Kuklos, Of Wiggling (1927). Section two of three
So bicycling became general and popular early in this century, passing into the hands of those who had less money to spend, whose need and appreciation of the bicycle were alike greater than in those earlier riders.
The two stories of the bicycle and of the motor have one part in common. Organised racing for motors began in 1905-6; and the racing motorist’s thrilling experience, plus the technical and competitive concentration in the factories, led to swift and surprising reductions in the height and bulk and weight of motor vehicles. On the earlier motorcycles the rider sat as high as on the bicycle. It was in 1906 that I took one back to its maker at Cleckheaton and said (with deep feeling) that I would never ride a motor-bicycle again until I could sit on it with both feet flat on the ground; and they laughed at me. Twelve months later, the same pioneer maker told me: “You were right; we’ve all got to do it.”
But all this time the bicycle remained as in 1895. So far as materials and workmanship go, it was faultless. The British bicycle has always been the best in the world. But its design was obviously stagnant and obsolete. In 1895 many main roads were rough, and by-roads were deeply loose and rutted. Riding from Bradford to London in 1898 I recorded that the Great North Road between Grantham and Stamford was “grass-grown and stony, with only two wheel-tracks to ride upon,” while the same famous highway between Hitchin and Welwyn was so deep in flints and gravel that my back tyre was ruined. There was no motor traffic at all. For such conditions as those was that bicycle designed which most people are still buying in 1927!
So the first decade of the twentieth century saw the bicycle selling in huge quantities, but almost exclusively as a vehicle of utilitarian necessity, and by virtue of its high quality and low price. Otherwise there was a slump in the more intellectual uses of cycling. With few exceptions, the big makers had betrayed the nation’s trust in them and dishonoured their high mission. They were now all motorists, and knew nothing of practical cycling under the new conditions. The cycling journals were withdrawn one after another in melancholy procession, and the C.T.C. lost forty thousand members in ten years.
At the time of the Great War’s outbreak, then, the cycling situation was Gilbertian. The revolution in road construction had reached its zenith. Following the pioneer introduction of “Westrumite,” that dust-laying spray of 1903, the county road surveyors of Nottingham and Kent showed what could be done with “tarmac”-cubes of granite or other hard stone immersed in tar. Along these smooth and rutless roads, the motor vehicles went ever thicker and faster, and they were low-built to the limit. Yet the cyclist was only offered (and is still only offered in the main) machines designed in 1895 for rough roads and no motors! He could only reach his too-high perch by an athletic feat, and when emergency called for a rapid dismount, he required more room for it than the traffic could afford him. Too soon the warning of Ecclesiastes came to pass – “They shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way . . . and desire shall fail.” With one accord the elderly put their big bicycles away in attics and toolsheds, and relapsed on golf, bridge, and engines, saying, “Cycling is dead”; and they spend their remaining years in trying to believe that they are as happy as they used to be.
But you cannot kill immortality, or any of its handmaidens, symbols or instruments. The great old cycle-makers, now heavily upholstered in water- jackets and pigskin, continued year by year to sell more bicycles of obsolete design and superb quality than ever. They were interested in selling bicycles, but not a bit interested in cycling or cyclists. Probably they were riders themselves in 1900, but “that first fine careless rapture” has left them for ever. Kings had arisen over Egypt which knew not Joseph. If all the orders for bicycles suddenly ceased they would not blame themselves at all, but sigh and put the shutters up and say “Kismet; after all, what else could you expect?” They never do anything to encourage the pastime.
Almost do they apologise for it, saying “Why won’t cyclists have rear lamps?”
Just lately it has begun to dawn on them that something subterranean, unnatural, and almost unfair has been happening. When, about 1900, they turned to petrol, and waited for the bicycle to die, and fatuously wondered why it didn’t, they reckoned without the athletic cyclist, the racing man, the abiding minority of intelligentsia and enthusiasts. The racing motorist and the racing cyclist, working on parallel lines, identified faults, calculated stresses, foresaw the increasing congestion on the highways, and re-designed their respective vehicles accordingly. The motoring speedmen worked in full limelight and hand-in-hand with the best engineering brains of the day. The cycling speedmen, forgotten and almost despised, continued to work in the dark places of the earth, in cellars and huts; they had already been doing it for some years. Both achieved success on the same lines; both came out on top. In both cases-the repetition is necessary for emphasis-the height and weight of their vehicles were materially reduced, while strength and safety and convenience were enormously increased at the same time. All over the country racing cyclists went into business as makers of low and light bicycles to order. Some of the old firms still further increased their turnover by supplying the necessary parts to these local makers. Over thirty years ago I rode bicycles built in a little Bradford shop from Eadie or Chater Lea fittings.
