Velocipedes

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May 21, 2013 by carltonreid

Britain’s first bicycle path – separated and swept to boot – was suggested in 1821


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lewisgompertzThe first cycle paths in the UK were installed (badly) in the 1930s. However, the idea for such dedicated ways – segregated and swept, even – was first proposed in 1821. Given that what we would recognise as a bicycle wasn’t developed until the 1860s, such a proposal seems rather prescient. The proposal was made by Lewis Gompertz, an industrious inventor (thank him for the drill chuck bit), who also happened to be vegetarian and Jewish. His radical vegetarianism led him to campaign against the mistreatment of the animals that were at the heart Victorian street transport: horses.

Gompertz was one of the co-founder’s of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which later had the Royal added to the front, creating the RSPCA. He preferred walking to riding in a horse-pulled carriage and was therefore much taken with the German machine that meant ‘fast foot’ in Latin. The velocipede running machine – or hobbyhorse, a bicycle without cranks or pedals – was introduced to the world by Baron von Drais. He had created his contraption in 1817 as a horse-substitute because, it is now believed, the price of oats, and everything else, had soared after the planet was plunged into darkness after the volcanic eruption of Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora in 1815. 1816 was known as the Year Without a Summer.

Velocipede riding became all the rage, including in Regency London, where Gompertz lived. However, it was a short-lived mania, and once Regency dandies had tired of it by 1820, velocipede riding was all but extinguished as a form of transport. Undeterred by its precipitous fall from grace, Gombertz wished to revive the velocipede. He came up with some ingenious modifications to the original velocipede, including a hand-crank attached to the front wheel, rowed for forward propulsion.

Gompertz velocipede addition

His addition failed to catch on. For Gompertz, the lack of interest in the two-wheel singletrack vehicle wasn’t due to poor vehicle design but to the surface upon which the vehicle was forced to run. Hobbyhorses, with their wooden wheels, were more usually urban runabouts, not long-distance machines. They were more suited to the smooth block-covered footways in towns rather than the small stone macadamised roads of the countryside. (In 1818, Britain had 114,379 miles of highways, of which 19,275 miles were turnpike roads, many of which were well-surfaced and carried ‘fast’ stagecoach traffic: 10mph was fast).

Not that velocipedes were welcome on footways. “All cyclists ride on the pavement” has been a hate epithet since bicycling’s very beginnings. Milan banned hobby horses from the sidewalk in 1818; London and New York did the same in 1819.

Law enforcement against “cyclists” started early, too. One London newspaper reported that “the crowded state of the metropolis does not admit of this novel mode of exercise, and it has been put down by the Magistrate of police.”

According to Gompertz, writing in 1821, it was…

“chiefly owing to [velocipedes] having been prohibited the use of the footpaths, which, if necessary in some places, should have been accompanied with an Act allowing them three or four feet of the width of the roads for their sole use, and for that to be kept in good repair; this they deserve, and persons while using them would not be exposed to danger where there are many carriages and horses, nor be obliged to wade through mud…”

Gompertz, ahead of his time, added “and it is only by this being adopted that mankind would reap the advantage from machines for this purpose, of being converted from one of the slowest animals in the creation, to one of great continued speed from his own salubrious exertions…”

NOTES
Thanks to Professor Dr Hans Lessing for alerting me to Gompertz’ views on separated velocipede infrastructure, and to Les Bowerman for supplying a copy of ‘Addition to the Velocipede’ in the Register of Arts, Manufacture and Agriculture, 2nd series, no. CCXXIX, June 1821.

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December 18, 2012 by carltonreid

Chain smoking: when bicycling was sponsored by baccy

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CyclingWeedTobaccoIn the late 1890s, Britain’s biggest tobacco company was the main sponsor of a chain of Cyclists’ Chalets. There were plans to build a chain of 500 such chalets, all part sponsored by W.D. & H.O. Wills. Only 40 are reported to have been built. I can’t find any illustrations which show what these chalets would have looked like but they were probably similar to Clarion clubhouses which later dotted the countryside around northern, industrial cities. There’s just one of these clubhouses left, Clarion House, near Clitheroe in Lancashire, built in 1912.

