What youth today will push one? The thousands of Walls and Eldorado ice-cream tricycles rot away in scrapyards without the Warrick maintenance scheme. Vestigal remnants of tricar days can be seen around the works. Curious ramp staircases with winches for lowering chassis; an old truck owing its origin to tricar components; a queer experimental motor tricycle of the twenties lurks in a disused store. Drawings of a four-wheeled envelope bodied ‘Landcrab,’ stillborn, lie in a forgotten drawer, and what has become of the 50 Burney motor cycles built in 1923/4 and exhibited at the 1923 Olympia Show?
– L. Mathews, after visiting Monarch Works in 1959, from the John Warrick Online Museum – www.1914Warrick.woprdpress.com
John Warrick originally operated the Monarch Works for T.W. Pitt, supplying tradesman’s bicycles and tricycles. After building up a successful business, he took over the company. Warrick & Co soon cornered the market in the supply of tradesman’s tricycles and bicycles, which he rented to companies on short-term or long-term contracts. But eventually, as you can see from the above quote from an ex-employee, by the late 1950s young lads were no longer prepared to make deliveries on heavy bicycles and tricycles.
1920s Warrick ‘Monarch’ Carrier Bicycle
23” Frame
26” Wheels
Frame No 15020
The Warrick Monarch is probably the rarest tradesman’s carrier bicycle. John Warrick Ltd of Reading, Berks, was a market leader in the supply of carrier bicycles, providing them to businesses on lease purchase schemes. If the bikes needed repairs, as part of the contract they would replace or fix them so that the businesses had an steady fleet of them. They also designed them to suit the business requirements – this example has a unique front carrier frame design, though I don’t know its purpose.
I’ve owned this Warrick for 16 years. It received a coat of red paint 20 years ago from its previous owner, Alan Bond of Worthing, Sussex, a well-known collector of carrier bicycles. It’s in good all round condition and ready to ride and display.
You can see the Warrick when I first bought it in 2007, at the John Warrick Museum –
