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May 11, 2012 by carltonreid

Drive fast to your tomb

Assassins who fret over telescopic rifle sights or the latest undetectable poisons would be better to run down their prey with a car. Kill with a gun, expect jail-time; kill with a car and more times than not you’ll walk free.

It often seems that the usual laws of the land are suspended when crimes are committed on the public highway. Speeding isn’t deemed a social ill, it’s seen as a necessary consequence of our modern, over-stressed lifestyles. Similarly, financial penalties are not yet high enough to quell the number of motorists who choose to be distracted by their mobile phones. Texting at the wheel is commonplace.

Yet the desire for highway haste, and the belief that slower users of the highway should get out of the way of the faster ones, has a long and inglorious history. Road bullying was amplified by motorisation, not introduced by it.

This bullying is painfully evoked in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

His novel has a famous start (“It was the best of times, it was the worse of times”) and a memorable ending (“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…”) but the comeuppance exercised on one of the book’s baddies is notable – for me, at least – because a killer road user actually paid for his crime.

A Tale of Two Cities was written in 1859 but set in the years leading up to the French Revolution of 1789. The ancien regime is personified by the Marquis St. Evrémonde, an aristocrat who thinks peasants are “rats” and who feels the roads – his roads – should be free of obstructions so he can be driven through the streets of Paris at the greatest possible speed. When his carriage, horses driven wildly at his insistence, kills a peasant child, Evrémonde’s uncaring response leads an onlooker to stalk him, and stab him to death in his bed. (The child killer walked, the stabber was executed).

[It was] rather agreeable to [the Marquis St. Evrémonde'] to see the common people dispersed before his horses, and often barely escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he were charging an enemy, and the furious recklessness of the man brought no check into the face, or to the lips, of the master. The complaint had sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city and dumb age, that, in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce patrician custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a barbarous manner. But, few cared enough for that to think of it a second time, and, in this matter, as in all others, the common wretches were left to get out of their difficulties as they could.

With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of its way. At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged.

But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would not have stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their wounded behind, and why not? But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry, and there were twenty hands at the horses’ bridles.

“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out.

A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and was down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.

“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is a child.”

“Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?”

“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis — it is a pity — yes.”

The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was, into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly got up from the ground, and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.

“Killed!” shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at their length above his head, and staring at him. “Dead!”

The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness and eagerness; there was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the people say anything; after the first cry, they had been silent, and they remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken, was flat and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over them all, as if they had been mere rats come out of their holes.

He took out his purse.

“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give him that.”

He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”

The onlookers knew that the Marquis could trample common folk under his wheels without fear. They knew “what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it.” But one of the onlookers, Gaspard, was a revolutionary and hid beneath the underside of the carriage as it left the scene. Dropping off close to the château owned by the Marquis, Gaspard is spotted by a “mender of the roads” but is able to hide. That night he steals into the château and stabs the Marquis to death, leaving a note: “Drive him fast to his tomb.”

Fast forward to the early 1900s and English aristocrats, in their spangly motorcars, felt the roads were theirs. Non-motorists had to jump out of the way or be squashed. This aristocratic feeling of entitlement came to be a common trait of motorists in general. Witness, today, a pedestrian crossing a road with a car bearing down on him or her. How many cars slow down when confronted with a frail human in front of them, and how many plough on regardless? Roads are seen as the rightful territory of motorists and motorists alone: all other users are alien, and worthy of little thought or duty of care.

Dickens used the violent death of the Marquis St. Evrémonde as a precursor of the Terror to come. Aristocrats were few in number and, once conditions for the majority became intolerable, a revolution occurred.

There are many more motorists than there have ever been aristocrats but in certain cities, such as London, drivers of private motorcars are in the minority. Most people get about via shanks’ pony, public transport, and cycling. Boris Johnson’s aristocratic wish to “smooth the traffic flow” – faster cars, less jams – is unachievable because it’s self-defeating (time and speed gains are eaten up by motorists attracted to the faster, less congested roads) but also has a naturally finite lifespan. Pedestrians crossing to Kings Cross station on the multi-lane highway that is Euston Road far outnumber the thundering lorries and private motorcars speeding through this notorious junction. One day the majority will wake up to the inequities they face and natural justice will force roads to be designed for people, not just motorised vehicles.

This day is very far off. But this day will come.

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May 3, 2012 by carltonreid

Driving for health, 1904

Many modern motorists glibly profess their hatred for cyclists. The automobilists of the early 1900s had no such issues with cyclists. This was because many were cyclists too, or had been cyclists before taking up motoring. The first motorcar racers, or at least the very best ones, tended to be former bicycle champions.

The bicycling boom of the 1890s led to an expansion of ownership, with secondhand bicycles enabling the British lower middle classes to gad about as never before. Prior to the boom, bicycling – and especially tricycling – had been the preserve of the rich. For a time, cycling was very much an aristocratic pleasure, although the greater expense, and greater speed, of automobiles saw the rich migrate to motor-propelled transport. Cycling became something for the masses; motoring remained exclusive for quite some years.

But the transition from cycling to motoring didn’t happen overnight. Who’s Who entries in The Motoring Annual and Motorist’s Year Book for 1904 showed that many pioneer motorists still listed ‘cycling’ as one of their hobbies. (Other favourites included yachting and hunting).

