This story dates to about the latter part of the year 1969.

I have carried solo bikes on sidecars and sidecars on sidecars, but the day the police didn’t really want to see me was the day I carried a queen sized bed and mattress on a sidecar.

The bike was a 1969 650cc Triumph Trophy TR6 and the chair was a 1946 Dusting Chassis fitted with a six-passenger home-built body (that’s two passengers sitting side-by-side facing forwards up front, two passengers seated side-by-side facing rearwards behind them and two more passengers seated side-by-side facing forwards at the rear of the limo-chair, in case you were wondering). I removed the windscreens from the chair so it was a wide flat long top with openings for all the passengers.  The flat top of the sidecar was almost exactly level with the dual seat and the rear luggage rack on the Triumph.

My parents had obtained a new bed and their old one was really had it and there was nowhere else in our house to store it.  We only had a sedan car or a station wagon to choose from and neither had a roof rack.  How to get Mum and Dad’s old bed to the rubbish tip?

I looked at my sidecar and had a sudden visualisation of how it would look if I used a screwdriver to remove the windscreens off the body of the chair.  It only took a minute to do just that! Then I placed the queen size mattress face down on top of the chair and bike, then I placed the bed on top of the mattress and used plenty of ockies to tie everything on.

To actually ride the bike with the bed on board, I had to straddle the front of the fuel tank, since the mattress covered the back half of it, and I rode standing up on the footpegs with my legs resting on the back of the handlebars, moving each leg forwards and back as I turned the handlebars.

With my brother Mick riding escort on his BMW in case anything went wrong, we set out.

We only had to carry it about three kilometres (say two miles) from Mary Street Morwell to the Latrobe Road Rubbish Tip operated by the then Morwell Shire Council, but half-way there, the police highway patrol happened to come along.  The officer pulled me up:  “Is that rig safe to drive when loaded like that, Smithy?”

I replied, “Do you reckon I’d be riding it if it wasn’t safe?”

He threw up his hands in mock horror and said, “I’m going to pretend I never saw this; no one would ever believe it if I reported it anyway: for God’s sake don’t hit anything on the way!”

“Okay, thanks mate!”

And away I went.

Back then, photography was restricted to the rich, which we weren’t, but I dearly wish we had gotten someone to take a picture of that loaded chair!