Ordinary

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March 7, 2013 by carltonreid

“You wouldn’t put Mark Cavendish on a penny-farthing…”

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EE is trying to sell folks its 4G service by using fast athletes on slow modes of transport. “You wouldn’t put Steve Redgrave on a pedalo” is one of the treatments, the other is this take on “penny-farthings” (purists prefer the terms ‘ordinary’ or high-wheel bicycle). Thing is, ordinaries were the red Ferraris of their day, the fastest vehicles on the roads.

When high-wheel bicycles are seen at fêtes, or on telly, or on posters for TfL competitions, it’s ten to a penny (farthing) that the gents riding them will be prim, proper and of relatively advanced age. Top hat. Waistcoat. Long jacket and cravat. Waxed mustache. Respectable. Slow. Staid.

This Victoriana visual is dead wrong. Direct drive bicycles of c.1877 through to the late 1880s had developed bigger and bigger front wheels not for comfort on bad roads but to make the bicycle go faster.

High-wheelers were hard to ride, dangerous, expensive, lightweight, technologically-advanced, and fast, very fast. They appealed to wealthy young men with time on their hands and who craved the speed and excitement of such machines. No doubt Mark Cavendish could whip up quite a sprint on a high-wheel bicycle. There were some diminutive high-wheel champions although it must be admitted most of the faster riders were gentlemen with long legs. The longer the lever the better.

Slow? Ordinaries were definitely not slow, as the book cover below attests. Yes, it’s an exaggeration but it shows a high-wheeler outpacing a train, and an equestrian (and, er, running over a bunny, too – or, as @MinistryofBikes suggests, it’s probably a hare that has collapsed after trying to race the cyclist):

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April 2, 2012 by carltonreid

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

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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.”

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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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March 2, 2012 by carltonreid

The “Mecca of all good cyclists”: Ripley Road

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The War of the Worlds, the Dibble sisters, Occam’s Razor, women’s liberation, and the London Olympics: all are linked by the “most famous cycling highway in the world.”

At approximately five minutes past ten on Saturday, July 29th, 2012, 145 professional cyclists will speed through the Surrey village of Ripley. Braking before the High Street they will bank to take a left-hand turn and then, seconds later, bank again to take a sharp right as the race, and its entourage, heads down Rose Lane towards Dorking. Sheltering behind his team-mates, Sky rider Mark Cavendish likely won’t know it but the 100 metres he will have just ridden are part of a route that 19th Century cyclists described as the “best cycling highway in the world.” An even longer stretch of this historic highway will be used on 1st August for the men’s and women’s time trials, starting at Hampton Court Palace and using almost ten miles of what’s now called the Portsmouth Road but was known as the Ripley Road to 19th Century cyclists.

For 30 years, the Ripley Road was the go-to destination for the smart set of the day: young, athletic gentlemen at first; radical, bloomer-wearing ladies later. The ten miles between the Angel pub at Thames Ditton and the Anchor inn at Ripley were world-famous, and busy with cyclists on all manner of machines.

On Whit Sunday 1894, the police in Kingston upon Thames said 20,000 cyclists had passed through, en route to Ripley. An exaggeration, perhaps, but an indication also that Ripley was – according to Lord Bury in 1887 – the “Mecca of all good cyclists.”

In the 1880s and 1890s, cycling was the marvel of the age, with bicycles and tricycles offering a revolutionary form of transport and leisure that captivated those who could afford what were expensive and technologically advanced pieces of equipment.

Thanks to cyclists, long-neglected roads came to life again. Certain roads became famous, and none more so than the Ripley Road.

The Hub, an “Illustrated Weekly Journal for Wheelmen and Women” produced by the publisher of market-leading Tit-Bits tabloid in the ‘bicycle boom’ years of 1896 and 1897, described the road as “historic”:

Of all stretches of highway popular amongst cyclists, the Ripley Road, without dispute, is by far and away the most famous…The Ripley Road is known, at least by name, to cyclists in every part of the globe; and particularly in the case of American wheeling visitors…a ‘run to Ripley’ figures as surely on their programme, as does a trip to Stratford upon Avon.

The Ripley Road isn’t really the Ripley Road, it’s part of the old Portsmouth Road, from London to what was once England’s chief naval seaport. Twenty three miles distant from Westminster Bridge, Ripley was the perfect distance for a there-and-back day ride for metropolitan “cracks” on their fast and trendy high-wheeler bicycles.

The Portsmouth turnpike road – paid for by tolls raised by a turnpike trust incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1772 – was capped with macadam, a stable surface of compacted small stones, known as metal, cemented together with rain water; stones crushed by the wheels of stage coaches to make a metalled road. Twenty three coaches a day had raced along the macadamised London to Portsmouth Road prior to the coming of the railways.

But trains were faster, cheaper and more comfortable than stage coaches. Trains were the first Victorian transport marvel and ‘railway mania’ killed off the stagecoach trade almost overnight.

In Lark Rise to Candleford, author Flora Thompson described how England’s rural roads, once heaving with traffic, had become hidden highways:

Three miles away trains roared over a viaduct, carrying those who would, had they lived a few years before or later, have used the turnpike. People were saying that far too much money was being spent on keeping such roads in repair, for their day was over; they were only needed now for people going from village to village…the children and their mother often walked their mile along the turnpike and back without seeing anything on wheels.

Bicycles changed this. Roads, including the Ripley Road, came to life once more. Coaching inns, in particular, welcomed the new trade, as described in a Daily Telegraph editorial of September 1880:

Not the worst thing that they have done, these knights of the road, has been to rehabilitate and set on their legs again many of our old posting-houses and decayed hostelries all over the country. Bicycles have…taken the place of coaches; they frequent all our great main roads, and gladded the hearts of innkeepers, who look out for the tinkling bells which herald the advent of a ‘club’ of wandering velocipedists, just as they anticipated of yore the gladsome tootling of the horn that bespoke the approach of the Enterprize, the Highflyer, or some other well-known conveyance of the old coaching days.

Highwheeler bicycles were difficult to ride, expensive to buy and, on a poorly surfaced road, dangerous. Potholes and large stones could see riders “come a cropper”. The turnpike roads of old had been engineered for speed (a stage coach could average 10mph on a metalled turnpike road) and were the roads of choice for the young, athletic riders of the new-fangled bicycles. Most riders were gentlemen, monied and with leisure time. A trickle of riders in 1869 became a steady trickle in 1870 and then a torrent by the 1880s.

The Pickwick Bicycle Club, founded in 1870 and still extant today, has long organised an annual ride at Hampton Court Place, close to the ‘start’ of the Ripley Road ride. The third annual ride took place on May 26th 1877, and was immortalised in the drawing above which appeared in the Illustrated London News. Fixed front wheel velocipedes could be made to go quicker by enlarging the front wheel: the high wheel bicycle was the result and can be seen at the front of procession of up to 2,000 riders. Other London and some “provincial” clubs were also represented on the ride. There was a rider from Edinburgh and seven from Manchester.

The Ripley Road was fast in parts, a good “scorching” road (the flattest, fastest stretch was at Fair Mile Common, near Cobham) but there were many other fine macadamised roads within easy reach of the centre of London. The Ripley Road was beloved by 19th Century cyclists for reasons other than just its speed. The road was scenic, dotted with clumps of “Surrey pines” on deserted commons. And the road was romantic: it passed Regency pleasure grounds and had been a famous haunt of highwaymen in pre-turnpike days. But, perhaps most important of all, the road was loved because of a pub: the Anchor inn in Ripley. This was a 16th century almshouse later converted into an inn. 30 years after the almost complete death of the coaching trade, hotels such as the Anchor were down on their luck. The Anchor, however, had a resourceful owner, Mrs Dibble, a widow. Two of her daughters worked in the inn, and they were, by all accounts, comely.

Annie and Harriet, their brother Alf, and Mrs Dibble, bent over backwards to please the new arrivals – cyclists were the first through traffic on rural roads since stage coaches – and the Anchor inn became the honeypot location on a honeypot road.

The Anchor, 23 miles from the dirty, industrious, smog-bound capital, was seen by cyclists as a quaint throwback to simpler times.

The early cyclists were pretty much the only users of the white Portsmouth turnpike road, and thought themselves in a rural idyll, a far cry from their life in a city of grime. Thanks to soot, even London’s mud was black.

Cycles were machines of escape; cycles offered independent means of locomotion out of overcrowded cities (London was an expanding metropolis of four million people in 1875) and, importantly, away from villages and towns being enlarged and “improved” by railways. A jaunt into the countryside appealed to upper and middle class Victorians who had a rosy, romantic view of agrarian ‘old England’, which was disappearing before their eyes. The rural aesthetic – inspired by thinkers and artists such as John Ruskin and William Morris – inspired many Victorians and they were keen to experience this “untouched” and “natural” countryside for themselves. The birth of the weekend – when middle class Victorians had time for play – saw an explosion in recreational activities, such as sight-seeing and taking part in sports. Not coincidentally, cycling combined both of these passions.

The Popular Recreator, an 1873 how-to book of sports and hobbies for the Victorian middle classes – it included sports such as cricket, fencing, polo, skating and swimming – said that recreation (for nobs only, presumably) was as necessary as work and education:

Toil rules the nation with iron hand whose finger points continuously in one direction, and says, “Work, that you may be wealthy.” Education stands, with a Minerva-like smile, calm and wise, and whispers, “Learn, that you may be wise.” To complete the trio, let us bring forward Recreation, bright of eye, glowing of cheek, with ruddy lip pouted to display her glistening teeth.

This “guide to out-door amusement” also had a section on cycling. Writer Charles E. Innes described a social ride he had undertaken in the summer of 1873, along the Portsmouth Road:

Before descending the hill leading from Ockham Common, let us rest a few minutes to enjoy the glorious sunset over Bolder Mere, with its dark background of firs, and the surrounding gorse lit up a sea of gold, for we may travel many a mile on our way ere we view a lovelier scene.

Bolder Mere is still there, albeit much reduced, and many of the commons that would have been familiar to Victorian cyclists are still there too, although it’s now necessary to tune-out the traffic noise from the multi-lane A3 that today forms part of the “between the Houses” route from the Angel to the Anchor. The M25 motorway is another intrusion on to the landscape described by Innes.

Many other authors of the day waxed lyrical about the scenic wonders of the countryside along the Ripley Road, creating a romantic legend that attracted cyclists to the road for the best part of 30 years.

Part of this legend involved the history of the road. Nostalgia was key. In Coaching Days, Coaching Ways of 1888, W. Oustram Tristram wrote that the Portsmouth Road was the “Royal Road”:

…certainly kings and queens have passed up and down it, eaten and drunken in the Royal Rooms, still to be seen in some of the old inns; snored in the Royal Beds, and dreamed of ruts and bogs, and blasted heaths and impassable morasses, and all the sundry and other mild discomforts which our ancestors, whether kings or cobblers, had to put up with…

Tristram said the Talbot Inn at Ripley was “full of gables, long corridors, and hoary memories of gastronomic feats, performed by cramped travellers in the twinkling of an eye to the accompaniment of the guard’s horn, relentlessly proclaiming imminent departure.”