And pioneer motorists such as William Rees-Jeffreys were still listed as members of the Cyclists’ Touring Club. I’ll devote a great deal of space to Rees-Jeffreys in Roads Were Not Built for Cars. He was an arch-motorist, but started his professional life as a servant of cycling.

He was the secretary of the Roads Improvement Association, an organisation created by the Cyclists’ Touring Club (today’s CTC) and the National Cyclists Union (today’s British Cycling). The RIA had been formed in 1885, long before motorcars and, in 1886, organised the first ever Roads Conference in Britain.

Rees Jeffreys had started his 50 year career in the improvement of what he called “despaired and neglected roads” as a member of the Council of the Cyclists’ Touring Club. Rees Jeffreys was Secretary of the RIA by 1901 and argued that the organisation should reign back its pamphleteering of country surveyors and should instead focus on political lobbying: he wanted the cyclist-funded RIA to push for a “a Central Highway Authority and a State grant for highway purposes.”

More on Ree Jeffreys below, and in the book. For now, here’s some extracts from The Motoring Annual and Motorist’s Year Book showing mentions of cycling and also interesting asides, such as the desire of the early automobilists to be allowed to bally well drive as fast as they wanted on public highways. The public bit wasn’t stressed. Instead, roads were known as the King’s Highway, with aristocrats, naturally, having greater rights to roads “owned” by the king. (This sense of entitlement persisted long after motoring ceased to be the preserve of the rich. The entitlement syndrome still exists today, especially in the belief that private property – cars – can be stored on the public highway).

The aristocratic nature of early motoring is apparent from a lordly entry in the 1904 Year Book:

“Automobilists who desire to use armorial bearings on their cars have to pay a duty of £2. 2s.”

And the nobs didn’t just take to motors as a way of displaying their elevated social status, they professed that motoring was undertaken for the pursuit of “fresh air” and for “good health.” The “fresh air” claim was justified. Cities were dirty, smoggy places, driving out to the countryside would have been a blessed relief (and this was one of the recreational reasons cycling had been popular, too). The health claims for motoring are slightly harder to justify, although the jolting and jarring of a drive on a rough road of the time would have offered some passive exercise. As cars became easier to drive and, as roads became smoother, true sloth set in.

In 1904 there were just 8000 motorists in Britain, the most important of whom appeared in this Who’s Who.

WHO’S WHO OF MOTORING, 1904

BENNETT-STANFORD, CAPTAIN JOHN, of Pyt House, Tisbury…amuses himself with hunting, big game shooting and cricket. Is in favour of no pace limit, but would make drivers responsible for all damage to life, limb and property… “It is the bounder in cars, like the cad on castors, who gets the gentleman into trouble,” is his opinion.

BROADLEY, H. HARRISON, J.P.,…is a thorough believer in the motor as a serviceable vehicle for business as well as sport, and, though a Justice of the Peace, strongly denounces the absurd twelve miles an hour speed limit.

COLQUHOUN, DR. W. B., of Sandhurst, Becks, took to motoring as the result of a serious bicycle accident, and has never regretted the change…He is a great believer in the motor-car for medical men.

FRASER, MISS MARGARET, who, as the “good fairy” in the pantomimes, delights thousands of juveniles, is a strong advocate of motoring. “The sport is the most exhilarating form of recreation the theatrical profession can take. During a successful run, we have very little leisure for outdoor sports. I was worn out after my first day’s driving, as I fell into the same error as I had done when I began to ride a bicycle – that is to say, I clutched the steering apparatus as though my life depended on the grip.”

HALL, WILLARD EVART, has been more or less interested in motor-cars from the time he had his first ride on one in the Riviera…One evening when he was running at perhaps a little faster than the legal limit, a dog ran into the centre of the road just in front of him. His first impulse was to avoid the dog, and in endeavouring to do so his front wheel dropped six to eight inches into the ditch at the side of the road, and he was unable to get it out before the wheel struck the high bank, stopping the car suddenly…Mr. Hall now places more value on his own life than that of a dog, so the dogs must look out for themselves in future.

HOLDEN, LIEUT.-COL., H.C.L.. M.I.C.E., F.R.S., Gifford House, Blackheath, head of the Royal Gun Factory at Woolwich. Hobbies: cricket, cycling. Supports motoring as a health-giving and manly form of sport…

JEFFREYS, W. REES, the hon. secretary of the Roads Improvement Association, Incorporated, of 45, Parliament Street, S.W., is an enthusiastic motorist, and a very busy man. He is a member of the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland; a member of the Council of the Cyclists’ Touring Club, and of several of its standing committees, including those concerned with motor-cycling, foreign touring, and legal and Parliamentary matter, and also chairman of the Metropolitan District Association. Mr. Rees Jeffreys has toured awheel in eleven countries; and has cycled over twenty-eight of the Alpine passes…As the result of his efforts to reform the existing system of highway administration, the Government have promised an official enquiry into the present methods of making and maintaining roads. Mr. Jeffreys believes that the motor- problem is a road problem to be solved only by the construction of roads suitable for rapid traffic along which motor-cars may travel without being subject to any artificial limits of speed. In December, 1902, he put forward a scheme for the construction of eleven new main roads out of London, and a boulevard round it…His recreations are motoring, cycling, boating, tennis, chess, and the study of public affairs…

KENEALY, MISS ARABELLA, L.R.C.P. and L.M., the well-known novelist, is a great advocate of motoring for women. Her notable articles ” Woman as an Athlete”…showed that the modern cry for athletics for women is deteriorative of health and injurious to the race. Miss Kenealy’s strenuous stand has done much to stem the tide in this direction. She is advocate of automobilism for women. The exhilarating, wholesome influences of sun and air, the delight to eye and mind of scenery and nature’s beauties all, thus obtainable, without that exhausting muscular exertion she deprecates.

