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