Back in the coaching days there had been a “constant throb of traffic on the direct Portsmouth Road,” said Tristram. In 1888 there was “not much throb of traffic about…now.”

Indeed, the villages and towns on the old Portsmouth road were now “suggestive of laudanum, mandragora, poppies, hop-pillows, and other sedatives.”

The commons and heaths that were later romanticised by the Victorians had been “rascally” in the 18th and early 19th Centuries; hideouts of footpads and highwaymen, such as the notorious Jerry Abershawe, the Laughing Highwayman, who plied his trade on the road between Guildford and his hometown of Kingston upon Thames.

In one of his Rural Rides (1830), pamphleteer William Cobbett wrote:

This county of Surrey presents to the eye of the traveller a greater contrast than any other county in England. It has some of the very best and some of the worst lands, not only in England, but in the world. We were here upon those of the latter description. For five miles on the road towards Guildford the land is a rascally common covered with poor heath…

Yet the Portsmouth Road was also noted for running beside aristocratic pleasure grounds. These were not open to most of the passing cyclists – the National Trust wasn’t founded until 1895 – but they would have been familiar landmarks to middle class cyclists, and no doubt many unofficial visits were facilitated by the new means of locomotion. The pleasure grounds at Claremont country house, close to Esher and bordering the Portsmouth road, were an early example of an English Landscape Garden and had been worked upon by Sir John Vanbrugh and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. In 1726 the gardens were described as “the noblest of any in Europe.”

The estate was once owned by Robert Clive, founder of Britain’s Indian Empire, and it later passed into royal hands. Queen Victoria was a frequent visitor to Claremont both as a child and later as an adult, when she bought the house and its grounds. In 1877 Queen Victoria presented nearby Esher with a drinking fountain and this would have been a favourite stopping point for cyclists doing a “run to Ripley.” [The fountain is still there]. Sightings of Queen Victoria on the Ripley Road would have been relatively common. In July 1884, riders from the Holborn Cycling Club reported seeing Queen Victoria on the Ripley Road at Claremont. She was in an open landau drawn by two horses. The cyclists were on the way back to London after tea at the Anchor and, upon seeing the Queen, they drew up in a line and saluted her. She “gracefully bowed her acknowledgements.”

Another estate that bordered the Portsmouth Road was Pains Hill, an estate visited by the likes of William Gilpin, the artist and author who popularised the “picturesque” landscape ethic; and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two of America’s founding fathers, the second and third presidents of the USA.

Pains Hill was created by the Honourable Charles Hamilton, an 18th-Century gentleman MP who transformed the “accursed hill” into an internationally-famous, naturally-landscaped pleasure ground, and one that was planned to have a “human pet:

According to English Eccentrics and Eccentricities, an 1866 book by John Timbs, Hamilton was an “admirer of singularity and silence, and, having advertised for a hermit, he built a retreat for this ornamental but retiring person on a steep mound on his estate.”

The advertisement said the hermit must “continue on the hermitage seven years, where he shall be provided with a Bible, optical glasses, a mat for his feet, a hassock for his pillow, an hourglass for timepiece, water for his beverage, and food from the house. He must wear a camlet robe, and never, under any circumstances, must he cut his hair, beard, or nails, stray beyond the limits of Mr. Hamilton’s grounds, or exchange one word with the servant.

The first ornamental hermit lasted a full three weeks before being spotted at the local pub (the name of the hostelry is not noted) and was subsequently sacked.

There’s no hermit at Pains Hill today but the gardens have been restored to their former glory. Another garden of note, just to the north of Ripley, is the world-renowned Royal Horticultural Society’s Gardens at Wisley. This was a smaller, experimental garden in the 1890s – it was owned by a treasurer of the RHS – and would have been known to greenfingered cyclists, some of whom perhaps stopped for a tour before lunching at the Anchor.

The 30-year use of the Ripley Road was largely recreational but the first riders on the road had been racers. A party led by champion racer John Keen – a builder of high-wheel bicycles – is the first recorded use of the road by cyclists. Keen had started racing as early as 1869 and was, according to an article in Wheeling World in 1885, “in the first rank of cycling celebrities.”

Keen used the flat Fair Mile Common stretch of road in 1870 for a one mile challenge match against a rider from Kensington. In 1873 Keen and other riders met in the Hut hotel, an alehouse overlooking Bolder Mere, to discuss cycling matters.

One of these matters was no doubt the state of the roads, including the once well-surfaced Portsmouth turnpike road. The stretch between Claremont Park and Guildford was “copiously stoned” wrote friends of Keen in 1877, a reference to a lack of maintenance of the Ripley Road.

Road maintenance was done – or, usually, not done – by parishes and local-ratepayers. Employed for the job were itinerant labourers. In the 1890s, some of the cyclists who rode on the Ripley road collected monies for ‘Road Menders’ feeds’, hot suppers for the old men who worked on the road between the Angel and the Anchor. The dinners were held from 1890 to 1908 with the road menders entertained, plied with tobacco and each given half a pound of tea.

Keen and his friends were interested in breaking records so needed the smoothest surface possible. The road was too stony so racer soon gravitated towards purpose-built cinder and wooden tracks. Recreational cyclists were more than happy with the surface of the Ripley Road. According to The Boy’s Own Paper, the 1870s roads out of London towards Portsmouth were “rough” but the Ripley Road wasn’t:

Starting from Westminster Bridge, along the Albert Embankment, through Wandsworth, over Wimbledon Common, to Kingston, the road is all macadam, and rather rough riding. From Kingston to Esher the road improves, and chance through Cobham to Ripley, twenty-three miles from London, is very good, but rather hilly.

Ripley is a delightful country place, six miles from a railway station, consequently free from excursionists. From Ripley to Guildford the road is splendid – six miles of the best roadway in England.

Ripley Road – and the Anchor inn – were key components in 19th Century cycling, in popular imagination, in the press and even in board games. Wheeling, the board game, went through a number editions from 1896 on, and featured, as the game’s destination, the Anchor hotel.

The Ripley Road also featured in novels.

E. W. Hornung, author of the Raffles novels about a gentleman thief of the 1890s, placed his anti-hero on a bicycle in The Black Mask and had him ride upon the “incomparable Ripley Road.”

Two years before Arthur Conan Doyle (Hornung’s brother in law) wrote The Adventure of the Priory School, in which Sherlock Holmes demonstrated his ability to identify bicycle tyre treads – “I am familiar with forty-two different impressions left by tyres” – Hornung had Raffles doing the same:

“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.”

Just as all roads once led to Rome, so most of the bicycle tracks on the Ripley Road would have once led to the Anchor inn. The Talbot was run by elderly proprietors so tended to attract a more sober crowd; the Hut at Bolder Mere was scenic but quiet; the Hautboy at nearby Ockham (which is the Ockam referred to in Occam’s razor, the maxim that the simplest explanation is the most plausible, expounded by 14th Century theologian Father William d’Ockham) was popular for raucous parties, but it was the Anchor which attracted the majority of cyclists, and the inn was already a popular haunt by 1877, when a cyclist wrote:

“I pulled up at the Anchor, a well known Surrey village, and asked what I could eat. Answered the fair Annie ‘Cold ham, cold mutton, cold beef.’ ‘Anything hot?’ asked I. ‘Mustard,’ said she, and scored one.”

Annie, then 22 (that’s probably her on the left in the engraving above, by C. J Staniland), was the prettier of the two Dibble sisters. In an 1880 article in The Wheel World, racer Harry J. Swindley wrote about bowing “at the throne of beauty”, thought to be a reference to Annie.

Swindley swooned over the ride to Ripley, too:

“The sweet door of the pine cones, whose resinous flavour imbues anew the jaded and half-choked city man, floats on a breath of the commons, scent-ladened by the flowering furze…At such moments the toiler realises that spots exist where the rush, the turmoil, the chicanery, deceit, and never-ending worry of city life is not.”

Annie was raved about by the riders (“…as comely as of yore”) but she never married, perhaps kept too busy catering to the hundreds of cyclists who descended on the hotel at the weekend.

Local historian Les Bowerman, a stalwart of the Veteran-Cycle Club and author of The Romance of the Ripley Road, has researched the Dibble family and has often wondered why Annie Dibble wasn’t married off to one of the many rich young gentlemen who sang her praises:

“They were a strange old lot, those Victorians, with their class distinctions. I guess it was a question of amateur gentlemen as opposed to ladies in trade. On one occasion, at Christmas, a bit of ‘squeezing’ was recorded, but that seems to have been as far as it went. Generally speaking, they seem to have kept to their allotted roles.”

Mrs Dibble died in 1887, Annie in 1895 and Harriet in 1896. A memorial window to the sisters was installed in the south aisle of the church opposite the Anchor, paid for by cyclists.

Cyclists – many of whom attended services at the church; 126 attended on one Sunday in 1889, including many American visitors – also paid for the church’s Willis organ and erected a memorial to Herbert Liddell Cortis, the first cyclist to best 20 miles in one hour of pedalling. He completed the feat on a track not the Ripley Road but the church opposite the Anchor was the obvious place to erect a memorial to a cyclist.

Charles Harper, author of a famous series of 1890s road history books, said the Ripley Road was the “most frequented by cyclists of any road in England…an almost inconceivable number take a journey down these twenty-three miles from London, and back again in the evening” but he disapproved of club cyclists, and women in ‘Rational dress’:

The Ripley Road…is the stalking-ground of self-advertising long-distance riders, of cliquey and boisterous club-men, and of the immodest women who wear breeches awheel.

Riding in a long skirt was difficult. The Rational Dress Society promoted knickerbocker suits, deemed too masculine by some. But Cycling reported in 1895 that “Rational dress is winning the battle between convention and comfort on the Surrey roads.”

In 1898, Viscountess Harberton, president of the Western Women’s Rational Dress Association, was refused luncheon in the coffee-room at the Hautboy in Ockham, close to the Ripley Road, because she had arrived on her bicycle wearing “exceedingly baggy knickerbockers reaching below the knee.” Lady Harberton left the hotel, no doubt in a huff, and lodged a complaint with the Cyclists’ Touring Club, which listed the Hautboy as one of the rider recommended hostelries of the area. The CTC took legal action against the landlady of the Hautboy and a trial took place in 1899. Mrs Martha Sprague, the landlady, was acquitted. The CTC lost this particular case – in law books it is known as Regina v Sprague – but the fight for women’s rights went on: woods close to the Ripley Road were later the destination for rides to support the suffragette movement.

