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Chapter Two

You Say You Want a Revolution

To get to the place where Dave Yates is now, to be able to calculate so cleanly the angles and weights that separate a mountain bike from a tourer or a BMX from a racer, takes more than just experience. It takes history. Every part and every angle of a bicycle has an ancestry, a time when something else was tried and found either to fit the purpose or to form a mechanical dead end. It doesn’t really matter if the aim of the framebuilder was to produce a bike that was light or durable or speedy – in order for Graeme and me to have built our dream machines, someone somewhere long ago had to do the R&D. The loss of a second or a gram or a millimetre of travel will always have been achieved by one man’s trial and another man’s error.

And, perhaps because the history of the bicycle is relatively short and well documented, much of that history is still contentious. For as long as there are bicycles in the world, there will be people squabbling about who invented them. The truth is that it was a collaborative process – not quite invention by committee, but more a cumulative uncovering of basic mechanical principles. The British contribution was threefold: an Englishman came up with the tangential wheel and leather saddles, a Scotsman came up with crank pedals and another Scotsman working in Northern Ireland came up with pneumatic tyres. For the sake of European harmony and a quiet life, it’s easiest to agree that the French invented everything else.

On the other hand, if you go to Germany they will tell you unequivocally that the bicycle came straight down the line from the draisienne, or velocipede, a heavy, wooden two-wheeled contraption without pedals or steering mechanism invented by a civil servant in 1817. In his professional life, Baron Karl von Drais was Master of the Forests in the Duchy of Baden. In his private life, he was an enthusiastic amateur inventor. His first project – a horseless carriage – had failed, but his new running machine met a more generous reception. Made out of wood and iron, it looked like a big old-fashioned version of the pedal-less bikes that children now learn to ride on. Though its front wheel was moveable, it weighed a minimum of 20kg and the only way of guiding it was to lean from side to side while pushing it along with the feet. Its unreliable trajectory meant that city riders couldn’t help straying onto pavements, while its huge weight often left them with painful ruptures of the groin. The combination of heavy fines, hernias and public ridicule was not a winning one. Even so, great claims were made on the velocipede’s behalf. Its popularity spread, and soon much of Europe knew about the new fashion. In February1869, three young men on velocipedes announced that they had managed the 53-mile run from London to Brighton in only 15 hours, a feat which would have been more impressive if someone had not shortly afterwards walked the same route in 11½.

Some time later, a blacksmith from Dumfriesshire named Kirkpatrick Macmillan was arrested in Glasgow for dangerous driving. In June 1842, Macmillan was found riding along a pavement on a velocipede, knocking down a child in the process. More unusually, he claimed to have made the journey from Old Cumnock, 40 miles away, in only five hours. The secret, he claimed, was in the adaptations he had made to his machine. By adding cranks and pedals to the front axle, he had produced something which could be powered by the legs and balanced by its own velocity. Now, instead of shunting himself along, he could pedal continuously, and in doing so reach much greater speeds than were ever possible on the velocipede. His appearance had produced great interest among the locals and a visit from the Glasgow Herald. While conceding that Macmillan’s invention was ‘ingenious’, the reporter was not that impressed. ‘This invention,’ he wrote, ‘will not supersede the railways.’

But Macmillan did nothing to broadcast his new device, and in the end it was the French who successfully reinvented the wheel. Pierre Michaux in Paris, also a blacksmith, once again added cranks and pedals to the front axle of a wooden velocipede. More importantly, he published and exploited the design, and by doing so moved the bicycle one step closer to being. This time, the idea caught on. ‘Boneshakers’, as they were nicknamed, became popular among young Parisians and then throughout Europe, though, as their name implied, they weren’t a comfortable ride. Since the wheels were wooden, every jolt and bump from the road surface was transmitted directly through the frame. Mounting required a running vault into the saddle, and since the whole thing weighed at least 30kg, any misjudgements could be permanently disabling.