This little historical survey has now led us to the years of the Great War, which brought about a setback for cycling as it did for everything else worth having. In 1919, after the Armistice, the big cycle makers resumed the mass production of their 1895 design.
Both the big makers and the public are now (1927) waking up, mechanically speaking. At least twenty- three years ago, the present secretary of the C.T.C. persuaded one of the great and famous old firms to build him a light and low machine for his fast work on the road. Twenty years later that firm adopted the same design as a standard pattern! Seven years ago a Manchester man whose turn-out was one bicycle per week (and no assistance) designed a dropped-frame bicycle with straight tubes. Every single one of the big old firms has now adopted it. Even the managing director of a world-famous Coventry firm wrote in a trade organ this year: “Nearly all bicycle makers have remained stagnant in the matter of bicycle design.” Our oldest friends in the trade are now trying to overtake the long lead they gave away to the newcomers-some of whom can already appoint agents all over the land. In a few cases the big old firms seem likely to succeed. But they have allowed France to come to the front also.
So the cycling of to-day is a matter of violent contrasts. Nine out of ten of the people who want bicycles still trustfully enter a shop and buy one of the brand-new machines of 1895 design which the agent tells them are the best procurable. How could he know otherwise ? He is no more of a cyclist than the people who make them, though I would not dispute his authority in the important matters of bassinettes and gramophones. Mark well, then, the eccentric behaviour of these victims when they leave the shop with their museum specimens, complete with “steps ” and “dressguards,” leaving also behind them from six to sixteen guineas-unless they prefer the popular system of paying half-a-crown per week for a month and being sued in the County Court for the remainder. See how anxiously their gaze sweeps the horizon as they seek a kerbstone, hedge-bank, hillock, or other elevation from which to “mount.” Sometimes they take a flying leap through the firmament from the pedal. Anon they place a foot on the “step” – that quaint survival of 1895 – and then hop in the wake of the machine in deplorable imitation of an intoxicated kangaroo or aged frog. By the same complicated and undignified gymnastics, but reversed, they “dismount.”
Observe the lady who has accepted the Standard Roadster of the big maker, 1927 pattern. The handlebar curls up around her ears. The chain is covered with more obsolete relics of 1895 –either a Ford body in tin or an attache-case of synthetic leather. These are “to keep her skirt out of the chain,” although that disappearing garment never comes within a foot of the chain, and may generally be observed in a state of retreat, joyously nonchalant, to the vicinity of the waist. The high wheels and bracket, the thick and lifeless tyres, are still those of 1895.
When faced with the no-longer-avoidable necessity of “mounting” the thing, she takes her stance on the west side of it, and revolves the cranks by hand (as if setting a clock) until they are in the most favourable position for the great adventure. Then, straddling broadly across the loop of the frame, and with both her arms akimbo, she jumps wildly into mid-air, and subsequently comes down wallop on to her elevated perch. The gods on Olympus, torn between laughter and grief, collapse in hysterics. The deluded lady eventually reaches home to remark that: “Biking is beastly hard work; can’t we afford a car? ”
“Nine out of ten,” I said. What, then, of the one enlightened man or woman in all this Sodom and Gomorrah of ignorance, delusion, and victimisation? His bicycle is his Third Leg; and his other two being just about the same height, he can touch ground with both feet while seated. He has ten to fifteen pounds less weight, ten inches lower gear, two inches lower wheels, two inches lower crank-bracket, and two to four inches less frame-height. As easily as by rubbing a magic lamp, he and his sister have found the Open Sesame to many of the best things life offers them.
Now that they can cover their eighty to a hundred miles a day more easily than their fifty of yore, even the limited leisure of the week-end brings Burford close to Birmingham, Moel Siabod to Liverpool, Ingleborough to Leeds, Ben More to Glasgow, Chanctonbury Ring to London. Iron-workers of Stockton and Middlesbrough ride across England and back on a Saturday and Sunday; they have been to Borrowdale, and bathed in Derwentwater. The dynamic young athletes of the records ride from London to York at over twenty miles an hour all the way, and cover more than four hundred miles in the day. Our emancipated cyclists often ride all night, breakfast at sunrise, and sleep (when they must) “at the foot of yonder nodding beech.”
When the Armistice brought a sort of dawn to Britain’s darkest night, the members of the Cyclists’ Touring Club numbered but 8,500. This year will see them 25,000. No longer fettered and bound by the dreadful draperies of the ‘nineties, the women are also and at last on light little bicycles that almost go by themselves; you see the happy bands everywhere. The bicycle has won through. Only such another futile cataclysm as the Great War can ever again check its progress.