Part of the fight for women’s rights was featured in The Wheels of Chance, a comic novel by author and noted cyclist H. G. Wells. His hero in the novel was Hoopdriver, an upwardly-mobile cycle tourist, who falls for Jessie, a young lady wearing ‘Rational dress’. The two ride together on, of course, the Ripley Road:

Mr. Hoopdriver …rode on in the direction of Ripley, along an excellent but undulating road. He was pleased to find his command over his machine already sensibly increased…”

Hoopdriver’s nemesis is a bounder called Bechamel, a rich gentleman rider, who rode a “machine of dazzling newness.”

At the sight of him Mr. Hoopdriver pulled himself together, and rode by with the air of one born to the wheel. “A splendid morning,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, “and a fine surface.”

“The morning and you and the surface be everlastingly damned!” said [Bechamel].

As Hoopdriver rode “swaggering along the Ripley road” he came to the Anchor inn (H. G. Wells renamed it the Unicorn for the novel) and “after propping his machine outside the door” he talked to the barmaid about the “weather, of the distance from London, and of the excellence of the Ripley Road.”

Ripley was later used by H. G. Wells is his more famous novel, The War of the Worlds, an epic about a Martian invasion of Earth:

It was this howling and firing of the guns at Ripley and St. George’s Hill that we had heard at Upper Halliford. The Ripley gunners…fired one wild, premature, ineffectual volley, and bolted…through the deserted village, while the Martian, without using his Heat-Ray, walked serenely over their guns, stepped gingerly among them, passed in front of them, and so came unexpectedly upon the guns in Painshill Park, which he destroyed.

Did H.G Wells, who often rode in the area, flatten Painshill Park because he hated the climb?

The War of the Worlds was first published in serial form in Pearson’s Magazine in 1897. This was the peak year for cycling in England, and for cycling on the Ripley Road (Alf Dibble sold the Anchor to hoteliers from Guildford in 1897). The boom years of 1896 and 1897 were followed by a market crash and cycling slowly withered. This fading to grey wasn’t caused by the arrival of motorcars but motorcars certainly made Ripley Road – and all other roads in England – less inviting to cyclists.

By 1909, motor traffic was well on the way to strangulating Ripley, as described by Eric Parker in Highways and Byways in Surrey:

The Ripley road, for the two days in the week when it is most used, is a place to avoid. Yet it can be beautiful, and there is an approach to it hardly equalled near any other highway in the county…Ripley itself, but for the traffic, would be the prettiest village on the road…The motor-car has brought prosperity, even if it is a prosperity that can soil. But the tarnish washes off in night and rain. Ripley may look its best early on a Saturday morning, before the flood rushes down the road. When the little village lies clean and fresh in the sun…before the dust comes, there is a sense of orderly bustle and of waiting for a day of hard work and good money that is pleasant enough.

But the dust – thrown up by speeding cars – did come and it stayed in the air longer as more and more motorised vehicles used the road.

Motorists were also guilty of forcing Ripley Road riders from their bicycles, as attested by this report from Bath Road News in March 1912:

Sal turned up to tea, cursing motors in general and with great particularity those which had driven him into the gutter.

Another cyclist wrote of seeing, near Wisley Hut, “a motor wreck – no uncommon sight on the Portsmouth Road these days.”

Use of the phrase Portsmouth Road here, and not Ripley Road, is instructive. By 1914, Ripley was no longer a terminus, a destination, but a dusty bottle-neck on what would be named, in the 1930s, the A3 between London and Portsmouth.

By the end of the 1970s, the congestion was so bad a by-pass was built and Ripley became a back-water again. The Anchor now serves Thai food, not cold beef and mutton. Six miles of the “between the Houses” route – from the Angel to the Anchor – would be largely recognisable by the cyclists of the 1890s but the Hut at Bolder Mere was swept away in 1978 by builders of the bypass. The bypass obliterates much of the route to Esher; cyclists are now sidelined with a narrow, poorly-maintained cycle path.

This is a far cry from 1885 when an editorial in Cyclist in August 1885 said:

It is simply extraordinary how little the Ripley Road palls on one, even after 11 years’ traversing of it, for we never enjoyed a run more than one last week by moonlight to this cycling village…We met no less than 89 cycles in the first ten miles of the homeward journey, nine pedestrians, and only two vehicles.

NB
Ripley is now home to the best cycle jumble in the country. The next one is 28 April. Here’s some audio and pix from a previous event.

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February 28, 2012 by carltonreid

How two cycling organisations (and a Minister for War) created better roads for all

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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). Lord Bury was one of the first presidents of the National Cyclists’ Union, a forerunner to today’s British Cycling Federation.

The National Cyclists’ Union was established in the Guildhall Tavern, London, in February 1878 as the Bicycle Union. Its purpose was to defend cyclists and to organise and regulate bicycle racing in Great Britain.

The Cyclists’ Touring Club – originally called the Bicycle Touring Club – was founded six months later, in Harrogate. It, too, seeked to protect cyclists but, as its name clearly states, was interested in touring not racing.

Cyclists were seen as interlopers by many of the road users of the time, especially carriage drivers.

Describing why cyclists formed protective organisations, Lord Bury wrote:

A number of evil-disposed persons…seemed to imagine that the bicycle had no right upon the roads [and] seized every opportunity of hampering and interfering with any cyclists they chanced to meet. One very flagrant case occurred on Saturday, August 26, 1876, when the driver of the St Albans coach lashed, with his whip, a bicyclist who was passing, whilst the guard, who had provided himself beforehand with an iron ball on the end of a rope, threw it between the spokes of the machine and dragged it and the rider to the ground. The driver was fined £2 for the assault, and also paid the rider £10 towards the damage to his machine, while the guard was fined £5. As an outcome of this case ‘a protection society for cyclists’…was discussed at some length in the contemporary press…

Lord Bury was an influential chap. A former soldier, he entered parliament in 1857, serving as Treasurer of the Household between 1859 and 1866. Between 1878 and 1880, and then 1885 and 1886, he was Under-Secretary of State for War. He wrote his cycling book the year after leaving office.

As president of the National Cyclists’ Union from 1883 – a post he held while an MP – he was well able to fulfil the obligation to “watch the course of any legislative proposals in Parliament or elsewhere affecting the interests of the bicycling public, and to make such representations on the subject as the occasion may demand,” a founding aim of the N.C.U.

Lord Bury was also able to keep tabs on another of the N.C.U’s founding aims: “To secure a fair and equitable administration of justice as regards the rights of bicyclists on the public roads.”

Lord Bury was said to be a “practical cyclist who took an active interest in the questions of the day” and secured the rights of cyclists to use public parks “with results which were in every way satisfactory.”

In partnership with the Cyclists’ Touring Club, the N.C.U. erected danger signs on hills, warning cyclists of descents to come. The two organisations also created, in 1885, the Roads Improvement Association to lobby for better roads for all.

Lord Bury takes up the story:

The question of road repair…has developed into a work of absolutely national importance. Many roadways, since the old coaches passed away, have been allowed to fall steadily into disrepair, and no effort was made to keep them in anything like a sound condition. This decay reached its maximum in the Birmingham district, and cyclists and others who had the misfortune to traverse the roads in question found them in a perfectly disgraceful state. The Birmingham local centre [i.e. the Birmingham branch of the N.C.U] therefore called a meeting of persons interested in the question, over which the Mayor of Birmingham presided, and the strange spectacle of the hitherto despised cyclist heading a motion of reform and supported by a number of horse owners and drivers, showed how wise and politic a step had been taken.

The road surveyors were at first inclined to regard the matter as a piece of impertinence on the part of the cyclists, some of them remarking that they were not called upon to make the roads good enough for that class of machine; but the result of an action brought on behalf of the Union against eight road surveyors at the Halesowen Court speedily convinced them that the cyclists were in the right, and held powers sufficient to compel them to do the work. Since then this fact has been brought home rather forcibly to the understandings of many similar officials, and the improvement in the roads in some places is very noticeable.

Mr. H. R. Reynolds, of the London and Oxford Bicycle Clubs, has gone very fully into the question of the right method of road-making, and has in an able article in the ‘Nineteenth Century’ and in letters to the public and cycling press, pointed out how little the systems of Telford and Macadam are followed, even on roads which are described as ‘Macadamised.’

One of the surveyors who was interviewed by a Union official admitted that he had never heard of Telford or Macadam, and did not know who they were or what they had done.

In 1882, the Prospectus of the Cyclists’ Touring Club, described how the arrival of bicycles on Britain’s roads wasn’t welcomed at first but how cyclists became the agents of change, improving roads when most sections of society had allowed them to lapse into disrepair thanks to the far superior transport afforded by trains:

As an essentially conservative nation, it is hardly a matter for surprise that Englishmen should have received with suspicion, which rapidly degenerated into factious opposition, the advent of the bicycle a decade and a half ago. Anything that tends to antagonise with the cherished traditions and old-fashioned habits of the average Britisher, is, by the more unthinking sections of the community, speedily condemned, aye, even without a semblance of a fair trial; and it therefore need hardly be wondered at that a mode of progression hitherto almost unheard of, and which ran counter to all preconceived methods, should have met with disfavour almost as soon as it was introduced.

A few of [bicycling's] persistent adherents remained steadfast in the belief of the capabilities of the new invention…With the establishment of a new pastime or sport, it was not long ere the shrewder of the people became alive to the advantages that followed in its wake, and that might, with a little ingenuity, be diverted into their channel. Foremost amongst these was the hotel proprietor in the country town, whose receipts had gradually diminished since the octopus-like feelers of the railway had penetrated into the district, and diverted the traffic which formerly brought with it a handsome competence to himself, and to the keeper of each roadside hostelry. Recognising in the tourist on foot or on horseback a legitimate subject for the extortion of ‘backsheesh,’ the same generous line for argument was extended to the touring wheelman, who, with hundreds of followers, was scouring the country in every direction in search of the novel, the grand, and the beautiful, whenever opportunity offered. Nor was this drawback the isolated bete noire of the cyclist, for the ill-concealed antipathy, culminating at times in undoubted brutality, of the remainder of the road-using community, who knew little of the capabilities, and less of the advantages, of the new method of locomotion, was a patent and glaring concomitant.

Added to these came the difficulty of obtaining reliable information of the nature of the route ahead – a route that often became treacherously unserviceable – so that, to commit a plagiarism as well as concoct a parody, ‘The rider’s lot was not a happy one.’

Cycling, as a national sport, to be indulged in by every class of the community, from the Queen upon the throne to the plodding artisan, has already taken a tenacious hold upon the sympathies of all unprejudiced people, and it is, perhaps, not too much to say that if the day has not already arrived, it is steadily and surely approaching, when, given a moderate endowment of health and strength, every soul within the confines of civilisation, where passable roads are by any means obtainable, may upon some one of the many modifications of the steel steed, in solitude or in company, participate in this health-giving means of locomotion.

The consuls of the Cyclists’ Touring Club, as the local representatives are called, are now co-operating in the production of a road-book. [As] the writers are all users of the lightest vehicles on the highways, their acquaintance with the roads is bound to be of a most intimate character. The Cyclists’ Touring Club has also co-operated actively with the [N.C.U.] in the very necessary work of erecting warning notices at the tops of dangerous hills, and also in the great effort at road reforms which the two bodies have been carrying on with such vigour.