Still, the impact on nineteenth-century society of the new contraptions was extraordinary. Charles Spencer, an early advocate of cycling, ran a gymnasium in London where novice riders could go to practise. One interested spectator recalled his reaction when one day in 1869 a man arrived at the gymnasium with a packing case containing ‘a piece of apparatus mainly consisting of two wheels … Mr Turner took off his coat, grasped the handles of the machine, and with a short run, to my intense surprise, vaulted on to it, and putting his feet on the treadles, made the circuit of the room. We were some half-dozen spectators, and I shall never forget our astonishment at the sight of Mr Turner whirling himself round the room, sitting on a bar above a pair of wheels in a line that ought, as we innocently supposed, to fall down immediately he jumped off the ground. Judge then our greater surprise when, instead of stopping by tilting over on one foot, he slowly halted, and turning the front wheel diagonally, remained quite still, balancing on the wheels.’ Track standing, or remaining stationary on an upright bike, was evidently a Spencer speciality. His 1877 guide to The Modern Bicycle moves briskly on from the vaulted mount to riding without using hands or feet. Once the difficulties of riding side-saddle had been mastered, it was time to try staying still. ‘Of course, this is a question of balancing, and you will soon find the knack of it. When the machine inclines to the left, slightly press the left treadle, and if it evinces a tendency to lean to the right, press the right treadle; and so on, until, sooner or later, you achieve a correct equilibrium, when you may take out your pocket book and read or even write letters, &c, without difficulty.’

An early cycling class.

As the popularity of boneshakers spread, so the design began to progress organically, first to iron or steel instead of wood and then towards the great ‘high wheelers’ of the 1870s. Back in England at the Coventry Sewing Machine Company, James Starley and his colleague William Hillman took the design one stage further. Their new Ariel model was made entirely out of steel instead of wood and iron, a change which knocked a good 40lb off the weight of the machine. As well as an optional ‘speed gear’, Starley’s other great innovation was the tension wheel. Now, instead of spokes being laced straight from hub to rim, they were laced at an angle, thereby significantly improving the wheel’s strength and setting the standard pattern for all wheels since. To prove the Ariel’s efficacy and its excellent value at £8, in 1870 Hillman and Starley decided to ride all the way from Paddington station in London to Coventry, a distance of 96 miles. ‘Mr Starley’s weight gave great velocity to his machine,’ one reporter noted, ‘a speed of at least 12mph being attained.’ The two cyclists reached home as the clock struck midnight, and apparently slept solidly for three days afterwards. Mr Starley’s weight was also the driving force behind another of his inventions. Since he was a large man with a substantial backside, the old saddles of wood or iron pained him. As he said, ‘There’s a lot of me to get sore.’ Arriving in the factory workyard one day, he got off his bike, plonked himself down on a pile of sand lying nearby, got up, examined the indent he had made and announced to his watching workers, ‘That’s how a saddle should be shaped – to fit the bum! Get a cast of that and make me a saddle of stout leather.’

As bicycles became lighter, so the front wheel got larger and larger. Since every turn of the cranks directly corresponded to a revolution of the wheel, the early riders had to maintain a very high cadence in order to move forward. The only way of lowering the cadence while maintaining reasonable forward momentum was to increase the size of the wheel the cranks were attached to. And so began the era of the Ordinary (or penny farthing). Huge and highly strung, Ordinaries were not for everyone. Like velocipedes, they were tricky to control and rapidly became notorious for flinging their riders off at odd moments. Most of the new guides to cycling devoted at least a chapter each to the complicated subjects of mounting, dismounting and how to fall off so you only broke the minimum number of bones. As Mecredy and Stoney, the authors of The Art and Pastime of Cycling, advised, ‘If you find you are unable to dismount because of the pace and steepness of the gradient, go for the nearest hedge or hawthorn bush, and just as you approach, throw your legs over the handles. You are sure to be hurt, but you may escape with only a few scrapes and bruises, whereas to hold on means more or less injury. If no hedge or hawthorn bush is near, throw your legs over the handles and put the brake hard on, and you will shoot forward and alight on your feet, when you must make every effort to keep on your feet and run as hard as you can, for your bicycle is in eager pursuit, and a stroke from it may place you hors de combat.’ If fractures didn’t deter people, then maybe impromptu tattoos would. Since many paths and tracks of the time were covered in coal cinders, riders who did fall off and graze themselves found that the coal dust got into the cuts. If the cuts weren’t cleaned immediately, the dust would tattoo itself in beneath the healing skin forever. ‘Some of the best racing men have been sadly disfigured about the face, elbows and knees this way.’ Such a potent combination of cost and personal hazard meant the market for the new Ordinaries was restricted mainly to the rich. Even at the tail end of the 1890s cycling craze, a new British-made bicycle could cost three months of a schoolteacher’s salary.

In the end, it was a simple mechanical innovation which made the difference. By fitting a chain drive to the rear wheel instead of cranks to the front, James Starley’s nephew, John Kemp, brought the cadence down to a point where wheel sizes too could be equalised. His first design, introduced in 1884, has a 36in. front wheel and a curved down tube and crossbar. Otherwise, it looks more or less identical to a modern 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 in disgrace with many in the movement, partly due to his support for conscription during the Boer and First World Wars but mainly for the much greater crime of writing for the Daily Mail. And the Clarion itself ended up a victim of war as readers either defected to other, redder publications, or stopped reading altogether. Besides, world politics had intervened. By the 1920s, socialism as an ideal had either been replaced by communism as a reality, or by the usual watery British pragmatism. In 1908, the aims of the NCCC were defined as ‘Mutual Aid, Good Fellowship and the Propagation of the Principles of Socialism as advocated by the Clarion’. At some point, the words ‘propagation of’ were quietly replaced by ‘support for’. Socialism, in other words, was a whole lot less fun than socialising.