KOOSEN, J. A., of Sussex Place, Smiths, being extremely devoted to all out-door sports, embraced motoring with ardour. He…finds motoring of exceptional value as a cure for insomnia and other nervous affections.

LAWES, SIR CHARLES BENNETT, BART., was an expert amateur bicyclist before he took to motoring. He journeys on his car daily from his town house to the beautiful old family place, Rothampstead, Herts, and his average speed on country roads is twenty-seven miles an hour.

LOWE, DR. G. N., of Castle Hill House, Lincoln, says he was the first to introduce mechanical highway traction— by means of the bicycle — into Lincoln.

[The Motor Car Act of 1904 set the speed limit at 25mph, much to the annoyance of the motoring organisations of the time who had argued it was perfectly safe for a gentleman to drive extremely fast on open roads].

LOFTUS, MISS KITTY, claims for motoring that it is a healthy recreation, a thorough tonic, and sleep producer and for “nerves” she considers motoring to be the one thing needful. The attractive posters advertising “Naughty Nancy” exceeding the legal limit on a motor-car excited the fury of some of the provincial police.

LONG, RIGHT HON. WALTER H., M.P., as President of the Local Government Board, Mr. Long has an important interest for automobilists. His department has great power to make or mar the pleasure of motorists in the use of the road, and it is somewhat of a comfort to them to know that Mr. Long is a good all-round sportsman. A keen huntsman, and possessed of the instincts which enable him to enjoy the delights of quick motion, Mr. Long is generally credited with a leaning towards the extension of the present speed limit for motor-cars…A gentleman of his temperament would soon range himself on the side of the motorist who, whilst desiring to keep within the law, yet sees no crime in putting on pace on an otherwise deserted road.

MAGRATH, J.P., COL. JOHN RICHARD, who lives at Bannaboo, near Wexford, is an automobilist who has a very poor opinion of some of his fellow magistrates when adjudicating upon motorists’ speed cases. “My opinion is,” says Col. Magrath, “that a number of silly, narrow-minded, nervous, and prejudiced old women on the Bench and in the County Councils are keeping back an industry which, if allowed fair play, will prove of incalculable advantage to our country.”

MARSDEN, BENJAMIN, of Wensley, Heaton…drives to benefit his health.

MAYHEW, MR. MARK, L.C.C. The London County Council member for Wandsworth, and the Vice-President of the Automobile Club…believes in motoring because it is a healthy recreation, affords increased facilities for workers to live outside towns, saves wear and tear of roadways, ensures cleanliness of streets and reduction of noise.

MORGAN, CAPT. DAVID HUGHES, Bank House, Brecon, and 55, Sussex Gardens, London. Hobbies: shooting, hunting, fishing. Desires to see motoring generally adopted, and wishes to abolish the speed limit.

PORTSMOUTH, THE EARL OF, although he does not personally drive his motor-cars, is a keen motorist, and owns several cars. The Earl does not like the present speed limit, and has sped — under Mr. S. F. Edge’s skilful guidance — at fifty-six miles an hour along Hampshire roads.

STANFORD, CAPT. JOHN BENETT, Pot House, Tisbury…believes in the numbering of all cars, and thinks that all gentlemen observe the speed regulations honourably.

STOCKS, J. W., after ten years of successful racing on the cycle path, turned his attention to motoring… His first cycle race was at Hull, in 1888, when in his seventeenth year, but it was not until 1893 that he distinguished himself, by winning the twenty-five miles N.C.U. championship, at Newcastle, against the best riders of that time. In the autumn of the same year he covered the then marvellous distance of twenty-five miles in the hour, on Herne Hill track…Although he looked askance at the new method of locomotion for some time, having depended upon his muscular efforts for so long, he was eventually induced by Mr. S. F. Edge to try that gentleman’s motor tricycle, and after the first ride he caught the fever…and has practically done no leg-cycling since.

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April 19, 2012 by carltonreid

Road rugosity, the CTC member who became transport minister, and cycling in the rain at the London Olympics in 1948

In 100 days from today the cycling road race of the London Olympics could see Mark Cavendish win gold for Britain. At the London Olympics of 1948 the Mark Cavendish of his day bagged silver medals on the track, but sprint star Reg Harris wasn’t one of the 101 riders who took part in the 120 mile road race. The modern peloton will ride on the (closed) public roads of Surrey, including a short stretch of the “most famous cycling highway in the world.” In 1948 the road race did 17 laps of a course using the minor roads of the Royal Park at Windsor, only using public roads for two short stretches.

On this blog-of-the-forthcoming-book I don’t usually cover racing, or cycling after the 1930s – my interest lies in the 1860s through to the 1920s – but I do cover the history of asphalt. This is actually more pertinent than you might think as middle class pushy cyclists had a major part to play in the lobbying, and later trials, that led to asphalt capping the roads of both Britain and America.