In 1886, the CTC/NCU’s Roads Improvement Association organised the first ever Roads Conference in Britain. With patronage – and cash – from aristocrats and royals, the RIA published pamphlets on road design and how to create better road surfaces. County surveyors took this on board (some were CTC members) and started to improve local roads.

Even though it was started and paid for by cyclists, the RIA stressed from its foundation that it was lobbying for better roads to be used by all, not just cyclists.

The most influential official of the Roads Improvement Association was William Rees Jeffreys. Today he is known as an arch motorist, one of the first people to advocate for motorways, but Rees Jeffreys had started his 50 year career in the improvement of what he called “despaired and neglected roads” as a cyclist. In 1900 he was elected a member of the Council of the Cyclists’ Touring Club and was a representative on the Council of the Roads Improvement Association. He 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 CTC to push for a “Central Highway Authority and a State grant for highway purposes.”

Cyclists wanted better road surfaces. They lobbied for smoother surfaces and for “dustless” roads. Rees Jeffreys became an advocate for spreading tar on Britain’s roads. He wrote:

In 1902 I went to Geneva as the representative of the Cyclists’ Touring Club at the Annual Congress of the International League of Touring Associations. M. Charbonnier, Cantonal Engineers of Geneva, showed me an experiment he was making with hot tar on the road between Geneva and Lausanne.

Five years later, Rees Jeffreys and the RIA organised competitions to find tar-spreading machines. The roads of Great Britain were gradually capped with asphalt. The work started by cyclists led to solid, sealed roads from coast to coast; roads which helped motoring become first a mania and then a form of mass transport.

By the early 1900s, British motorists had forgotten about the debt they owed to prehistoric track builders, the Romans, turnpike trusts, John McAdam, Thomas Telford and bicyclists. Before even one road had been built with motorcars in mind, motorists assumed the mantle of overlords of the road.

A satirical verse in Punch magazine of 1907 summed up this attitude from some drivers:

The roads were made for me; years ago they were made. Wise rulers saw me coming and made roads. Now that I am come they go on making roads – making them up. I dislocate the traffic. But I am the Traffic.

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February 7, 2012 by carltonreid

Pickwick Bicycle Club, 1870

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Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The great novelist was born on this day in 1812. On 9th June 1870, he died. Sadly, the old chap never got to ride a velocipede, which had arrived in London in 1869. None of Dickens’ characters rode bicycles but when six velocipedists from Hackney in London wanted a name for a club they had just formed, in the Downs Hotel on 22nd June, they landed upon Dickens. They could have chosen any of the author’s novels to name their new club but they chose Dickens’ first: the Pickwick Papers.

The Pickwick Bicycle Club was born. It’s the world’s oldest bicycle club and it’s also the world’s oldest extant Dickensian association. I’m a member. Club members – all men – are given sobriquets taken from characters in the Pickwick Papers. I’m Mr. Grundy. There are only a finite number of characters in the book so to become a member you go on seven-year waiting list and, when an unfortunate member shuffles off this mortal coil, in you jump.

There are two main events each year: posh and ribald ‘luncheons’ in the 200-year old New Connaught Rooms, near Covent Garden. At the luncheons, members are called to order by trumpeters of the Grenadier Guards and Pickwickian punch is wheeled in by Chelsea pensioners while members sing the Boys of the Old Brigade. The great and good of the bicycle world go to these functions, from industry bigwigs to pro riders (I sat next to David Millar at a previous function). The Pickwick Bicycle Club also still organises bicycle rides, including an annual ride at Hampton Court. Members are encouraged to ride period bicycles.

This ride has a long history. The third ride took place on May 26th 1877, and was immortalised in the drawing below which appeared in the Illustrated London News. Fixed front wheel velocipedes could be made to go quicker by enlarging the front wheel: the high wheel bicycle was the result and can be seen at the front of procession of up to 2,000 riders. London and “provincial” clubs were well represented on the ride. There was a rider from Edinburgh and seven from Manchester. 69 of the riders were members of the Pickwick Bicycle Club, and the club’s Captain K.M. Yeoman was “put in command for the day.” Behind him were six marshals, one of which was a fellow Pickwickian.

The clubs of the time were quasi-military in garb and manners: riders dressed in uniforms and followed commands issued via a bugler. One of the reasons for the uniforms and riding en masse was to discourage stone throwing from country-dwellers not used to seeing townsfolk on the long neglected turnpikes. Cyclists of the 1870s were the first users of rural roads since the demise of the stagecoach trade fifty years previously.

At the 1877 Hampton Court ride “each of the Marshals wore a scarlet sash,” reported the Illustrated London News.

“At half-past five o’clock the buglers sounded the advance. The Pickwick Club, which was first in order, immediately replied, and the men, mounting at once, came on in pairs in gallant style, amidst tremendous cheering…It took upwards of an hour for the regulars to file past, before the unattached riders brought up the rear. The procession was watched with much interest by H.R.H. Prince Christian and Colonel Maude, C.B., from the windows of the Greyhound Hotel.”

Those not attached to a club “acted in a spirit of insolent independence, and did much to upset the order which the marshals were taking so much pains to maintain.”

In an article in a CTC Yearbook from 1928 J Foxley Norris wrote “the usual runs in the early 1870s were about ten miles out, and a radius of 20 miles would well constitute a Sunday or weekend fixture. Such riding may seem trivial to the rider of 1928, but he will be reminded of the weight of the ‘boneshaker’ – 60lbs with its wooden wheels, iron tyres, and the villainous character of the road surfaces.”

Members of the Pickwick Club today include Richard Hemington, the boss of Specialized UK (sobriquet: John Edmunds); cycling commentators David Duffield (Mr Ayresleigh) and Hugh Porter MBE (Jonas Mudge); world champion track rider Tony Doyle MBE (George Nupkins); Howard Knight, former MD of Raleigh (Wilkins the Gardener) and bike shop owner Peter Hargroves (The Chancery Prisoner).

The most notable former member – and club president in 1944 – was Lord Nuffield CBE who, as William Morris, founded the Morris Motor Co. Naturally, as with many motor magnates, Lord Nuffield had started out as a bicycle mechanic.

In the company of his fellow club members Lord Nuffield was known as Joseph Smiggers. Many of the early clubmen raced using only their assumed names.

The Boys’ Own Paper of 1889 reported that in “some old reports of race meetings, we find the name of the “Fat Boy” frequently mentioned. As may naturally be supposed, this name was appropriated by one of the thinnest of men.”

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February 1, 2012 by carltonreid

World’s first cycling faceplant, 1865 (rider wasn’t wearing a helmet, but he didn’t die)

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This is a line-drawing of the world’s “first header”, a forward fall from a bicycle. It’s also a line-drawing of the probable creator of the world’s first pedal-operated bicycle. The rider is Frenchman Pierre Lallement. The location is Birmingham, close to New Haven, Connecticut. Lallement is said to have first attached cranks and pedals to a Draisienne ‘dandy horse’ in 1863 and rode this 70lb wooden velocipede on the cobbled streets of Paris. In 1865 he emigrated to America, taking the novel contraption with him. With a co-investor he patented his velocipede. A year later, in Paris, blacksmith Pierre Michaux started selling similar looking velocipedes. Most history books (especially French ones) say it’s Michaux, and his son, Ernest, who “invented” the pedal-powered bicycle. It’s sometimes reported, with no proof, they did so as early as March 1861. However, in an article in Outing magazine of 1883, Charles E. Pratt, co-founder of the League of American Wheelman, credited Lallement as the true father of the bicycle and predicted, wrongly, that Lallement would be “remembered as long as the bipedaliferous wheel continues to revolve.”

Pratt knew Lallement. He knew Lallement because they worked in the same place. Down on his luck (he never made much money from his invention, having sold the patent for a pittance) Lallement worked as a mechanic for the Pope Manufacturing Company, maker of the Columbia bicycle, America’s leading brand of bicycle from the 1880s through to the early years of the 20th Century. Pratt was the patent attorney for the Pope Manufacturing Company, a firm created by Colonel Albert A Pope, the US importer, and then copier, of English high wheel bicycles. Pope was a portly fellow – Pratt called him Colonel Bounce – and an astute businessman. Pope spent many years buying bicycle patents, and then defending them monopoly-fashion, causing rival manufacturers to pay him royalties for all machines sold in the US.

Pratt was therefore a busy patent lawyer. But he was also a writer, an occupation funded by Colonel Pope because Pratt’s writing helped popularise the riding of bicycles. Pratt penned many articles that brought new blood into bicycling, wrote songs about cycling, and was keen on the recent history of this new sport.

As a wheelman, and as a patent lawyer, and as one of the first bicycle historians, Pratt (left) was no doubt keen to tell the story of a patent he was very familiar with: US patent 59915. This had been granted on November 20, 1866, and filed in New Haven, Connecticut. It had been filed by Lallement and an American businessman. It was the world’s first public record for a low-mount two-wheeler that “after a little practice,” said the patent, can be ridden “at an incredible velocity with the greatest of ease.”

It was this velocity that caused the “first header.” Here’s Pratt’s 1883 description of Lallement’s 1865 ride, the first long distance bicycle ride on US soil, on one of the world’s first bicycles:

There lives in Brooklyn, New York, Pierre Lallement…a plain, intelligent mechanic, of about middle age, speaking our language little and brokenly, working industriously at the trade he learned in youth. He is of rather less than medium stature, dark complexion, and sincere countenance, of quiet demeanor, but quick in thought and action. He designed, and put together, and rode the first bicycle.

Lallement came to the United States of America by way of Havre, London and Liverpool…arriving in July 1865. After some stay in New York he went to Ansonia, Connecticut, a manufacturing village in the beautiful Naugatuck Valley, about twelve miles west of New Haven.

He had brought with him the two wheels, a new forged wrought-iron perch, and cranks partly done, from Paris. He completed his work with them in the fall of 1865, completed and finished up his ‘veloce’ and was able to ride it some that fall for exhibition, and to and from the shop where he worked. Soon he essayed a longer road ride, and one that he thought would test the qualities of the machine for road use, and convince the sceptics from whom he had trying to obtain financial aid.

This first bicycle spin proved both interesting and amusing. The route lay through a part of the main street in Ansonia, over a long bridge, and the main country road south, to the thriving manufacturing village of Birmingham (which nestles about a hill, with a fine green near the centre and the main street, and overlook charming villages) and back again – a distance of about four and a half miles.

There had been rains, making rills in the gutters, and a considerable rush of water under the culvert at the foot of the long hill…first reached at the north of Birmingham. Lallement had no brake, and he could not back-pedal. Exhilaration at his easy and rapid approach turned to consternation as his speed quickened to an uncontrollable rush down the slope, and he saw that a
a jogging span of horses, holding back a wagon and two men, occupied the roadway before him, unconscious of his advance.

