The Bicycle Book. Bella Bathurst

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СКАЧАТЬ bike and proved so successful it became cycling’s Model T – an affordable, high-quality, mass-market product which very probably converted thousands of people to the pleasures of cycling. The bike could deliver letters, take the children to school, convey newsboys from place to place. It could be used by policemen and butchers, telegraph boys and teachers. It belonged to everyone, not just to the rich. Quick, silent, unobtrusive and requiring far less skill or maintenance than a horse, the traditional diamond-frame suddenly seemed the ideal way to negotiate the streets. Just as significant was John Boyd Dunlop’s notion of fitting rubber tyres filled with air to his son’s trike. In 1889, the first Dunlop pneumatic tyre was tested on London’s streets to thigh-slapping ridicule and the confident prediction that it would never catch on.

      As the popularity of cycling increased through the 1890s, so the price began to come down. Manufacturers now offered hire purchase arrangements, and the bicycle’s obvious advantages for middle- and working-class commuters brought it to the point of near-ubiquity. Back in 1869, Scientific American had foreseen the results of such popularity. ‘The art of walking is obsolete,’ it claimed. ‘It is true that a few still cling to that mode of locomotion, are still admired as fossil specimens of an extinct race of pedestrians, but for the majority of civilised humanity, walking is on its last legs.’ In America, over two million bicycles were sold in 1897 alone, and in the UK the numbers of both small- and large-scale framemakers rose from 22,241 in 1895 to 46,039 in 1897. Small framemakers found the demand so overwhelming they couldn’t keep up. Metalworkers of all descriptions took to producing frames, setting up their own little workshops in sheds and backyards at home. Larger manufacturers included shipbuilders and munitions factories – places, in other words, which already had the tools and raw materials available, and which found knocking together a few bike frames on the side an easy transition to make. The bicycle’s leisured competitors did not do so well. In the US, by the late 1890s, the sudden passion for bicycles had led to a fall in sales of pianos by up to 50 percent.

      Back at home, the new interest in cycling brought with it an equal interest in matters of dress and diet. For men, woollen garments were thought best, topped off with a Norfolk jacket. Other more radical innovations were less popular. One outfitter offered a wind-cutter, worn strapped to the chest and shaped at an angle like a snowplough on a train. Different types of hat were suggested, including golf or cricket caps which could be worn with a wet cabbage leaf inside for refreshing evaporation on hot summer days. To disguise scrawny legs, stockings with extra-thick knitting on the calves were offered. For racers, good, stodgy, protein-rich meals topped off with strong liquor were recommended. When in 1875 David Stanton set out to ride 100km round the Lille Bridge track, he supported himself with a combination of brandy-soaked sponge cake, mutton and tea. A couple of years later, Charles Spencer was advising racers that ‘The daily use of the cold bath, or tepid if necessary, cannot be too strongly insisted upon … and the avoidance of all rich viands, such as pork, veal, duck, salmon, pastry, &c, &c. Beef, mutton, fowls, soles, and fish of a similar kind, should form the principal diet.’ To ensure continuing vitality, it was also advised that ‘The mouth should always be kept shut. The nose is the proper organ to breathe through, and is provided with blood vessels to warm the incoming air, and with minute hairs to catch particles of dust, germs of infection, and other extraneous matter … To ride with an open mouth, besides giving one an idiotic appearance, is apt to cause severe cold, neuralgia, &c.’ Many guides advised against riding uphill. In Cycling as a Cause of Heart Disease of 1895, physician George Herschell threatened a terrible fate. Should the rider persist in heading upwards, it was almost certain that their heart would be unable to cope. ‘A time will come when it will be unable to contract effectively at all. The rider will lose consciousness, and possibly die then and there.’