As an asphalt buff I was intrigued to see, in the National Cyclists’ Union guide to the 1948 Olympic cycling events, an advert for Resmat cold rolled asphalt. This was a non-skid asphalt that was smooth enough to be used for the Herne Hill velodrome track. In the 1930s and 1940s, asphalt used on roads tended not to be highly skid-resistant because car speeds were relatively low. It was the advent of the motorways in the late 1950s and 1960s which accelerated the need for more skid-resistance. Roads could be made more skid-resistant by using coarser aggregate, increasing the road’s rugosity, or roughness. Calcined bauxite, imported from Guyana, is a sharp roadstone applied to a road surface with epoxy resin (yes, the same stuff that binds carbon fibres in composite bike frames). Bauxite and epoxy resin was used from the 1950s but was prohibitively expensive and applied sparingly. A curve on the Hammersmith Flyover – built at the end of the 1950s – was dressed with bauxite because drivers routinely took the bend too quickly.

Ernest Marples (in white shirt)

Incidentally, London’s famous elevated roadway was built by Marples, Ridgway and Partners. This Westminster-based civil engineering contractor was founded, and majority-owned, by the colourful Ernest Marples, who was transport minister from 1959 to 1964. In 1975, Marples, who had by then been made a baron, fled the country in rather a hurry, not because of his hushed-up proclivity for prostitutes, his introduction of double yellow lines and traffic wardens, or the conflict of interest in building motorways at the same time as cutting Britain’s rail network (the infamous Beeching cuts were his work) but because of tax evasion. He may have killed off the railways and promoted, instead, the use of motorways but Marples was a member of the CTC, the first member to rise to the role of minister for transport. He and his wife toured by bicycle while at their holiday home in France.

There’s another Marples and CTC connection: Phil Liggett, former president of the CTC and long the “voice of cycling”, met Marples in 1963:

“I would have been just 20, as I had got my first cat licence days before and was riding the New Brighton Promenade races against the independents like Bernie Burns and Tom Oldfield. I was the leading rider in the New Brighton Cycling Club, who were the organisers, and Marples came along to start the event, so just before the off I gave him a racing jersey as a memento.” Phil Liggett

Where was I? Oh, yes, the London Olympics of 1948. The Resmat surface on the Herne Hill track couldn’t have been made with bauxite as that would have been too rough for track use. However, no amount of searching has turned up details of how the Resmat asphalt was made anti-skid. All I could find out was that the Teeside company went belly up in the same year England won the football World Cup.

While the 1940s aren’t my period I can’t help but devote some space to the 1948 Olympiad. The Authorised Olympic Publication of the National Cyclists’ Union (the NCU was the forerunner to the British Cycling Federation and was founded in 1878, some months before the creation of the Bicycle Touring Club, which became the Cyclists’ Touring Club) offers a fascinating glimpse of cycle sport at a time when it was relatively mainstream (Reg Harris was the Sports Journalists’ Association’s Sportsman of the Year in 1950).

Below are two further extracts from this publication, plus a map of the route.

And here’s an account of the cycling events at the 1948 Olympics from the 570-page Official Report of the Organising Committee for the XIV Olympiad London 1948:

Of all the Olympic programme, it was the cycling events which produced the greatest number of surprise results, not a single one of the eventual champions having been expected to win his event. As always, most attention focused upon the sprint, one event which it had been confidently expected would be won be a rider on his home track and cheered on by his own supporters—Reg Harris, already world champion among the amateur sprinters. Yet it was M. Ghella, of Italy, who was the winner in two straight heats, both won by comfortable margins.

The final Olympic cycling event was the road race which was held in Windsor Great Park by gracious permission of H.M. King George VI. The race was over a course of about 120 miles in 17 laps. The course included no severe gradients, but was sufficiently undulating to provide a real test of stamina, and with bends, especially that at Blacknest Gate, which needed all the skill of the contestants at the speed at which the race was run. Preparations had been made for a crowd which, it had been thought, might reach forty or fifty thousand, but this was, unfortunately, one of the wettest days of the whole Games, and it was surprising that there were as many as the 15,000 enthusiasts who, it was estimated, were on the circuit when the race was started by H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh.

Although attempts had been made to improve the surface of the roads within the Park, the wet weather had nullified them and unfortunately, punctures were frequent, several fancied riders being eliminated from the race.

G. Thomas (Great Britain), tried a breakaway on the penultimate lap, between Ascot and Blacknest Gates, and he was chased by L. Delathouwer (Belgium). The pair held a 15 second lead as they climbed Breakheart Hill and finished the lap. But with five miles still to go, the group were gaining fast, and as they caught the leaders, all the riders easied in readiness for the sprint which seemed certain to decide the race. J. Beyaert made his first real effort at Ascot gate, but, led by J. Hoobin, the group regained contact. The decisive moment was not, however, to be in the final sprint after all. A short distance before the top of Breakheart Hill, and with over half a mile still to go, Beyaert again sprinted into the lead and opened up a gap of at least eight lengths which was too much for any of his rivals, all of whom seemed more tired than the winner at the finish. Voorting won the sprint finish from the remainder of the leaders for second place, after being in the leading bunch ever since the third lap, and Belgian riders, L. Wouters and L. Delathouwer, finished third and fourth to gain the team title with the aid of E. Van Roosbroeck in twelfth place. Great Britain also had two riders among the leading group, R. Maitland and G. Thomas, and C. S. I. Scott came in sixteenth to gain the second team award.

