In its 122-year history, Norton has fallen victim to competition from Japan; mismanagement & intransigent unions; the challenge of commercializing rotary engines; even the collapse of Lehmann Bros. It was also owned by at least two fraudsters before Stuart Garner got his hands on the brand.
He doesn’t look guilty… OK, he does. This photo may give a clue as to how this story will end. Garner owned (and, I think, still owns) a game ranch in South Africa. If he gets down there, extraditing him will take years if it happens at all. And if he’s sequestered a few million quid in SA, that money will be safe from his creditors. So even if Garner were to be extradited, and do a few years in prison, he’d retire in comfort.
By my count, Stuart Garner’s at least the tenth person or corporate entity to own the great old Norton brand. Considering its recent past, I was not surprised to learn Garner was just another grifter.
A potted history of Norton ownership…
Norton was founded by James Lansdowne Norton in 1898. The company was formed to supply machine parts to the hundreds of small shops across Britain making newfangled bicycles and motorcycles. Norton made its first ’cycle in 1902, powered by a single-cylinder Clement motor. The first all-Norton motorcycle appeared in 1908.
Under new ownership
James Norton fell ill in 1911, and the Vandervell family took ownership (though James remained as co-managing director.) Thus began an extended period of commercial and racing success.
Under new ownership
In 1952, the Vandervells sold Norton to Associated Motorcycles in order to avoid steep estate taxes. AMC was another British company that also manufactured Matchless and AJS .
Under new ownership
In the mid-1960s, AMC went bust, and its assets were acquired by Dennis Poore, a British industrialist who controlled Manganese Bronze Holdings. (Among other things, his company made those famous London ‘black cabs’.)
Reorganized
Poore re-organized Norton as Norton-Villiers and invested in the development of new models including the much loved ‘Commando’. For a while, it almost staved off Japanese competition.
In 1973, Poore was asked to take over Triumph (which by then had merged with BSA.) Thus began the Norton-Villiers-Triumph period. In ’76, Triumph production ground to an almost complete halt as the company fought with its unionized labor force.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Poore kept the Norton name alive by reorganizing the company under Norton Motors (1978) Ltd. That company developed a new bike powered by a Wankel motor. (The development rights to the Wankel had come along with BSA’s assets years earlier.)
Under new ownership
The first air-cooled Norton rotaries were not without their problems, but they showed promise and a water-cooled version was developed. It’s possible that Poore just tired of competing with the Japanese ‘Big Four’, or that he realized rotary motors were destined to have trouble meeting upcoming pollution regulations. Anyway, he sold Norton to another financier named Phillippe la Roux who created another new company, Norton plc.
The Norton rotary race bikes were the stuff of legend. Steve Hislop’s battle with Carl Fogarty in the 1992 Senior TT is considered by many to be the hardest fought TT race of all time. Fogarty put in the first-ever 123 mph lap on a Yamaha, but Hislop won the race on a Norton rotary.
Although fans loved them, the rotaries were not a commercial success, and le Roux’s efforts to keep the company afloat included some shady dealings. He resigned while under investigation by the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry. In the early 1990’s, the Norton assets were sold by one of le Roux’ creditors.
Norton emigrates to Canada
The brand was next acquired by a Canadian named Nelson Skalbania, who was well known in western Canada as a real estate flipper who’d also bought and sold a number of second-tier pro sports teams. He must’ve had some good instincts, because he was the first guy to sign Wayne Gretzky to a pro hockey contract. But no one trusted Skalbania any further than they could throw him. He was finally convicted of a criminal fraud (unrelated to Norton) in 1997.
After Skalbania, the Norton brand was sub-licensed in at least four regions. It got increasingly difficult to determine who, if anyone, owned the rights to the name.
Norton emigrates again
That didn’t deter Kenny Dreer, a lifelong motorcyclist and mechanic, who fell in love with Nortons the first time he saw a Commando. Dreer started restoring vintage Commandos but by 2006, he’d assembled a small team that set out to design and build an entirely new 961 cc Commando. Dave Edwards, then the editor of Cycle World, was an enthusiastic early supporter.
“There was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in Oregon,” Dreer recently told me. “From 1998 to 2007, we were in it for $12 million, but seven of that, at least, went to attorneys. When we designed the 961 prototype, we were working on fold out tables. We weren’t buying Aston Martins or castles.” The company’s most valuable asset was the result of all those attorneys’ fees: Dreer and his investor/business partner Oliver Curme consolidated all the Norton trademarks.
