Ariel Owners Motorcycle Club

This bike was owned by my father from new for its first five years. The attached DVLA search shows it to still be running. I guess the log book issue February 2019 was a change of owner.
If this reaches the current owner, or previous owners, I would be delighted to share photographs and information.

As no one has reacted, there is something strange, it's a 1952 Ariel on the photo and 1954 first on paper.

By coincidence, my VH is a '52.
But though delivered to a dealer in July '52 it was not registered until November '53. So it must have been sitting in the dealer's for 15 months or so.

Yes it is strange. It says on the back of the photo 1950 model bought in 1952 brand new from Brandishes. I wrote this probably in the 1970’s after talking to my Dad. So 1954 seems way out.

It cann't be a 1950 or 1953 model, maybe late 1951, we need to see the rest of the Ariel to know.

The profile of the barrel fins is '52-'53.
I'd suggest your dad might have been a couple of years out in his dates and it's a '52 model bought new in '54 (I've recently been reviewing the contents of a trunk full of family memorabilia and it's quite disturbing to see the errors in the dates that have been written down by people trying to make notes a decade or so after the fact!)
Registration folks weren't especially interested in manufacturing dates and the year of 1954 is probably just a lazy copy-down on the assumption that all bikes are sold within a week or two of leaving the factory.

SG

You could try Draganfly's service of providing a copy of the Ariel factory's despatch records.

OVC registation numbers are listed as Feb->Dec '54 (Coventry)

Pete