The organisers of the London Olympics had anticipated that “most of those using Windsor Great Park would travel on their machines between their living quarters and the race circuit.”

In fact, nothing like this happened, noted the Official Report:

A certain number of station wagons had been equipped with special racks to carry two or three machines and their riders, but this was quite inadequate to meet the demand of nearly all the competitors that the cycles should be conveyed to and from the training grounds on every occasion.

Operators refused to take the machines aboard with their owners for fear of damage to the seats of the coaches, so lorries and furniture vans were brought into service. This brought complaints from some teams that they were prevented from accompanying their bicycles by this method of transport. There were actually no hold-ups, but the whole operation was the cause of a great deal of daily last-minute arrangements.

The best answer to the problem was obtained by having seats stripped from one side of a 32-seater coach. This enabled about twelve machines to be carried in the space so provided, the riders, trainers and others interested in the teams, being able to travel in comfort with the bicycles. The cost of such an arrangement was twice that of the lorries, but there is no doubt that it gave complete satisfaction to those able to make use of it.

The route of the 1948 cycling road race can still be followed today:


Thanks to US-based cycle historian Dr Andrew Ritchie for supplying the inspiration and some of the images for this piece.

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April 16, 2012 by carltonreid

Detroit’s most famous cyclist: Henry Ford

At just after 11pm on March 6th 1896 the first motorcar on the streets of Detroit was piloted to a stop on Woodward Avenue. This car was driven by its builder, 28-year old mechanical engineer Charles Brady King. King’s horseless carriage had been followed by a tall, slim man on a three-year old bicycle. This bicycle was the slim man’s pride and joy, an individual means of transportation affordable by almost all. The slim man was Henry Ford. Three months after riding behind King, Ford knocked out the wall of his home workshop at 58 Bagley Avenue in downtown Detroit and went for a drive in his first automobile. This was the Quadricycle, featuring a great many bicycle parts, including steel spoked wheels and pneumatic tyres.

Ford sold this car to his friend Charles G. Annesley for $200. Annesley, like Ford, was a cyclist. Annesley was nephew of one of the wealthiest men in Detroit and was friends with Barton L Peck. Peck, son of a wealthy industrialist, was another of Detroit’s wheelmen. Before it was a Motortown, Detroit was a Bicycletown.

Henry Ford and his bicycle, 1893

Annesley and Peck were moneyed and educated. Ford was neither but the three had a joint interest: their bicycles. Annesley and Peck could afford the latest models; in 1896, Ford was still riding on the bicycle he had bought in February 1893.

Ford rode to work at one of Detroit’s Edison electric plants on his bicycle. He also cycled to work when he was developing the Model T. He may be known as the kick-starter of the US automobile industry but he was careful with his money and knew that his trusty bicycle could get through Detroit quicker than the town’s streetcar trams.

The rest of Henry Ford’s story is well known.

His cycling friends, Annesley and Peck, largely faded from history. Annesley’s main claim to fame is for a letter he wrote in 1901, disparaging the prospects of his old friend.

While working for the Buffalo Gasolene Motor Company, of Buffalo, New York – a manufacturer of boat engines – he answered a job application letter from another friend, Walter Marr (later to be chief engineer at Buick).

Annesley wrote: “What is poor old Ford doing? I feel so very sorry for him. He is a good man and perfectly capable;, and yet cannot get out of the hole just because he won’t leave Detroit.”

NB
Just because Henry Ford rode a bike, that doesn’t make him an angel. In fact, Ford was an anti-Semite and, at one time, made sympathetic overtures to Adolf Hitler. And, guess what, Adolf Hitler was a cyclist, too. In the First World War he was a bicycle messenger, as shown by his military records. This document says he was a “radfahrer”, a cyclist, not a motorcyclist, that would have been written “Kradfahrer” in military jargon. Hitler’s time as an Austrian fixie hipster didn’t leave a good impression: when in power Hitler’s Nazi party enacted a number of anti-cycling laws, aiming to get cyclists off roads, leaving more space for the “peoples’ cars”

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April 15, 2012 by carltonreid

When cycling was the “kind of thing a man must do to be taken seriously”

An otherwise positive article in today’s Telegraph neatly illustrates how much has been forgotten about the important role the bicycle played in the 19th Century. William Langley’s article about MAMILs on carbon composite bicycles, and cycling becoming the “most fashionable activity in Britain”, features the cliché that cycling has always been “poor man’s transport”. He writes:

“Although cycling has had its useful times, and even times in vogue, it has never really made the big leap to become one of life’s essential obligations – the kind of thing a man must do to be taken seriously….In Britain, cycling has long been sniffed at as the forced option of the working class, rank with images of flat-capped factory hands and straw-chewing codgers weaving down farm tracks.”

Mr Langley – like most people, of course – doesn’t appear to know about the time, in the 1880s and 1890s, when cycling was the talk of High Society; when aristocrats competed with each other to be seen on the very latest self-propelled machines (usually tricycles); and when bicycles were the red Ferrari’s of their day (fast, dangerous, expensive and the playthings of the leisured rich).

In Langley’s piece Rapha’s Simon Mottram says:

“There’s a new social demographic of people with education and money who have a clear idea of the kind of lifestyle they want for themselves. They see it in terms of personal development, health and happiness.”