Dreer hated to see his effort wound down, but in 2008 under increased pressure after the collapse of Lehmann Bros., Curme forced Kenny’s hand, and put Norton up for sale. That’s when Stuart Garner bought the brand and the intellectual property associated with Dreer’s 961 prototypes.
“We just couldn’t raise the money to go into production,” Dreer told me. “It was sad, because we had a book full of customers. But in the end, everyone got their deposits back.”
Garner’s not the first grifter to own Norton, but he may be the most obvious one
He left school at 16 without a diploma, chased girls, played snooker, and rode motorcycles. He got a job as a gamekeeper at Foremarke Hall, a Georgian Manor house and estate that’s also home to a fancy prep school. Although he was only paid £16 a week, it was a great place to study upper class twits and learn how easy they were to scam.
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Next, a girlfriend’s father got him a job at a fireworks company. By the age of 19 Garner’d started his own fireworks business. He leveraged that company and made his first motorcycle investment, acquiring half of Spondon Engineering, a famous old British frame company.
Although he was only a 50% shareholder in Spondon, Garner managed to put the entire Spondon company up as collateral on a £1.2 million loan. His partner at the time told John Hogan, of UK’s Superbike magazine, that Garner probably forged his name on loan documents.
Garner used some of the proceeds of that loan to acquire the rights to the Norton brand from Kenny Dreer, who had spent the previous decade trying to resurrect Norton out in Portland, OR.
Around the same time, two of Garner’s associates were convicted of a criminal fraud in the UK, involving a tax scam that netted £1 million. That money was loaned to Garner, who was deemed not to have participated in the fraud, although his associates were convicted in 2013.
In 2012 and ’13, Garner had one degree of separation from another fraudulent scheme in which hundreds of elderly Britons were persuaded to transfer their pension funds into three funds which were ‘invested’ in Norton, and also in Donington Hall.
Donington Hall was an enormous mansion on the books as Norton’s headquarters. It was really just Garner’s home. He put on a ‘toff in faded jeans’ air, allowing society journalists to profile him at home, and showing off his fleet of Aston Martin cars. Having used little of his own money, he’d managed to go from being a grubby gamekeeper at one mansion, to the owner of another one (with, yes, its own captive deer herd.)
“I was presentable and could talk to people,” Garner told ‘Derbyshire Life’. “And I found that if I was buying something, I could usually get it a bit cheaper than it was being sold for. Also, when it came to opportunity, I was able to see past what the next man can see. This is something no business school can teach you.”
Presumably what Garner meant was, he could see past the limitations of working within the law.
Under Garner, Norton has delivered several hundred bikes, but many more customers have put up deposits or even paid for bikes in full that were never delivered. Payments to suppliers were delayed to the point where some key suppliers refused to deliver the parts needed to build new motorcycles.
Scandalously, some people sent Nortons back to Donington for warranty work, only to have parts stripped off their motorcycles and used to build and ship new machines. It amounted to a Ponzi scheme done with fuel tanks and wheels instead of money.
Think of this as a Ponzi scheme, but using motorcycle bits.
The whole time that Garner ran Norton, the company’s board of directors played a giant game of musical chairs. Board members came in, saw what was happening, and quickly resigned their seats. Even as recently as last November, Garner circulated an investment prospectus that forecast delusional revenue increases, and a future IPO.
Just before the whole house of cards fell apart over an unpaid £300,000 tax bill, Garner tried to crowd-source an additional £1 million in funding, but canceled that effort when, he claimed, he’d received the money from a single anonymous source. Roger Willis told me that no one believed the ‘anonymous investor’ was real.
I’ve also heard that before the administrator closed in, Garner sold the rights and intellectual property associated with the 961 Commando to a Chinese company. If he sub-licensed the Norton brand, that was a final dick move that will greatly reduce the value of Norton’s most valuable asset, which is simply its name and logo.
Where will this all end?
The UK’s Serious Fraud Office will probably bring charges against Garner, but it will take time. The Pensions Ombudsman will have to deliver a report to the Pensions Regulator, which will in turn have to determine that fraud was likely. Then the Regulator will have to hand the case off to the SFO.
If you want my best guess, Garner will do a runner and head to South Africa where he owns (or at least, did own) a game ranch.