Hi,
The thought that there are no such entities as 'Pre-65 trials' is entirely correct - and I should know because I am guilty of the heinous crime of having coined the term!!!
Trouble is, time goes by, and with its passage memories fail and, more importantly, many of those actually involved at the time are no longer with us.
The reason for the creation of the term 'pre-65' was not some puritanical dream to maintain a superior 'status quo' for those lucky enough to own a genuine classic British motorcycle, but because many of us were working chaps, often with young families, who could never hope to own a brand new competition machine. We loved our sport and rode in trials as often as we could, at whatever level we could achieve be it local club events, local centre, regional as we progressed and even the lofty realms of 'nationals' for the skilled few.
Then Sammy Miller swopped his faith from the British industry and took over the Bultaco Sherpa in late 1964. Suddenly organisers had to rethink their ideas on course plotting as the trials world followed suit. Bultaco, Montesa and Ossa suddenly became the fashion - totally, in reality, because their designers looked at trials riding and designed a complete motorcycle suitable for the task, whereas the British manufacturers almost universally designed machines for everyday road use and then slightly modified them for trials use.
The new breed could turn on a sixpence and had controllable power from tickover that meant you could lift the front end over obstacles, sections became narrower, tighter, steeper. Suddenly the riders of the old British bikes found they could no longer even wheel the machines round the sections, let alone ride them !
That left two possibilities - create trials that the older bikes could cope with or go try some other sport.
The answers came from a meeting of the minds between yours truly, John Smith of the Rochdale club and Derek Lord whilst we were practising on our bikes, me on my Ariel HT5, John on his Norton 500T and Derek riding whichever one was free at the minute. We decided to create a trial to suit our machines and chose a favourite old bit of trials ground at Shawforth above the Red Lion pub. We called it the 'Bigger Banger Trial' and limited entries to riders of British trials machines with two classes, rigid and sprung. 56 hardy souls entered from the Lancashire/Yorkshire borders and the winner was Arthur Lampkin riding his ex-works rigid BSA B33 Gold Star.
Also present were the riders who were later to create the Lans/Yorks Classic club including Howard Midgley and John Craven. I duly reported the event in my column in Trials and Motocross News and received all sorts of queries from various places around the country, including invitations to 'come and ride' in various trials to advise them how to create similar events. Those interested included Dennis Bridges of the Stratford-on-Avon club, Mike Rees of the Islwyn club and Adrian Moss of the Golden Valley club.
We soon decided that an eligibility format was needed and the simplistic route was to say that machines could be created using any components that were generally available in catalogues of the British manufacturers, and since the last manufacturer to offer a pre-unit trials model in their catalogue were AMC at Plumstead with their AJS and Matchless models in the 1964 catalogue, the simple definition 'pre-65' seemed easy to understand at the time. In its day it was useful as a guiding template for clubs - but then life continued and the world moved on.
Now if you want to know about the British Bike Championship that I created - that's another story for another day.