People with education, money and an interest in health and happiness were big into cycling in the late Victorian period. They might have driven off – like a departing gang of Mr Toad’s – when the motorcar came along but, for some years, cycling was very much an activity that was the “kind of thing a man must do to be taken seriously.”

Ownership of a tricycle, for instance, required not just the outlay of a serious amount of money for the machine itself but also somewhere to keep it: a stable or outhouse. The Tricyclist magazine suggested the creation of “town stables for tricycles” so that high society gents riding to their exclusive London clubs could leave their bulky and expensive vehicles in a safe place. The magazine said such storage need only cost two or three pounds a year (a large sum, of course) and would lead to the employment of “handy lads to clean and look after the machines.”

Tricycling was done by “Princes, Princesses, Dukes, Earls etc”, wrote a tricyclist in a circular to members of the Bicycle Touring Club in 1882 (the name was changed to Cyclists’ Touring Club in order to include tricycle riders).

Aristocrats who wished to take up a sport in the 1880s purchased how-to guides penned by peers. The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes was founded in 1885 by Henry Somerset, 8th Duke of Beaufort, owner of Badminton House, a stately pile in Gloucestershire. The first book in the series – on hunting, naturally – was authored by the Duke and a number of his aristocratic friends. Two tomes on fishing followed. A horsey title was published in 1886 and, in the same year, there came two books on shooting. Books on boating and cricket didn’t appear until 1888 but had been preceded by a joint book on Athletics and Football in 1887. Prior to this, and showing how important cycling was at the time, the Badminton Library’s book on Cycling was published early in 1887.

This socialite’s guide to the new form of locomotion was written by William Coutts Keppel, Lord Bury, the later Earl of Albemarle. (Keppel’s great-great-grand-daughter is Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, who could be Queen Consort of Great Britain one day).

In America, members of the Michaux Club of New York, named after the French bicycle innovator of the 1860s, were some of New York’s “best people”, as Mumsey Magazine put it. Rich socialites, such as the Rockefeller’s and the Roosevelt’s, were members of this club (they rode Safety bicycles, not tricycles).

British Prime Minister William Gladstone recognised cycling as a wonder of the age. In 1892, he wrote:

“I can only emphasise the fact that I consider that, physically, morally and socially, the benefits of cycling confers on the men of the present day are almost unbounded.”

The benefits of cycling are just as valid today as back then. (And for women, too.)

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April 11, 2012 by carltonreid

How the bloody battle of Towton 1461 helped win the bridleway battle of Stutton 2012

Rights of way in England are a layer upon layer accretion of the comings and goings of people, and animals, over the space of hundreds, in some cases thousands, of years. They describe a rich history of communication, of movement. They remain important. Diversion, or deletion, of rights of way never go unnoticed. Many historic rights of way are now capped with asphalt and marked with thermoplastic road paint. That doesn’t make them any less special. Road surfaces come and go; the way remains. A right of way doesn’t require castles, towers or churches to be historic: alignment is all.

This is readily apparent from a rights of way decision made in a little publicised public inquiry held in Yorkshire earlier this year. An inspector from the Planning Inspectorate decided that a particular highway alignment was, indeed, historic. A route alignment may not have the solidity of worked stone or the beauty of an illuminated manuscript but can be historic nevertheless. This bridleway battle was won because of a medieval battle, the bloodiest in British history. The battle of Towton is almost unknown today but the way used by a routed medieval army will now not be diverted to make a lawn, free of pesky walkers and cyclists. The alignment of this right of way has now been recorded as providing a “physical link to the past.”

The right of way in question is an uncapped part of the Old London Road at Stutton, a hamlet 10 miles south-west of York. Close by is the village of Towton. Between the two is a battlefield site from the War of the Roses. This battle took place on a bitterly cold Palm Sunday in 1461. Wind-blown snow blinded archers from the House of Lancaster allowing archers from the House of York to send the arrows back to their owners. After ten hours of slaughter from both sides, the House of York won the day, leaving 28,000 Englishmen dead, a greater number of dead than those killed in the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk and the Normandy landings combined. At no other point in history have more Englishmen died in one day, not even during the battle of the Somme, when 19,000 died. One percent of the English population died in the rising fields of Towton: even if the death toll was an exaggeration by the victor, the impact on English society would have been immense.

The local babbling stream – like all rivers at battlefield sites – frothed red with blood. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 3, the Lancastrian king wishes himself among the dead of Towton, “For what is in this world but grief and woe?”

The crushed Lancastrians (they were also chopped, hacked, bludgeoned, trampled, sliced and spiked) fled by way of the Great North Road, along what is today a bridleway.

The old road was bypassed by a new one in the 18th Century, but the Old London Road remained in use. Today, it’s a traffic-free route between hamlets, designated as a bridleway. Close to Stutton – and three houses, one of which is Sugar Hill Farm – the Old London Road has a tarmac surface but soon peters out to a dirt track. In 2008, the owners of two of these houses started the process to divert this bridleway in order to extend their lawns. North Yorkshire County Council had no objections to this diversion but a number of locals did. Sixteen objections were eventually lodged and the decision whether to divert the bridleway was left to inspector Alan Beckett, who held a small scale public inquiry in February this year.