      As bicycles became easier to ride they became more widespread, and as they became more widespread so too did conflict with other road users. Then as now, there were many who felt that two-wheeled traffic should not be granted the same status as four-wheeled. Since in its early stages the cycling craze was limited mainly to the young and rich, pedestrians did their best to stop them either by fair means (setting the law on them) or foul (stabbing umbrellas through passing spokes). The main complaint was that they frightened the horses and, since the majority of road freight then went by horse, it could legitimately be claimed that cyclists were disrupting the commercial life of the country. In Leeds in 1893 a cyclist passing a solicitor on a carriage failed to ring his bell. The solicitor struck out with his whip, lassoed the man round the neck, dragged him to the ground and ran over him with the carriage. When fined £30 for the assault, he was unrepentant: ‘I should do it again and let you take your luck, even though it killed you. To us gentlemen who drive spirited horses, you cyclists are a great nuisance.’ In 1882, one ‘respectable gentleman’ was fined 40 shillings for riding ‘furiously’ through London at 10mph, and when a female horse-rider became entangled with a group of racers on the Great North Road, she took her complaint to the police. Fearing that the sympathy of the public would lie overwhelmingly with the rider and that legislation would surely follow, the National Cyclists’ Union (NCU, later the CTC) took the extraordinary step of pre-emptively banning all forms of mass-start road racing from 1888 onwards. Time-trialling (individual timed races against the clock) became the only alternative. Even these were organised and conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy similar to that surrounding the acid raves of the 1990s. Would-be participants were given codes and passwords and told to turn up at some distant corner of the country wearing strange clothes at odd hours of the night. The ban was not finally repealed until the 1950s, a fact which partly explains Britain’s isolation from the rest of Europe’s racing world and its relative lack of pro-level champions.

      But neither legal nor practical obstacles deterred the new enthusiasts. The bicycle was quick, silent, straightforward and ideal for covering city-sized distances. It had grace and style and the thrust of modernity behind it. It could be adapted for speed or designed to take heavy burdens. It coped easily with the relatively shallow gradients of most urban hills. And always it trailed behind it an indefinable sense of boyish joy that nothing – not even the clogging stress and grime of the great industrial towns – could ever quite suppress.

      It also had another unexpected result: it began to be seen as a tool of socialist revolt. Together with a group of disaffected colleagues from the Manchester Sunday Chronicle, Robert Blatchford founded the penny weekly the Clarion. Blatchford was a journalist and writer whose beliefs had been strongly marked both by his time in the army and by his experience of the Manchester slums. Writing under the pen name of Nunquam (short for Nunquam Dormio, or ‘I never sleep’), Blatchford’s real brilliance was to ally strong campaigning journalism with cycling. The Clarion was distributed by cyclists, and the National Clarion Cycling Club was founded by Blatchford’s colleague Tom Groom to spread the word. Socialism and bicycles were, Groom considered, perfect bedfellows. ‘Little troubles keep him (the cyclist) sympathetic – punctures, chains that break, nuts that loosen, lamps that won’t burn etc. Runs in the country and glorious sights prevent him from becoming narrow and bigoted … The frequent contrasts a cyclist gets between the beauties of nature and the dirty squalor of town make him more anxious than ever to abolish the present system.’

      The Clarion Scouts used their days off to paper their local areas with leaflets, pamphlets and copies of the Clarion, ‘nailing down lies and disposing of fables, improving the landscape by sticking up labels’. In some areas disputes arose between those who felt that the business of the NCCC should be to bring about the downfall of capitalism, and those who were much more interested in riding a bicycle as fast as possible. Despite an early move to prevent racing on the grounds that competition in any form clearly represented an attempt by bourgeois ruling forces to divide the proletariat, time-trialling did become an integral part of the NCCC. Trials would be organised most weekends, though it was, as always, conducted according to firm socialist principles: the National Racing Secretary Alex Taylor considering that ‘Our biggest asset lies in our being a working-class organisation … The knowledge that he is riding for a principle … gives new energy to tired legs.’ Even so, Robert Blatchford ended his life СКАЧАТЬ