He yelled to the men, in foreign accent. They gave one look behind at the hurrying monster almost upon them, and whipped their horses to a run. It was too late for Lallement. His wheel, deflected to avoid a collision, struck the edge of the culvert, and careened. The positions of rider and vehicle were suddenly reversed, and the rider still wears the scar of that too impulsive embrace of mother earth.

Our hero of the first “header” gathered himself and his bicycle together, rode on to the main street in Ansonia, stopped at the tavern, and, tilting his machine against a hitching-post, went in. There he found the two men, relating between drinks how they had seen the dark Devil, with human head and a body half like a snake, and half like a bird, just hovering above the ground which he seemed no way to touch, chase them down the hill, and, just as he was about to board their wagon, disappear in the water by the roadside. The bar-keeper was smilingly incredulous, as, with the earnestness of amazement, they assured him it was true.

“I vas ze diable,” exclaimed Lallement, advancing, and endeavoring with scant English and much gesture to explain. But they would not believe him until he had produced and again bestridden the mysterious machine.

In the spring of 1866 Lallement went to New Haven, and there rode his novel vehicle on the “Green,” or public square, and on the streets. There was a tradition that he was once or twice arrested and put in the lock-up in that city, at the instance of irate drivers [i.e. carriage drivers].

Interested wheelmen will perhaps often hereafter take pleasure in visiting the charming valley of the Naugatuck, and pedalling over the first country roadway that knew the sinuous track of the bicycle, and coast the hill of the first genuine header.

Birmingham – the site of the “first header” – is now part of downtown Derby, and is no longer known as Birmingham. I’ve drawn part of the route of Lallement’s 1865 ride on the 1875 map of Birmingham, above and bigger here. Most of the streets on that map are still there today. The bulbous canal was long ago filled in and is now Pershing Drive, the factory at the base of the picture is now a DIY mall and car park. Local historian Marian O’Keefe, curator for the Seymour Historical Society, believes the “first header” happened on Elizabeth Street, and I’ve marked a possible spot for the crash.

There’s no plaque there to record the fact. However, historian David Herlihy, author of Bicycle: The History, helped get a plaque to Lallement placed in on the town square in New Haven.

Herlihy was the founder of the non-profit Lallement Memorial Committee, which pushed to make sure Lallement is billed as the true inventor of the bicycle. A Boston bicycle path is now named after Lallement (it crosses the point where the Frenchman died, in relative obscurity, in 1891). Not all historians agree with Herlihy, and clearly, Pratt, while familiar with Lallement’s story, may have been swayed in his historical allegiance by his relationship with an employee of the company he worked for.

It’s possible to follow the route of Lallement’s first ride. However, Google Street View shows that it’s rather different from this description of Birmingham from 1880:

This flourishing and enterprising part of the town is located over a mile above Derby Narrows and Birmingham. On the east and west the hills gradually rise from the Naugatuck, forming a picturesque landscape on either side. [The] borough…contains 456 dwellings, capable of accommodating 600 families, but many of these houses are palatial residences and the surrounding lawns beautified with ornamental trees and shrubbery. There are twelve factories, five churches, two banks, thirty-four stores of all kinds, three schoolhouses, three drug stores, three coal yards, four meat markets, and a great variety of shops where different kinds of goods are made and retailed.

The location of Birmingham is picturesque in every point of view; even the rocky, wooded hill to the north-west being pleasant to the sight, and a beacon defense from the wind. The [view] along the brow of the hill to the Ansonia lower bridge, is surpassed for beauty of location by very little inland scenery in New England. Atwater avenue [part of Lallement's route, just before his crash] is being rapidly adorned with beautiful, palatial residences, surrounded by spacious, ornamented lawns…”

If Lallement is accepted as the originator of the bicycle, he was the first cyclist, the first cycle commuter, the first fixie rider, the first to survive a bicycle faceplant, the first to seek “financial aid” by riding a bike, the first to come a cropper from a bike-to-vehicle incident, the first cafe rider, the first cycle chic adherent (he rode in a suit); the first roadie, the first mountain biker (the roads of the area were rough and unmade), the first “scorcher”, the first cyclist to be “locked up” for annoying “irate drivers” and the first to eschew a helmet when riding a bike.

Lallement’s only head protection during that famous first fall was a hat and this flew off when he was catapulted from his machine. The location of his scar is unknown: Pratt didn’t furnish details, although he had clearly interviewed Lallement for his piece in Outing. Pratt was writing just 19 years after Lallement first attached cranks to his ‘veloce’.

In 2016 we will be able to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Lallement’s creation. However, trumping this somewhat, the 200th anniversary of Pierre Michaux’s birth has already taken place. This was organised by French veteran cycle club, L’Union Velocipedique De La Belle Epoque. It took place 28th April to 1st May 2013 in La Chaussee Saint Victor, France. And here’s a photograph from the event, kindly supplied by Stuart Mason-Elliott.

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‘Roads Were Not Built For Cars’ will contain lots of detail on the history of roads, and bicycles. Thanks to advertising and grants the book will be distributed as a free e-book as well as being available as a print-on-demand title later in 2013. In May 2013 the book secured £17,408 in pre-publication funding from a Kickstarter campaign. 648 Kickstarter backers will get the first edition of the book in August 2013.

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January 27, 2012 by carltonreid

The Red Flag Run, motoring’s flagship event, was created by a bicycle builder

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The famous Emanicipation Run of 1896, the drive from London to Brighton, now reenacted each year as one of the key events in British motoring history, was organised by a bicycle designer and bicycle company owner. Harry Lawson was the creator of the ‘Safety’ bicycle, the grand-daddy of today’s rear-driven low-mount bicycle with gears. The Rover Safety, designed by John Kemp Starley some six years later, is usually listed as the first modern bicycle – the rider was lower to the ground than on a highwheeler so was safer – but, in fact, he was beaten to it by Lawson. His ‘Bicyclette’, above, of 1879 was ahead of its time: it was thought undignified, too complex, and although popular for a time in his home town of Brighton, it failed to sell nationally. Undeterred, Lawson carried on designing bicycles through the 1880s. (The name for his bike later became one of the French words for bicycle).

But it’s as a financier – first of bicycle companies, later of motorcar companies – that Lawson was to achieve fame. Or, rather, infamy. His motorcar syndicates and company flotations were often based on fraudulent claims. His prowess as a puffer of companies and as a publicist – skills honed in the bicycle trade – were apparent in his foundation of the British Motor Car Syndicate, a shell scheme which he aimed to promote by organising the London to Brighton Emanicipation Run of 14th November 1896. This drive, Lawson told the Chief Constable of Sussex, was to provide a “practical demonstration of the capabilities and characteristics of the new vehicle.”

It was to be held in anticipation of the soon-to-be-law Locomotives on Highways Act 1896, which allowed ‘light locomotives’ – motorcars – to travel at a speed of up to 14mph and to dispense with the need for a fellow to travel in front waving a red flag.

Thirty three motorcars took part in the Run, seen off by a huge crowd, including 10,000 cyclists.

Why Brighton? Because that was where Lawson first lived when he started in the business of making bicycles, working with James Likeman, with whom he collaborated on his first bicycle patent, in 1874. As a cyclist, Lawson would have been familiar with the popular bicycle excursion of London to Brighton.

This had been first ridden in 1869, on a timber and wrought iron velocipede, weighing 93 lbs. The Times, of 19th February 1869, takes up the tale:

On Wednesday Mr John Mayall, jun., son of the well-known photographer, accomplished the journey from London to Brighton on one of the new two-wheel velocipedes. He was accompanied by two friends, Mr Spencer and Mr Turner, also on velocipedes.

They had a preliminary run round Trafalgar Square, and then started off at the rate of eight miles an hour on roads which proved to be generally good, but against a very strong wind all the way. They kept pretty well together as far as Crawley (30 miles), after which Mr Mayall took a decided lead, and arrived in Brighton in time and in good condition for dinner, and the second part of Mr Kube’s concert at the Grand Hall. Part of the journey, down hill from Clayton to Brighton, was run at the speed of one mile in four minutes.

Cycling, in 1912, said that this ride was “the first long ride accomplished in England – a ride that materially helped to demonstrate the bicycle as a road vehicle instead of a plaything or a mere piece of apparatus for use in a gymnasium.”

While the first ride was long, and newsworthy, subsequent ones certainly were not. Four years later, members of the Amateur Bicycle Club of Middlesex, were riding the same route that had taken Mayall thirteen hours in only 5 and a quarter hours. They did this, on the poor roads of the day, on high wheelers, the red Ferraris of the 1870s.

By the 1890s it was common for cyclists to ride to Brighton from London and then ride back the same day.

When Lawson wanted a destination for his motor car demonstration he chose London to Brighton. Only 17 motorcars made it to Brighton, Lawson’s included.

By 1916, just ten years after the Emancipation Ride, there were 23,192 cars on the roads of Great Britain. Popular cycling routes – such as London to Brighton – were colonised by cars. By 1921, cyclists retreated had all but retreated, said cycle writer W. Grew:

“Innumerable cycling records have been made on the Brighton Road, but the extension of London southwards and Brighton northwards entails so much traffic riding that very few attempt the performance now.”

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January 20, 2012 by carltonreid

MOTORISTS’ FRONT OF JUDEA: What Have The Cyclists Ever Done for Us?

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REG: Cyclists have bled us white, the bastards. They don’t pay road tax, they run red lights. And what have they ever given us in return?
XERXES: Pneumatic tyres.
REG: What?
XERXES: Pneumatic tyres.
REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that’s true. Yeah.
COMMANDO #3: And ball bearings.
REG: Yeah. All right. I’ll grant you pneumatic tyres and ball bearings are two things that the cyclists have done.
MATTHIAS: And the roads.
REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don’t they? But apart from pneumatic tyres, ball bearings, and the roads…
COMMANDO: Lightweight steel tubing.
XERXES: Chain driven differential gears.
COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh…
COMMANDO #2: Dust-free highways. Tractors. Automobile advertising.
COMMANDOS: Ohh…
REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
COMMANDO #1: And central Government administration of roads.
COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah…
FRANCIS: Cars and planes.
REG: Cars and planes?
FRANCIS: Yeah, America’s first car was built by the Duryea brothers: they were bicycle builders first. And powered flight, Reg, that was developed by the Wright Brothers: they owned a bike shop and built bikes.
REG: All right, but apart from the pneumatic tyre, ball bearings, differential gears, roads, motoring, car ads, and aviation, what have cyclists ever done for us?

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Like the logo for The Motorists Front of Judea? It’s on t-shirts, mugs, and other Cafepress products (the t-shirt are on the generous side, if you normally order M, order S instead)..

The limited first edition of ‘Roads Were Not Built For Cars’ was available only on Kickstarter.com. The campaign is now finished. Thanks to 604 lovely people it raised an amazing £17,407 with the initial Kickstarter target of £4000 blown through on the first day. A PDF of the full text of the book will be placed on this site, for free, later in the year.