He concluded that that the diversion would, indeed, be very much to the advantage of the landowners, giving them an “enhanced feeling of security” (and nicer lawns). He didn’t envisage any loss of amenity or enjoyment to members of public wishing to transit the area – in fact, a well-engineered diversion might actually be safer and provide a better surface than the existing right of way – but he decided, on balance, that the historic nature of the way trumped all other considerations.


Inspector Beckett noted that the objectors argued that the “enjoyment of the route as a whole would be diminished by the proposed diversion as it would disrupt the integrity of a route which was acknowledged to have been in existence since at least the mediaeval period and is likely to have been in existence in Anglo-Saxon times. For the objectors, the ability to walk the same route as earlier generations was part and parcel of the enjoyment to be derived from a journey along the bridleway.”

The objectors had produced in evidence a number of studies identifying Old London Road as one of the routes used by Lancastrian forces fleeing the carnage of the Battle of Towton (they also pointed out its proximity to the Anglo-Saxon meeting place on Wingate Hill where the ‘Riding Court’ had met).

The council and the diversion applicants countered that “there was no feature of historic interest on that part of the route at issue”; and furthermore that part of the route had been ‘improved’ and surfaced “such that the character of the bridleway was significantly different from what previous generations had experienced.”

The inspector recognised there “was no individual feature on the section at issue which was of historic interest…” but that the “alignment of the bridleway was the feature of historic interest, and it was from that historic interest which [they] derived enjoyment.”


He noted, too, that Old London Road “runs on the same alignment today as it (in all probability) did when the routed Lancastrians made their escape from Towton. That the route has retained its integrity (despite being made up in parts to accommodate modern vehicular traffic) through successive centuries is a matter that should be given some weight in the assessment of the impact the diversion would have on public enjoyment of the route as a whole.”

Inspector Beckett concluded:

“I have dealt with a number of cases where objectors to a proposed diversion have submitted that the route should not be diverted because it has historic significance. In almost all those cases, such an assertion is not supported by any evidence. In my view, the arguments against the diversion of the public access over that part of Old London Road near Sugar Hill Farm on grounds of diminished enjoyment provide an exception to that rule. The route at issue has an identifiable connection with a significant event in English history and is likely to have been a means of access to the pre-Conquest meeting place of Anglo-Saxon administration. I have no difficulty in recognising that the residents of Stutton with Hazlewood have an appreciation and understanding of their local history and the events which happened almost 600 years ago. For them, and for those with an interest in mediaeval history, the Old London Road provides a physical link to the past and the events which occurred in the immediate locality.”

The diversion order was refused.


View Larger Map

With thanks to the Byways and Bridleways Trust.

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April 9, 2012 by carltonreid

The real speed of cars is just 3.7mph (if you factor in the social and economic costs)

During the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich published ‘Energy and Equity’, a polemic that argued apparent advances in speed were nothing of the sort, when other factors were taken into account. Fast cars weren’t as fast as they seemed because the costs to society and to the individual were far higher than ever appreciated. In short, having to work a certain number of hours to pay for an expensive form of transport is a calculation that can shock. This is a theme first explored in the 1850s, but put so beautifully and intelligently by Illich. The full text is available online but here’s an extended edited extract from his often-quoted booklet:

The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel — probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions — finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.

Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history.

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.

Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man’s radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.

Street Space For 60 People: Car, Bus, Bicycle

The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred.

Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim.

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April 3, 2012 by carltonreid

Patently obvious

Bicycles were perfect by the 90s. The 1890s. While refinements such as the quick-release binder bolt and derailleur gears were the work of the early 20th Century, most of the key bicycle innovations had been invented by 1899. (Even plastic lens sports-shades and knobby tyres).

In the ten years before 1900, a third of ALL new patent applications at the US Patent Office were bicycle-related.

Not all of the products described in the patents got made. This was especially the case for suspension products. The bad roads of the day meant some form of suspension would be useful but John Boyd Dunlop’s (re)invention of the pneumatic tyre in 1889 gave cyclists a floating-on-air-feeling that meant suspension gizmos were no longer quite so necessary. And, following lobbying by cyclists, many road surfaces were improved, further relegating the need for suspension products. Nevertheless, there were a few patents for suspension products in the 1920s and beyond but it was only in the 1980s, and the advent of mountain biking, that the frenzy for bicycle patents took off again, especially for suspension designs.

What today’s innovators often don’t realise is that their clever ideas were very likely anticipated in the 1890s.

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April 2, 2012 by carltonreid

Tread carefully or your strap-on knobbifier may leave the wrong impression

Just as Oakley-style plastic lenses for cycling were around in the 1890s, so were MTB-style knobby tyres. Most solid tyres of the period – as fitted to high-wheelers, which didn’t need the suspension offered by pneumatics – were smooth. Most pneumatics were patterned with grooves. However, for serious mud-plugging on an overseas tour on Humber Safety cycles in 1893, the Stead brothers were equipped with the “latest bicycle Torrilliou pneumatic tyres and Edwards’ corrugate cover.”

According to an article in their father’s The Daily Paper (a short-lived publication from the father of New Journalism, creator of the tabloid reporting style, and who in 1912 went down with the Titanic), this “corrugate cover”…

…was an immense success, and attracted great attention whenever the cycles stopped. They were the first of the kind that had been seen in France, and they were very greatly admired, not without cause, for they entirely prevent side-slipping, and they render riding in rain and mud as safe as in dry weather.”

This strap-on knobbifier didn’t catch on even though cyclists could have done with the traction: many of the unimproved rural roads of the day were mud pools when wet.

