on monsters like the Z1.
 
Hey Lee, were you working at Stanco between 1976 and 1981? You might have had your spanners on my Jota. The previous owner to me bought the bike new from Stanco and he had them do all subsequent servicing and mechanical work. I guess he wasn't much of a hands-on fettler.

He moved back to Tassie with the bike in around 1981 (he's a native Tasmanian but lived in Melbourne for a few years). Come to think of it, I was living in Melbourne at that time too, but we didn't cross paths until much later.

He sold the bike to me in 2007 because arthritis in his hands made it too difficult to ride. He bought a Honda (CB 900 or something similar) with more comfortable ergonomics and a much lighter clutch. He thought the Honda was boring, but at least he could pull the clutch.
 
I worked there in I think 1976 or 7 and at the time it was 3CL and SF3 only from Laverda, the 1200 came just after I left Vic for WA and worked with Q at Hartley's where Q raced that first 1200 (against Stanco?s wishes). I don't exactly know when Stanco started importing Jotas but I would think it was when the factory released them as an official model. Stanco wouldn't have been importing from Slaters, who I think were the only Jota source back then. A guy turned up in Perth with one he had brought in from UK which Quentin got to have a ride on iirc. I contacted a former workmate from Stanco for Maurice but haven't heard back from him directly, he would have plenty more info than me. If I ever get back to Oz with this pangolin flu biz I will look him up.
 
Piranha Brother 2 said:
More like 'On the Beach' (the film) in Melbourne, especially after the fire-on-sight 8pm curfew  :D
Click to expand...

Blimey!  Had forgotten all about that ...  (bigthumb)

220px-OnTheBeach.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top