REFERENCES

ROAD TAX
Cyclists do not pay ‘road tax’. Nor do motorists. It’s Graduated Vehicle Excise Duty – or car tax – and is a charge on vehicular emissions, with the least polluting vehicles paying less or even nothing. If cyclists were to pay VED, they would pay £0, the same as low emission cars. ‘Road tax’ was abolished in 1937.

RED LIGHTS
‘Riding through red lights: The rate, characteristics and risk factors of non-compliant urban commuter cyclists’ is a 2010 study in Accident Analysis and Prevention by the Monash University Accident Research Centre, Melbourne, Australia. It used a covert video camera to record cyclists at 10 sites across metropolitan Melbourne from October 2008 to April 2009. They found that of 4,225 cyclists facing a red light, only 6.9% didn’t stop.

When a cyclist runs a red light, he or she is taking an extreme risk that could result in death or serious injury, almost always to the cyclist alone. Motorists also run red lights: when they do so, the risks are to others as well as themselves.

PNEUMATIC TYRES
The first practical pneumatic tyre was made in 1887 by John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish veterinarian, for his son’s bicycle. Dunlop founded the Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre Co. Ltd in 1889 to market this bicycle tyre. The detachable pneumatic tyre was introduced in 1891 by Édouard Michelin. This was also a bicycle tyre. Like many motorcar brands (Rover, Peugeot etc.) Dunlop and Michelin were bicycle brands before they were car brands.

BALL BEARINGS
Ball bearings were patented in Paris in 1869 by Jules Pierre Suriray, a bicycle mechanic. The advantages of a bicycle equipped with parts using ball bearings was demonstrated by Englishman James Moore, winner of the world’s first bicycle road race, Paris–Rouen, on November 7th 1869. 100 riders took part. Moore completed the 80-mile course in ten and a half hours, riding a bicycle with solid rubber tyres and an oversized front wheel with ball bearings in the hub. Not riding a bicycle with ball bearings – but completing the course nonetheless – was ‘Miss America’, a French woman married to Rowley B Turner, the English velocipedist who was one of the first to bring one of the French contraptions to England, thereby kick-starting the British bicycle industry.

ROADS
Many motorists assume that roads were built for them. In fact, cars are the johnny-come-latelies of highways.

The hard, flat road surfaces we take for granted are relatively new. Asphalt surfaces weren’t widespread outside of towns until the 1930s. So, are motorists to thank for this smoothness? No. The improvement of roads was first lobbied for – and paid for – by cycling organisations.

In the UK and the US, cyclists lobbied for better road surfaces for a full 30 years before motoring organisations did the same. Cyclists were ahead of their time.

When railways took off from the 1840s, the coaching trade died, leaving roads almost unused and in poor condition. Cyclists were the first vehicle operators in a generation to go on long journeys, town to town. Cyclists helped save many roads from being grubbed up.

Rural roads were unsurfaced and would be the colour of the local stone. Many 19th century authors waxed lyrical about the varied and beautiful colours of British roads.

Cycling organisations, such as Cyclists’ Touring Club in the UK and League of American Wheelmen (LAW) in the US, lobbied county surveyors and politicians to build better roads. The US Good Roads movement, set up by LAW, was highly influential. LAW once had the then US president turn up at its annual general meeting.

The CTC created the Roads Improvement Association in 1885 and, in 1886, organised the first ever Roads Conference in Britain. With patronage – and cash – from aristocrats and royals, the CTC published pamphlets on road design and how to create better road surfaces. County surveyors took this on board (some were CTC members) and started to improve local roads.

Even though it was started and paid for by cyclists, the RIA stressed from its foundation that it was lobbying for better roads to be used by all, not just cyclists.

By the early 1900s most British motorists had forgotten about the debt they owed to prehistoric track builders, the Romans, turnpike trusts, John McAdam, Thomas Telford and bicyclists. Before even one road had been built with motorcars in mind, motorists assumed the mantle of overlords of the road.

A satirical verse in Punch magazine of 1907 summed up this attitude from some drivers:

“The roads were made for me; years ago they were made. Wise rulers saw me coming and made roads. Now that I am come they go on making roads – making them up. I dislocate the traffic. But I am the Traffic.”

DUST-FREE HIGHWAYS
The dust kicked up by cars on dirt roads in the early days of motoring was a major health problem and its suppression was of pressing importance, should motoring wish to gain public acceptance.

Dust had also been a problem for cyclists. Highwheelers were nearly two metres off the ground so their riders weren’t bothered about dust, but riders of Safety bicycles, closer to the ground (which is why they were safer than high wheelers), were very concerned. The main anti-dust campaigner of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century was William Rees Jeffreys.

Rees Jeffreys is known today as an arch motorist, one of the first people to advocate for motorways, but Rees Jeffreys had started his 50 year career in the improvement of what he called “despaired and neglected roads” as a cyclist. In 1900 he was elected a member of the Council of the Cyclists’ Touring Club and was a representative on the Council of the Roads Improvement Association, an organisation founded by the CTC in 1886. 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 CTC to push for a “a Central Highway Authority and a State grant for highway purposes.”

Cyclists wanted better road surfaces. They lobbied for smoother surfaces and for “dustless” roads. Rees Jeffreys became an advocate for spreading tar on Britain’s roads. He wrote:

“In 1902 I went to Geneva as the representative of the Cyclists’ Touring Club at the Annual Congress of the International League of Touring Associations. M. Charbonnier, Cantonal Engineers of Geneva, showed me an experiment he was making with hot tar on the road between Geneva and Lausanne.”

Sealed roads are taken for granted now but the work of the CTC’s Road Improvements Association – and influential figures such as Rees Jeffreys – led not just to swifter, cross country travel but created health benefits, too.

“It is not only difficult, it is impossible, for the present generation to appreciate what their parents and grandparents suffered from dust and mud,” wrote Rees Jeffreys. “Not only were houses made distressingly uncomfortable by dust, but household work was increased greatly by the mud and dust which children brought into the house on boots and clothes. The dust cased many ailments and diseases of the eyes, nose and throat.

“Few reforms brought so much direct benefit to the people as a whole as that which in so few years made the British roads dustless.”

Reforms started by cyclists.

TRACTORS
The first successful lightweight tractor was built in 1902 by bicycle designer and racer Dan Albone of Biggleswade. At the age of just 13 Albone designed and built his own high wheel Ordinary. At the age of 18 he formed the Ivel Cycle Works to market his bicycles, and his innovations. Ivel Cycle Works went belly up in 1893 following the end of the bicycle boom. Albone used many of his innovations developed for bicycles in prototype motor bicycles, in cars and in his Ivel Agricultural Motor, the first practical motor tractor. (Incidentally, Albone also developed an early women’s Safety bicycle and later produced automobiles, too).

LIGHTWEIGHT STEEL TUBING
The weight of an average Safety bicycle in 1892 was 42 pounds; by 1897 it was 22 pounds, with speciality bicycles weighing as little as 16 pounds. Bicycles were one of the first items to be mass-produced and to benefit from Ford-style factory production, before Ford. Lightweight drawn steel tubes developed for bicycles were adopted by the new automobile industry and later by the aviation industry, too.

Rifles used tubes, too, but gun barrels were machined from solid billets of steel. Innovators created new ways of making lightweight steel tubes, specifically for fast, high-wheeler bicycles, the red Ferraris of their day. Gun maker William Charles Stiff of Birmingham formed the Credenda Cold-drawn Seamless Steel Tube Company to market his bicycle tubing. Stiff had perfected his process by 1882 (a US patent was granted in 1886). He stretched steel billets into long, thin-walled tubes that could be cut and welded into frames for bicycles. The process was time-consuming: it could take three weeks of stretching, baking and thinning, with up to 16 pulls over a die and mandrel. The result was a lightweight, card-thin tube 1.125 inches in diameter.

Highwheeler ‘Ordinaries’ made from such expensive, technologically-advanced tubes became lighter, yet stronger. The Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, used Credenda tubes from England for the ‘Penny farthing’ used by Thomas Stevens on his circumnavigation of the world between 1884 and 1886. Stevens – “perched on a lofty wheel, as if riding on a soap-bubble” – was the first cyclist to ride around the globe. He had been born in England in 1854 but emigrated to the US in 1871. His derring-do exploits gripped the Victorian world.

“Creeping noiselessly up behind an unsuspecting donkey-driver [in Turkey], until quite close, I suddenly reveal my presence. Looking round and observing a strange, unearthly combination, apparently swooping down upon him, the affrighted katir-jee’s first impulse is to seek refuge in flight, not infrequently bolting clear off the roadway, before venturing upon taking a second look. Sometimes I simply put on a spurt, and whisk past at a fifteen mile pace. Looking back, the katir-jee generally seems rooted to the spot with astonishment, and his utter inability to comprehend. These men will have marvellous tales to tell in their respective villages concerning what they saw; unless other bicycles are introduced, the time the “Ingilisiu” went through the country with his wonderful araba will become a red-letter event in the memory of the people along my route through Asia Minor. Crossing the Yeldez Irmak Eiver, on a stone bridge, I follow along the valley…having wheeled nearly fifty miles to-day, the last forty of which will compare favorably in smoothness, though not in levelness, with any forty-mile stretch I know of in the United States.”

His travels on his “lofty wheel” showed that self-propelled, independent, international travel, while exotic, was possible. And Stevens’ journey had been made possible with lightweight, cold-drawn steel from England. His 50-inch Columbia was light enough to hoist over a railway bridge to escape a passing train, with Stevens “letting the bicycle hang over.”

Reynolds’ famous “double butted” lightweight bicycle tubes were created in 1897 by A. M. Reynolds and J. T. Hewitt of Birmingham’s Reynolds Tube Company. This had started in 1841 as a maker of steel nails and was making bicycle tubing by 1889. (Reynolds 531 double butted tubes were introduced in 1934).

DIFFERENTIAL GEARS
Differential gears have an ancient history but chain driven differential gears were the brainchild of James Starley, ‘father of the British bicycle industry’. The historian Edward Lyte wrote:

“Each rider of the Sociable drove his own big wheel independently, so the course of the machine along the road was rather variable. One day Starley cried ‘I have it!’ and dismounted. He sat down to a cup of tea and forthwith invented the differential gear that is now incorporated in the back axle of every car. It was a Saturday. At 6am on the Monday the prototype was being made and at 8am Starley was stepping on to the London train to register patent No. 3388,1877.”

ROAD SIGNS
Before the AA and RAC were given the rights to erect road signs, and before the Government did the same for ‘national’ roads, the CTC – and the National Cyclists’ Union, forerunner to British Cycling – had the authority to erect official road signs. They placed them at the top and at the base of hills, warning cyclists of particularly steep slopes.