Other attempts to push cycling into one niche or another also failed. In the US, the League of American Wheelmen, or LAW – founded in 1880 and hugely popular in its time – was permanently tainted by its decision to prohibit the admission of black members. The decision was taken as a direct result of the success of one rider. Marshall Taylor’s father worked as coachman to the Southards, a white family in Indianapolis. The Southards had a son, Daniel, of Marshall’s age, and since the two boys played together, they also learned to ride bikes at the same time. The Southards paid for Marshall’s first bike, and he grew up with a good grounding as a cyclist. Unfortunately, the result of his connection with the Southards was predictable: his family and friends found him too white and white society found him too black. His best escape vehicle from both was the bicycle. He went to work for a local bike shop, performing tricks and stunts outside to lure customers. The job earned him both a new cycle and a new name, Major, after the military costume that he wore. His boss entered him in races which Major almost always won. The clubs and leagues that organised the races began to take notice. Some clubs (those on the east and west coasts) were happy to let a rising star compete. Some realised that the controversy generated by a winning black rider in an overwhelmingly white peloton had an electrifying effect on audience figures. But a small number of organisations wanted nothing to do with Major. In 1894, the LAW (then the main cyclists’ association with a membership of around 100,000) voted to ban black riders, including Major. He could still take part in LAW races, but only as an outsider. Despite an atmosphere of dangerous hostility, Major’s talent won out. He became World Sprint Champion in 1899 and made a triumphant tour of Europe. Back at home in the US, he found it harder and harder to appear competitively. Hotels, bars and restaurants would refuse to serve him, and Taylor eventually found the climate against him so intolerable that he gave up racing in his own country. Though the LAW’s membership declined sharply at the beginning of the twentieth century (partly as a result of their segregation policy), it took a further century for the prohibition to be fully repealed.

Major Taylor. Despite becoming World Sprint Champion in 1899, Major found the discrimination against him so intolerable that he gave up racing in his own country.

Meanwhile, the world itself was moving on. By the 1930s, the days when bicycles were competing only with horses and trains were long gone. Motorised transport had increased and diversified enormously. This was no longer a case of a few stately cars poop-pooping down the dusty roads preceded by flag-waving flunkeys; in the decade after 1945, the numbers of cars on the road increased threefold. In a world where an Austin Seven or a Model T cost £175 and a bike £5, it was evident that two wheels had lost to four. The national highways were now full of trucks, military vehicles, private cars, taxis, buses, ambulances, police cars and motorbikes. Even then, the bicycle still somehow held on. In 1950, 11 percent of all journeys were made by bike, and there remained twelve million regular cyclists in the UK. To get some idea of how awe-inspiring a figure that is, it’s worth remembering that in 2010 only 3 percent of all UK journeys were made by bike, and that was double on the previous decade. Even more peculiar, throughout that entire period the bicycle industry managed to remain healthy. In 1976, 15 percent of UK households owned a bike. By 1986, that figure had risen to 25 percent and by 1995 to 33 percent. People were still buying bikes, they just weren’t using them much beyond the age of ten.

Meanwhile, back on the roads, the consequences of a complete non-policy were predictable. A 1937 Ministry of Transport survey found that a third of all road accidents involved cyclists; 1,421 cyclists were killed on the roads that year. Bicycles were not merely old-fashioned, they were fatal. Unfortunately, riders couldn’t always look to cycling organisations to support their cause. In an echo of its curious act of self-sabotage in banning mass-start racing in the 1880s, the main cyclists’ organisation, the CTC, chose to oppose the establishment of a national network of cycle paths during the 1930s on the grounds that it might interfere with their right to use roads. By the time the future of travel was being considered in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, ‘transport’ was taken to mean only ‘things with engines’. The first motorways were built and the London Underground expanded. Tram systems came and went. Beeching axed half of Britain’s railway network, and cars, instead of being a temptation, became a necessity. London’s population rose steadily through the millions. In the committee rooms of Westminster there were inquiries into the high cost of rail fares, working parties on roundabouts and Royal Commissions on buses. And the motorist reigned supreme. Until, almost without anyone noticing, something interesting began to happen.