The ridges and grooves on the pneumatic bicycle tyres of the 1890s were distinctive. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Priory School, Sherlock Holmes demonstrated his ability to identify bicycle tyre treads:

“I am familiar with forty-two different impressions left by tyres.”

Conan Doyle likely borrowed this supposed skill from his brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung, author of the Raffles novels about a gentleman thief of the 1890s. Two years before Conan Doyle wrote The Adventure of the Priory School, Hornung placed his anti-hero on a bicycle in The Black Mask and had him ride upon the “incomparable Ripley Road.”

“I had my eye on the road all the way from Ripley to Cobham, and there were more Dunlop marks than any other kind. Bless you, yes, they all leave their special tracks.”

In the cycle trade press, a Lovell Diamond Safety bicycle of 1897 was advertised as having a tyre tread that featured the company’s name in reverse, which, in certain conditions, would decorate a dirt road surface with a corporate signature.

In 1925, an Ariel bicycle was shod with bicycle tyres featuring the swastika. However, this Indian religious symbol was not yet resonant with connotations of Nazis and was used as symbol of luck.

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April 1, 2012 by carltonreid

Prime Minister: “I have noticed with pleasure the rapid growth of cycling.”

No, not David Cameron; the Prime Minister who said the above was William Gladstone, in 1892. The elder statesmen was on his fourth premiership in 1892 and was reflecting the sentiment of an age when he praised cycling. He did so in an article in Pall Mall Gazette, a tabloid political organ that was required reading for high society.

Gladstone wrote:

“I have noticed with real and unfeigned pleasure the rapid growth of cycling in this country, for not only does it afford to many to whom it would otherwise be unobtainable a healthy and pleasurable form of exercise, but it also enables them to derive all those advantages of travel which, previous to the advent of cycling, were out of their reach. It is far more profitable than the luxurious railway journey from the city to some definite point along an unalterable route, over which the traveller is whirled with no time for observation and no opportunity of examining the district through which he is carried.

He added that cycling was a healthy pursuit for men (he ignored the fact that women cycled: he was also opposed to womens’ suffrage) and revealed that he welcomed parties of sight-seeing cyclists to his country estate in Wales:

“Of the bodily good derived from so manly and healthy a form of exercise, of the blessing it bestows, helping to maintain a sound mind in a sound body by the relaxation from the desk or counter, of the recreation in the open air, of the energy it calls into play, I need hardly speak. I can only emphasise the fact that I consider that, physically, morally and socially, the benefits of cycling confers on the men of the present day are almost unbounded, and this belief I endeavour to act up to by heartily welcoming and assisting, so far as in me lies, the many cyclists who come to visit Hawarden and use the grounds.”

This quote was popular with cyclists in Britain, naturally, but it was also popular around the world. A cycling column in the Otago Witness newspaper of New Zealand repeated the quote, and so did Good Roads Magazine, the highway evangelising journal produced by the League of American Wheelmen.

And English satirical magazine Punch also picked up the quote, made it into a poem and added a running commentary. Beside the poem Gladstone was shown atop a high wheeler bicycle, a style of bicycle receding in popularity in the 1890s as the Safety bicycle took its place.


WILLIAM THE WHEELMAN

Enthusiastic Cyclist loquitur:—

I have noticed with unfeigned and real pleasure,
The rapid growth of Cycling. (How it jumps!)
To those who have the energy and leisure
It affords—(Confound this saddle! it so bumps!)
What otherwise would be quite unattainable,
A healthy, and a pleasurable form
Of exercise. (Yes, health is hereby gainable;
But I am most uncomfortably warm!)

It gives them the advantages of travel,
(By Jingo! I was nearly over then!
A tumble and the “gravel-rash” would gravel
The nimblest of extremely Grand Old Men)
Which, previous to the Cycle’s happy advent,
Were out of almost everybody’s reach.
(And to the “spirits” of the cycling-cad vent.
‘Arry on Wheels the law must manners teach.)

It’s really very much more profitable
Than is the long luxurious rail way journey.
(If in the saddle I feel not more stable,
I’ll be “unhorsed,” like tilter in a tourney!)
Monotonous the journey from the City,
Along a fixed unalterable route.
(This is an old “bone-shaker.” ‘Tis a pity!
For over the front wheel one’s apt to shoot.)

The traveller’s whirled from station unto station,
(I wish there were more stations on this road,)
With hardly half a chance for observation.
(If I know where I am, may I be blowed!),
Without an opportunity to examine
The district. (Wish that I could spot a pub!
For I am overdone with thirst and famine,
And see no chance of tipple or of grub!)

(I must travel many miles o’er clay or cobble,
I fear, before I’ll have a real rest,
The big wheel and the little shift and wobble,
I think the low pneumatic Cycle’s best.
Eh? “Dangerous to Cyclists!” That’s a notice,
I fancy, that suggests a spin down-hill.
How stiff I feel! How very parched my throat is!
Hold up! By Jove, but that was near a spill!)

I emphasise the fact that I consider
That, physically—(Pheugh! that little wheel
Is dangerous as poor old WELLER’s “widder,”)
Yes, morally, and socially, I feel
The benefits of Cycling are unbounded,
Almost—(Almost I fear a nasty fall!
I wish, with big and little wheel confounded,
That I were on a Safety, after all!)

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