AUTOMOBILE ADVERTISING
The Winton Motor Carriage Company of Ohio placed the world’s first ever automobile advert. It appeared in Scientific American in the issue for July 30th 1898. The Winton Motor Carriage Company was founded and run by Alexander Winton, a Scottish bicycle maker who created the Winton Bicycle Company in 1891. He specialised in shaft-drive bicycles. After the bike boom popped in 1896 Winton turned his hand to making cars (with tangent-spoked bicycle wheels). The 1898 advert worked: Winton sold 22 cars that year. Winton was the first person in the United States to sell an automobile commercially. His manufacturing company was bought by General Motors in 1930.

CENTRAL GOVERNMENT ADMINISTRATION OF ROADS
Royals and aristrocrats were members of Britain’s Cyclists’ Touring Club, and in America in the 1890s, the ‘bicycling bloc’ was courted in order to successfully elect the President of the United States. The League of American Wheelmen was the only lobbying group to have its own room at the 1896 campaign HQ of the Republican party.

The Bicycling Boom of the 1890s was followed by Motoring Mania in the early 1900s and many of the individuals who had been influential in cycling went on to become influential in motoring. In the US, General Stone, Horatio Earle, Edward Hines and Albert Pope helped make the League of American Wheelmen into a formidable, non-partisan political force and one that laid the foundations – sometimes literally – for the US highway system. In the UK, William Rees Jeffreys – see above – came from a cycling background and helped create our modern road administration.

British Prime Minister Lloyd George said William Rees Jeffreys was “the greatest authority on roads in the United Kingdom and one of the greatest in the whole world.”

Rees Jeffreys was the first secretary of the Roads Board, founded in 1910. This was the first central authority for roads in Great Britain since the Romans. The Roads Board later became part of the newly-formed Ministry of Transport.

The local and national legislative structures put in place by cyclists were later used to great effect by motorists, many of whom had been cyclists long before they were automobilists.

Had these influential figures not spent many years lobbying for good roads when they were cyclists, they would not have been as well equipped when it came to lobbying on behalf of the automobile.

Pioneer motorists knew how to push for good roads. They knew this because they had been cyclists first.

“What the bicyclist did for roads, between 1888 and 1900, was to rehabilitate through traffic, and accustom us all to the idea of our highways being used by other than local residents. It was the bicyclist who brought the road once more into popular use for pleasure riding; who made people away both of the charm of the English Highway and of the extraordinary local differences in the standards of road maintenance and who caused us to realise that the administration, even of local byways, was not a matter that concerned each locality only, but one which the whole nation had an abiding interest.”
BEATRICE & SIDNEY WEBB
The Story of the King’s Highway (1913)

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“I often hear that the automobile is the parent of good roads. Well, the truth is, the bicycle is the father of good roads.”
HORATIO EARLE (1929)

Chief Consul, League of American Wheelmen Michigan division, 1898-1906. In 1905 Earle introduced legislation which created a State Highway Department: he was the first Commissioner. This Department is now the Michigan Department of Transportation. Earle is known as the ‘Father of Good Roads’

MOTORING
John Kemp Starley, originator of the Rover safety bicycle (yes, Land Rover cars were developed by the company created by JK Starley), is one of Britain’s most unsung engineers. As well as developing the bicycle that “set the fashion to the world”, JK worked on an electric car. His battery-powered tricycle was developed in 1888.

Over in the US, Charles Edgar Duryea was the designer of the first-ever American-made gasoline-powered car. His brother, Frank, built this ground-breaking machine.

Charles, the elder of the two, trained as a mechanic and after completing his studies he worked in a bicycle shop in Washington D.C. in the mid-1880s. By the end of the decade he had designed and patented a number of bicycle innovations, including a hammock saddle and, to take the sting out of the rough roads of the day, a variety of frame-mounted spring suspension devices.

He was talent spotted by bicycle maker Harry G. Rouse of Peoria, Illinois and the two went into business together as the Rouse-Duryea Cycle Company. This company – via gun and sword maker Ames Manufacturing of Chicopee, Massachusetts – made the Sylph ‘comfort’ bike for men and women.

An 1892 trade catalogue for the company said:

“Our Mr. C.E. Duryea is well known as one of the most prolific practical cycle inventors in America, and as the originator of number cycling features of great value.”

In 1891, Charles designed a gasoline-powered engine but didn’t progress with it. His brother – who had joined the Rouse-Duryea Cycle Company – carried on working on the engine, and perfected it. In 1893, Charles Duryea made the first trip in an American-made, gasoline-powered ‘automobile.’

By 1896 – while still working in the bicycle trade – Charles and Frank Duryea offered for sale the first commercial automobile in the US, the Duryea Motor Wagon. One of these was bought by Henry Wells of New York.

On May 30th 1896 Wells drove his Duryea Motor Wagon into New York City to take part in a horseless carriage race organised by Cosmopolitan magazine (then called The Cosmopolitan). While racing on public roads, he crashed into Evelyn Thomas, riding a Columbia bicycle on Broadway near West 74th Street. Wells became the first motorist arrested for what would later become known as dangerous driving.

Thomas had been planning to attend a Civil War Memorial Day service but, instead, was hospitalised with a fractured leg. While in hospital, she was visited by Horatio Earle (also see above), the leading light of the League of American Wheelmen, and who had been elected to the Michigan Senate in 1890 (It was Earle, a cyclist, who pushed through legislation to create the State Highway Department and who later pushed for the earliest freeways in America).

Thomas related her story to Earle and both agreed that cyclists’ rights on the highway would need protecting from a new menace on the road.

Duryea’s Motor Wagon sold in low numbers (13, in fact, unlucky for some, including Ms Thomas), but a vehicle inspired by the Duryea vehicle would soon sell in its millions. But the Model T wasn’t the first motorcar built by Henry Ford. He called his first vehicle the Quadricycle: it used four bicycle wheels, it was chain driven and it even had a bicycle lamp on the front. All of this is natural enough: Henry Ford was a cyclist and even when he had a car factory he rode his bicycle to work.

Ford promoted his cars by demonstrating how fast they could go. To do this he hired bicycle racing champions, Barney Oldfield and Tom Cooper.

Another famous car racer was also a cyclist. And, in fact, remained a cyclist. Or, strictly speaking, a tricyclist. Lionel Martin was the co-founder of the famous motor marque Aston Martin, the British sports car driven by 007 James Bond. Martin was a racing cyclist and was the holder of a number of long-distance records, including tandem and tricycle records. He was a tricyclist to his dying day. Literally. He was killed in October 1945 after being knocked from his tricycle by a motorcar on a suburban ‘rat run’ road in Kingston upon Thames. Ironically, he got into motoring after being thrown from his tricycle in 1900 by a waywardly-driven motorcar. “I saw the monster approaching and I threw myself and ‘iron’ into the nearest ditch, counting myself lucky to escape with my life,” he later wrote. He and his business partner Robert Bamford became specialists in taking ordinary cars and ‘souping them up’ to go faster. The Aston Martin name came from a hill climb race at Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire (close to the modern day Aston mountain bike course in the Wendover woods). Martin drove a modified Singer car very fast up this climb and, when Bamford & Martin Ltd needed a name for their new car brand, they chose to combine the words Aston and Martin. Singer cars were produced by a company that, of course, had started life as a manufacturer of bicycles. George Singer’s bicycle company was one of the earliest, having been founded in Coventry in 1874, and produced high-wheelers at first and Safeties later. George Singer, while still a maker of bicycles, was Mayor of Coventry three years in succession from 1891-1893.

One of the key engine parts used by Singer, Ford, Aston Martin and all other automobile manufacturers was the spark plug. The best known brand of spark plug was created by Albert Champion, a French road bicycle racer who moved to the US. Champion won the 1899 Paris–Roubaix one-day race. In 1904 he founded the Champion Ignition Company to make spark plugs; in 1909 the name changed to AC Spark Plug Company, after Champion’s initials. Today the brand is known as ACDelco. Champion spark plugs were used in the rocket engines that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Moon.

AVIATION
On May 30th 1899, Wilbur Wright wrote to the Smithsonian Institution, asking for papers on man’s attempt to fly. He paid for the papers from his and his brother’s bicycle business. The accounts for the Wright Cycle Co. includes an 1899 entry of $5.50 “for books on flying.”

“I am an enthusiast but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine,” he wrote to the Smithsonian, revealing he was “about to begin a systematic study of the subject in preparation for practical work to which I expect to devote what time I can spare from my regular business.”

He and his brother would take turns to man their bicycle store as they tested first a kite prototype and then larger scale gliders in 1900, 1901 and 1902. Their first powered aeroplane in 1903 used bicycle chains and sprockets to link the propellors. Their aeroplane frames were made up of bicycle-type double-triangles. Wilbur’s visionary ‘wing warping’ technique of controlling an aircraft’s pitch, roll and yaw was developed in 1899 after twisting an empty bicycle tube box with the ends removed. Wing warping is still used today, albeit with ailerons.

The Wright Brothers had used one of their bicycles to work out their ideal wing shape. The brothers took turns pedalling their converted machine in Dayton, Ohio. A handlebar-mounted wheel was fitted with two metal plates, one flat, one curved, ninety degrees apart. Orville and Wilbur used the device to measure air resistance.

“The results obtained with the rough apparatus…gave evidence of such possibility of exactness,” wrote Wilbur.

By riding along and generating some wind flow, the brothers were able to disprove earlier theories on lift.

The brothers later invented the wind tunnel to fine tune their early experiments in aerodynamics. This was a box six feet long and sixteen inches square on the inside. They mounted a fan attached to a sheet metal hood to one side and replaced a panel on the top of the box with a pane of glass so they could see inside. The fan moved the air through the tunnel at 27 miles per hour and the brothers tested hundreds of small sections of wings and wing shapes. High-tech wind tunnels would, of course, be later used to fine-tune the best aerodynamic shapes for bicycles…

By 1903, the brothers had achieved their goal of constructing a practical flying machine capable of remaining in the air for extended periods of time and operating under the full control of the pilot.

The earlier, smaller machines had been built and tested in the Wright’s bicycle store, in full view of customers.

In a later patent infringement case, the Wright brothers had to recall these early experiements to prove their patents.

Orville remembered spending long hours at the bicycle shop, waiting on customers, performing repairs, and constructing his kite.

“I was not able to be present when the structure was flown as a kite, but I operated the machine in our store before it was taken out to be flown,” Orville told the court.

The brothers were cycling enthusiasts. In 1892, Orville bought a new Columbia safety bicycle for $160. In the same year, Wilbur purchased a used Eagle safety bicycle for $80. Orville entered bicycle races put on by the YMCA Wheelmen. Wilbur liked to ride more slowly, taking in the passing scenery and, importantly, watching birds fly.

It’s therefore entirely possible that powered flight was conceived from the saddle.

Originally small-town publishers and jobbing printers, the Wrights were inspired by their new found passion for bicycles to open a bicycle sales and repair shop called the Wright Cycle Exchange at 1005 West Third Street in Dayton, Ohio in 1892.