Refreshment rooms for cyclists were all the rage in Victorian England. At Carding Mill, in Shropshire, Mrs. James’s temperance refreshment rooms, of the mid-1880s, catered to middle class riders out for a spin in the countryside on their high wheelers; cyclists were “specially attended to.” Cycling was promoted as a healthy pursuit and the no-alchohol temperance movement, in vogue at the same time as late Victorian cycling, could see the benefits of being aligned with such a pursuit. While booze might have been out, baccy back then was totally fine. In 1898, when W.D. & H.O. Wills was sponsoring Cyclists’ Chalets, there would have been no raised eyebrows about “the cycling craze” being sponsored by “our trusted weed.”

bicycle for sale cigarette cardWills was a vigorous marketeer. In 1887 it was the first UK tobacco company to include advertising cards in packs of cigarettes, and in the 1890s racing cyclists were included in the pantheon of sporting greats portrayed on these advertising cards. Later, general cycling images were used on cigarette cards.

London newspapers in January 1898 reported that the Cyclists’ Chalets Company had ambitious plans:

“500 chalets to be erected on principal cycling routes in the Midlands and the South of England for the use of cyclists who may desire light refreshments and temperance beverages. One chalet placed on the Bath road is said to have proved a great success.”

In his history of Wills, B. W. E. Alford wrote that the Cyclists’ Chalets Company:

“had been founded in response to the enormous popularity of cycling among the middle classes in the late 1890s – incidentally, a fashion eagerly followed by the younger members of the Wills family. The Cyclists’ Company had forty chalets, located in different parts of the country, where members could rest or shelter, and in each of these Wills’ tobaccos and cigarettes were given exclusive display.”

Such sponsorship was pedalling with the zeitgeist. Cycling was used to sell everything, from cotton reels to lime juice cordial.

VelocipedeTobacco1874

But tobacco companies were especially attracted to healthful cycling, and latched on to the activity from the very start. The Velocipede tobacco brand was created in 1869, soon after the start of the velocipede craze. Made by the Harris, Beebe & Co of Quincy, Illinois, Velocipede was a chewing tobacco. (Harris had a contract during the American Civil war, 1861-1865, to supply the Union army with tobacco). This advert was created in 1874.

OgdenCigaretteAdvert1900

Ogden’s Guinea Gold is here targeting the ‘New Woman’ of the Victorian era, who sought independence and freedom, awheel as well as in life in general. In Paris, an 1898 novel by Emile Zola, the character Pierre, a former priest, now a convert to cycling, asks, “So women are to be emancipated by cycling?” and Marie responds:

“Well why not? It may seem a droll idea; but see what progress has been made already! By wearing rationals women free their limbs from prison; then the facilities which cycling affords people for going out together tend to greater intercourse and equality between the sexes; the wife and the children can follow the husband everywhere, and friends like ourselves are at liberty to roam hither and thither without astonishing anybody. In this lies the greatest advantage of all, one takes a bath of air and sunshine, one goes back to nature, to the earth, our common mother, from whom one derives fresh strength and gaiety of heart! Just look how delightful this forest is. And how healthy the breeze that inflates our lungs! Yes, it all purifies, calms, and encourages one.’”

Cycling is still healthy but smoking very much isn’t. Not that tobacco companies have ever wanted to stress this harm. Far from it. Smoking wasn’t just portrayed as healthy, it was also shown as being sexy. In France, the cigarette cards of the 1890s were, ahem, a little racier than those produced in England:

french cigarette cars 85-1908

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November 23, 2012 by carltonreid

Hating cyclists has a long, long history

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The Twitter account @cyclehatred offers up a daily digest of spite and spittle aimed at the goodly, wonderful creatures who gad about on a benign form of unpowered transport. Such hatred is nothing new. The first two-wheeler users were also loathed. This was mostly because ‘running machines’, briefly popular from about 1817, were ridden by preening toffs. These Regency dandies took to velocipedes like ducks to water, and they were easy meat for ruffians eager to test their rock-throwing skills, and for caricaturists.

Charles Williams (1797-1830) was one of many Regency illustrators who ridiculed dandies, including those who strutted and strode astride their wooden hobby-horses. In 1819, when Williams created the illustration below, the first pedal-propelled bicycle had yet to be invented (that was in the mid-1860s, by Pierre Michaux and/or Pierre Lallement of Paris). Whether it was the ridicule from illustrators, or the rocks from ruffians, the velocipede fad didn’t last long: it was over by 1820.


