S Stowaway finds a new home

by Ken Butterfield

Examples of the S range rarely come onto the open market, so the lovely honest chrome S stowaway that was listed on eBay in December 2005 was greeted with great interest.

The bike was a circa 1965 original, only lacking the correct chainset and sans mudguards, it was being used by its enthusiastic Yorkshire owner and son on trips abroad and the listing even showed the bike in Paris recently!I talked to the owner and he filled me on some details, but more of that later.

The 10 day auction started with a price of one pound, but there was a reserve naturally, and this was soon revealed to be below £500 when the bids started to flow in from UK, Singapore and stayed with a French bidder for most of the week.

The keen Moulton watchers all assumed that the bike would find an appreciative new home in Japan so we all watched as the price steadily rose, but would it really get the big money so close to Christmas?

The last few minutes saw the shift to the land of the rising sun as the bids shot from a meagre £900 between a German bidder and two Japanese Moulton fans until the last few seconds when the winner weighed in with a crushing proxy of above £1750 and it was all over!

My opinion is that the bike was cheap and would have been over £2K with more enthusiastic bidding earlier in the auction, considering the rarity value and a worldwide sale, but I expect that many will be surprised at the new benchmark price for a  standard steel F-frame albeit at the top of the sixties range?

I contacted the seller and he had this to say:

" I had the bike a good few years, I never knew it was so valuable. Apparently there are only about a 100 of them. I used the bike to travel to France, folding it for the Eurostar. I have ridden it all over Paris where my daughter lives. I should never have left it outside shops unlocked.!!!!!. Im sorry to see it go, but I have a Speedsix,R18, Safari, and a second Stowaway and a Dahon Hellios SL,The S stowaway was a good light fast bike, my son even wanted to time trial it. for a laugh I think but he would probably have won as he's super fit".

An interesting guy with a great collection of Moultons and now one less , but I think that 100 "S" stowaways produced is an overestimate?

Within days the rare chrome moulton was in Japan with it's new owner and the arrival was documented on the internet!