As their business grew, the Wright brothers moved their bicycle shop six times and changed the name to the Wright Cycle Co. in 1894.

In April 1896, the Wrights introduced their first in-house bike, the Van Cleve. Catharine Benham Van Cleve Thompson, the Wright brother’s great, great grandmother, had been among Dayton’s first settlers. Later in the year, the Wrights introduced a second, less expensive model called the St. Clair. Again, the name was drawn from local history; Arthur St. Clair had been the first president of the Northwest Territory, which later became Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

The Wright Bicycle Co. was profitable for many years. In 1897, their best year, they made $3000 between them at a time when the average American worker was doing well to make $500 per year. The Wright’s stopped producing own-label bikes in 1904. The bike store continued to sell branded bikes and P&A but was converted to a machine shop in 1909 when the Wright Company, an aircraft manufacturing business, started producing bicycle-inspired parts for aeroplane engines.

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‘Roads Were Not Built For Cars’ will contain lots of detail on the history of roads and how even many multi-lane highways were built that wide long before cars. The print book, iPad and Kindle versions, are available for pre-order on Kickstarter until April 20th 2013.

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Archive

January 18, 2012 by carltonreid

Oldest bike shops in the world survived challenge from ‘the internet’ of the 1890s

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I’m writing a book about the US and UK cyclist organisations of the 1880s and 1890s which lobbied for good roads – and got them – before the motorcar came along and stole their thunder. ‘Roads Were Not Built For Cars’ will be a social history of the bicycle’s contribution to public life, arguing that cars are the johnny-come-latelies on the highways of Britain and America.

The role of bike shops in the spread of the popularity of cycling is underplayed, or not mentioned, in pretty much all of the bicycle history books I’ve consulted so far.

To research the book (which will be a free e-book, supported by trade advertising, as well as an all-singing, all-dancing paid-for e-book and print title) I’m reading widely, including poring over bicycle trade journals, yellowed with age. As a bike trade mag veteran I’m finding this research illuminates the present.

Bicycle retailers have been fighting against sellers of cheap Bicycle Shaped Objects for at least 120 years. Tescos and Wal-Mart muscling in on bike shop sales isn’t a new phenomenon: the cycle retailers of the 1890s also railed against the supermarkets of their day. When Specialized and other specialty-channel brands talk about protecting independent dealers, they’re echoing the concerns and sales pitches of equivalent bike brands in the 1890s.

Outing Bicycle said in an 1897 ad: “We don’t want our machines disgraced by associating them with sour kraut, pig iron and cheese sandwich dealers.”

An editorial in US weekly trade magazine Cycling Life, also in 1897, railed against department stores. It was necessary to “check the evil before it becomes too great for suppression.”

The magazine recommended the creation of a “separate classification to the bicycle sold by the department stores and thereby distinguish it from other machines”, adding “it is clear that if supply houses and bicycle makers do not mutually assist each other in crushing out the competition of department stores the stores will swallow up the reputation of both.”

Cycling Life had little to say on the challenge posed by Sears Roebuck & Co. Perhaps bicycles-by-mail were deemed too uncouth to even mention? Sales via independent bicycle dealers would soon be lost to the early mail order specialists.

Just as bike sales over the the internet have impinged on many modern dealers, the bike shops of the late 1890s faced similar challenges. In 1895, Sears, Roebuck & Co. of the US was producing a 532-page catalogue.

Who could resist Dr. Chaise’s Nerve And Brain Pills? This was a patent medicine cure for those with “overworked sexual excesses.” There were also items such as shoes, fishing tackle, glassware, guns (lots of guns, including specialist ones for cyclists) and, of course, bicycles and bike parts, such as wheels, valve stems, child seats, horns, clothing and pumps.

Cyclists in the US even helped such a trade to flourish not only because they bought mail order but because their championing of better roads to ride on led, in turn, to the ability for postal services to reach into the far reaches of the US. Bad rural roads had previously kept many communities cut off from the rest of society for much of the year: railroads weren’t everywhere. Today, Chain Reaction Cycles sends bike kit all over the world; in the 1890s, so did Sears Roebuck & Co. It claimed it was “The Cheapest Supply House On Earth” and that “Our Trade Reaches Around The World’”. (However, despite its grandiose claim, the only shipping rates in the Sears Roebuck catalogues of the 1890s are for American States).

The late 1890s were a golden age for bicycles. They were seen as technological marvels and were ridden by Royals and rich young blades. In 1891, entry level bicycles were sold for at least $100 a piece. Fancier bicycles sold for $150 or more. To put this into perspective, a worker in one of the many factories producing bicycles in 1891 would have to work for six months to be able to afford one of the items he was assembling.

Prior to the boom of 1895-7, bicycles were the red Ferraris of the day: fast playthings of the rich.

When bicycles were luxury items, there were few bicycle retailers. When the middle classes started buying bicycles in big numbers, the number of specialist bicycle retailers increased to cope with demand. There were 100,000 visitors to a cycle show in New York in 1896, of which 2000 were ‘cycle agents’, such as bike shops, and hardware stores which sold bikes. In 1897 America manufactured 1 million bicycles; England made 600,000. American and English bicycles were exported around the world but, until the bubble bursting required “dumping” product overseas, the biggest markets were domestic markets.

Bicycle shop owners made a tidy living. The Wright Brothers – they who, in 1903, perfected powered flight (one of the brothers is seen in the shop’s workshop, above) – paid for their aviation experiments from the profits generated in their bicycle shop, founded in 1892. The Wright Cycle Co. of Dayton, Ohio, was profitable for many years. In 1897, their best year, they made $3000 between them at a time when a very respectable white-collar wage was $500 per year.

One of the reasons bike shops made so much money – apart from the crazed cravings of customers, who had to have the buzz product of the day – was because of manufacturer’s sales tactics that would later be taken up with gusto by automobile manufacturers. Bikes were bought on credit, with instalment payments a novelty at the time. Bicycle manufacturers also innovated with “planned obsolescence”, creating models with short lifespans before another, improved model came out (it was manufacturers who most benefitted from this; bike shops had to offer trade-in deals and then offload “dated” bicycles as secondhand machines, these went for as low as $15, making bicycles more affordable for the masses, the bicycle was soon to become, truly, the “peoples’ nag”).

1897 was to be the peak year for the upper and middle class bicycle boom, in both America and England, with America witnessing the bursting of the bubble first. After 1897 trade in the US started going downhill, prices plummeted.

In England, the boom was also over by 1897 but it took at least another year before it was obvious the craze was at an end. Travel writing husband and wife team Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell said 1899 “was as bad a year as the (bicycle) trade has ever seen.”

As bicycle retailing became less profitable, the numbers of bicycle retailers fell through the floor. Bad for bicycle manufacturers, good for aviation. After 1897, sales – and profits – at the Wright Cycle Co. were much reduced. On May 30th 1899, Wilbur Wright wrote to the Smithsonian Institution, asking for papers on man’s attempt to fly. He paid for the papers from his and his brother’s bicycle business. The accounts for the Wright Cycle Co. includes an 1899 entry of $5.50 “for books on flying.” (Wright Cycle Co. stopped producing own-label bikes in 1904. The bike store continued to sell branded bikes and P&A but was converted to a machine shop in 1909 when the Wright Company, an aircraft manufacturing business, started producing bicycle-inspired parts for aeroplane engines).

Sears Roebuck & Co. didn’t cause the bicycle crash of post-1897 but it made life much more difficult for bicycle retailers. The mail order giant was selling bicycles for as low as $7.50 by 1900.

Retailers of every stripe were impacted by price-cutting by department stores and mail order merchants. Manhattan’s Siegel-Cooper department store sold $100 bicycles for just $22 in 1897. The Sears Roebuck catalogue boasted:

“This book tells just what your storekeeper at home pays for everything he buys and will prevent him from overcharging you on anything you buy from him.”

Yet despite the market-warping power of the department stores and early mail order giants – they were the Amazon.com’s of their day – some bike shops founded before the Great War still exist today.

Pearson Cycles of Sutton, West London, was founded in 1860. Howes of Cambridge was founded twenty years earlier. Both pre-date the modern bicycle. Pearson’s started life as a blacksmiths; John Howes was a wheelright and carriage maker.

Pearson Cycles – seen above, on the right – is still in the same building as the original blacksmith’s forge, albeit much renovated. Brothers Guy and Will Pearson – the fifth generation from the family to run the shop – recently opened a new branch, a few miles away in Sheen.

“We have a slow roll-out programme; one store every 150 years,” Will jokes. The shop is now very high tech (the new ‘concept store’ is a bicycle fitting specialist and was opened by Sean Kelly, the dominant classics rider of the 1980s) but, when needed, an item from the 1860 forge is still used in the workshop:

“The anvil still gets dragged out for occasional stubborn workshop jobs, or customers.”

According to the website for Howes Cycles, the business has “traded in the heart of Cambridge in Regent Street for over one and a half centuries.”

Store and family historian Richard Howes says:

“Family legend has it that one of the [Howes family] went to Paris to an exposition in 1868, saw this strange two wheeled thing and thought ‘I could make that with the equipment we already have in Cambridge.’ So he did. We still have one of the high wheelers we made back then.”

In America, the oldest still-trading bike shop is Bishop’s Bicycles of Milford, Ohio, founded in 1890. Kopp’s Cycle of Princeton, New Jersey, was founded by E.C. Kopp in 1891 at the tail-end of the high-wheeler era. Safety bicycles, with two equal sized wheels and later shod with new-fangled pneumatic tyres, were disparagingly known as “jiggers” by the gentlemen on their elevated steeds but soon dominated the scene, leading to increased business for specialist retailers such as Bishop’s and Kopp’s.

The father of Charles Kuhn, the current owner of Kopp’s, bought the business from the founder’s wife in the 1940s.

Kuhn Snr and Englishman Dick Swann - who I knew, and who I’ve mentioned previously – pioneered the US import of Italian racing bicycles and parts in the 1960s.

The oldest retail bike shop in the United States still owned by the same family is the wonderfully named Greenlees Bicycle Hospital of Knoxville, TN. The second oldest still owned by the same family is Bumstead’s Bicycles of Ontario, California, founded in 1909.

Guthrie Bikes of Salt Lake City was founded as a bicycle manufacturer in 1888, converting to retail in 1907.

In the book – due to be published early in 2013 – I’ll delve deeper into the important role of bike shops in the development of cycle sport, cycle touring and, later, motoring.

American and British cyclists of the 1890s saved roads for ALL users

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

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The “Mecca of all good cyclists”: Ripley Road

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How two cycling organisations (and a Minister for War) created better roads for all

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Pickwick Bicycle Club, 1870

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World’s first cycling faceplant, 1865 (rider wasn’t wearing a helmet, but he didn’t die)

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MOTORISTS’ FRONT OF JUDEA: What Have The Cyclists Ever Done for Us?

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Oldest bike shops in the world survived challenge from ‘the internet’ of the 1890s

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