The hatred thrown the way of those on velocipedes – also known as accelerators, pedestrian curricles, hobbies and a host of other names – was virulent on both sides of the Atlantic. The Federal Republican and Baltimore Telegraph of 1819 sniffed:

“A curious two-wheeled vehicle called the Velocipede has been invented, which is propelled by Jack-asses instead of horses.”


Baron von Drais, the German inventor of the ‘running machine’, had created his contraption in 1817 as a horse-substitute because, it is now believed, the price of oats, and everything else, had soared after the planet was plunged into darkness after the volcanic eruption of Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora in 1815. 1816 was known as the Year Without a Summer. But society was not yet ready for horseless transport and those connected to the horse trade – farriers, veterinary surgeons, blacksmiths – saw velocipedes, and their riders, as direct threats to their livelihoods.

And this hatred is clearly shown in Williams’s ‘Anti-dandy Infantry Triumphant or the Velocipede Cavalry’. A veterinary surgeon called Drench has knocked a dandy from his machine and is pumping him with a liquid (pitch?); a blacksmith called Anvil is smashing the dandy’s machine, and two other dandies are legging it – literally – over the hill, lest they too are prodded with pitch forks or bitten by the mutts of the locale.


The signpost says the dandies are on the way to Coventry. This is almost certainly a reference to the idiom “being sent to Coventry”, banished.

In 1811, the meaning of the term was defined in Francis Grose’s The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

To send one to Coventry; a punishment inflicted by officers of the army on such of their brethren as are testy, or have been guilty of improper behaviour, not worthy the cognizance of a court martial. The person sent to Coventry is considered as absent; no one must speak to or answer any question he asks, except relative to duty, under penalty of being also sent to the same place. On a proper submission, the penitent is recalled, and welcomed by the mess, as just returned from a journey to Coventry.

[It's accidentally appropriate that the artist chose this Midlands town because Coventry, of course, was, from the 1870s on, the hub of the British bicycle industry, domicile of James Starley, the "father of the bicycle industry". In 1885, his nephew John Kemp Starley built the Rover Safety bicycle, the direct ancestor of today's machines].

Some Regency dandies took to the countryside for long velocipede rides. But hobbyhorses, with their wooden wheels, were more usually urban runabouts, not long-distance machines. They were more suited to the smooth block pavements in towns rather than the macadamised roads of the countryside. (In 1818, Britain had 114,379 miles of highways, of which 19,275 miles were turnpike roads, many of which were well-surfaced and carried ‘fast’ stagecoach traffic: 10mph was fast).

Not that velocipedes were welcome on footways. “All cyclists ride on the pavement” has been a hate epithet since bicycling’s very beginnings (Milan banned hobby horses from the sidewalk in 1818; London and New York did the same in 1819).

Law enforcement against “cyclists” started early, too. One London newspaper reported that “the crowded state of the metropolis does not admit of this novel mode of exercise, and it has been put down by the Magistrate of police.”


When velocipede riders did venture away from towns, they could expect rough treatment. In 1819, a dandy riding on the road to Camberwell, three miles south of London – then a pastoral village not the busy place it is today – “attracted a great crowd, from the pressure of which he was, at his earnest solicitation, extracted by a passing coachman, who carried him and his ‘horse’ off on the roof.”

Williams wasn’t the only caricaturist to ridicule velocipedists of the day. The Cruikshank brothers, George and Robert, also had many digs at dandies. George, by far the more famous and successful of the two, created the classic illustration below, showing how horses and their riders might feel about a future where velocipedes became altogether too successful:


Robert, on the other hand, based his dislike of hobby horses on personal experience. He and a friend had ridden a pair of velocipedes down Highgate Hill in London, and had crashed into each other at high speed. Cruikshank’s book The Dandy’s Perambulations has gaily-dressed protagonists who are chased by geese and crash their hobbies.

William Heath also poked fun at dandies and their machines, as seen in this illustration.

And satirists, too, poured scorn on the early “cyclists”. One wrote of:

Patent pedestrian accellerators,
Floating velocipedes, perambulators,
Or hobbies, at present which so much the rage are,
That asses from Brighton they’ll banish, I wager.

