Mike Parry started the Club in late 1981. His idea was to make contact with fellow spirits who were not being well served by the mainstream local bike club or the one make clubs.

He sent out a press release to the bike magazines, local newspapers and some national newspapers and sat back to see if the idea stirred any interest.

The difficult thing was to express the objectives of the club without sounding snobbish or elitist.

There was some flak from left wing readers of Motorcycle Sport but in the main, readers got the right idea and enquiries started to flow.

Mike and his good friend Robin Farmer established a logo for the Club which was basically the outline of a brief case with a motorcycle helmet inside (see below).

They decided on the name ‘Lineswapper’ and a style for the news letter which would be sent out to members from time to time updating members of events to come and a range of reports and thoughts about motorcycling matters.

Looking through the first Lineswapper in 1983, which ran to a modest eight photocopied pages, there were reports on trips to the Bristol Powerboat Grand Prix, notice of a visit to the old Triumph operation at Meriden and a reprint of a letter from P.J.Phillips of Carmarthen who was lambasting us for promoting such a class-ridden organisation !

This was an exciting time. By 1984 the club had almost two hundred Members and it settled around that figure for the five years Mike ran the Club. The variety of members at the time, suggested that the early fears about the Club suffering from elitism was not the case.

Lineswapper was produced for us for many years, by Mike’s dear friend, Robin Farmer. Mike Parry recalls flicking through the front covers of Lineswappers and seeing many friends’ faces smiling at him. All were enjoying themselves in the pictures. They were falling off trail bikes, riding through the mountains of Europe or perhaps enjoying a barbecue at a fellow member’s home.

Before Mike’s unfortunate death in March 2003, he summed up the success of the PEMC: 

“It offers such a variety of good experiences to its Members and they take full advantage of them. Bike riding is obviously central to the Club’s activities but it is not everything. Everyone I have become friendly with has lots to offer and a wide range of interests.

I am glad to see that the Chairmen that followed me continued to foster that objective and have done a wonderful job in making the PEMC so successful”.