Much of the hatred aimed at hobbyhorse riders was dandy-hate rather than hobbyhorse-hate. In an 1822 ditty, A S Grenville wrote:

Said Tom to Dick, ‘the other dav,
As they stood gazing on the way;—
Why, what is that-there thing,—
There? tis strange I vow ;—
It seems two wheels with wooden spring,
Darnation! see it go!
Cries Dick, that’s called Velocipede—
A creature without tail or head,
That wants nor whip nor prick,—
There’s nought to do but on and kick,
Away ’tis gone full speed!—
And will or stage or coach outrun,
In manner wonderful, indeed!
As very often it has done.
Well ! well! but what is that astride,—
There—kicking so, and tries to ride?
Wounds! how the thing does pant for breath—
Tis dying, sure, a shocking death!
What! that,—which looks—Mere, stiff as brass?
‘Tis nothing but a-Dandy Ass!

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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.

Ripley Road montage

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 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.

World's First Bicycle Headplant, Ansonia 1865

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’.

michaux stamp 1983In 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.

michauzcelebrationStuartMasonElliott

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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 3, 2012 by carltonreid

Climate change and bicycles

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Use of cars – unfettered individual motorised transport – plays a big part in man-made climate change. Cycling can make urban transport greener, almost as green as walking, and bicycles will play a key role in the cities of the future, even if transport engineers and city planners can’t quite see this yet.

The bicycle is future-proof because of its simplicity. It has the never-bettered ability to amplify human strength and extend the distance that a human can travel without the aid of a motor, or a horse.

And it was this ability – especially of the horse bettering kind – that led to the creation of what would become the bicycle. Interestingly, the contraption that would later morph into the bicycle was created in answer to a transport crisis brought on by a cataclysmic climatic event.

In April 1815 Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted spewing lava and ash until July of the same year. It was the biggest eruption in 1300 years and the sky was so loaded with dust that average global temperatures dipped, and artists had a field day, painting scenes with dramatic sunsets. 1816 became known as the ‘year without a summer’.

On holiday by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy and John William Polidori were trapped in Lord Byron’s house by constant rain. Byron suggested a essay writing competition: come up with a ghost story. Mary Shelley created Frankenstein; Polidori wrote The Vampyre. Not too far away, in the German Grand Duchy of Baden, a minor aristocrat noticed that horse travel was becoming crippingly expensive: harvests had failed due to the ash cloud, and staples such as oats had soared in price. Feeding a horse with oats – like feeding a car with petrol today – was becoming too expensive. This minor aristocrat was Baron Karl Von Drais.

He wanted to find a substitute for the horse. He created what he called the Running Machine, the Laufmaschine, what the French would call the vélocipède (from Latin, vēlōx fast and pēs foot). This was made of wood and – revolutionary in many ways – had two inline wheels. It didn’t have pedals, it was propelled by the feet striking the ground. It did not replace horses; it did not become poor man’s transport. In fact, the Draisinnes of 1817-19 were the toys of wealthy owners. Dandies, in particular, were much taken by this machine and there was a brief burst of enthusiasm for what were also called Accelerators.

The roads of the time were too rough and cut-up for extended use by these early velocipedes. Some riders therefore took to the pavements (sidewalks) and were duly fined, stiffly, for their incursions into the pedestrian’s domain.

Velocipedes were also used indoors, on groomed dirt surfaces. Dandies would learn to ride their machines in schools but some never left the confines of the indoor tracks, treating the premises as gymnasiums.


A postcard depicting the UK’s first-ever velocipede school has been found in the archives of Westminster City Council. This school was created in Westminster in 1818 by Denis Johnson, a coachmaker from Long Acre.
 
Westminster City Council is promoting the fact that the postcard shows that Westminster has been serious about cycle training for hundreds of years and has linked the finding of the postcard to the council’s Cycle Confident cycle training. The postcard features a much-used illustration of velocipede riding.

Denis Johnson (c.1760-1833) improved Drais’s machine and patented his version in December 1818. He called his machine a pedestrian curricle and made about 320 of them before the craze expired in 1819. Velocipedes went out of fashion; Johnson went back to creating carriages. It took the addition of pedals and cranks by Pierre Lallement of Paris in 1863 to spur the next round of innovations, innovations that eventually led to the bicycle we know today, which then spurred the development of powered trikes and bicycles, the start of the automotive and motorbike industries.