The Military History of the Bicycle by John Norris

Author:John Norris [Norris, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Evacuation of the Wounded

The faster a wounded man can be evacuated to a base hospital for treatment the greater are his chances of survival. One nineteenth century surgeon who knew this all too well was Baron Dominique Jean Larrey, who served with Napoleon’s Grande Armée on many campaigns. He set about developing improved ambulance wagons which provided comfort during transportation. The best vehicles of Larrey’s day were those with side-by-side wheels drawn by horses.

When the first bicycles appeared, with their linear wheel arrangement, the configuration did not lend them to the evacuation of the wounded. Over time it was discovered that if two machines could be attached together side by side using a framework, the improvisation would create a stable platform with four wheels. Such a use had already been speculated by Lieutenant Colonel Savile in his presentation on the military role of the bicycle in 1887 and later by Baden-Powell. An ‘ambulance bicycle’ was developed by the British company of Alldays in 1894, which mounted a stretcher on two wheels and was pushed like a handcart. This was followed in 1895 with a design which joined two bicycles together side by side, just as Savile had suggested.

One of the first institutions to use Alldays’ design was the Birmingham Hospital Saturday Fund. The idea was quickly taken up and by 1898 its use was spreading. In the bustling American city of Chicago, Dr John T. Hinckley used a combination of two tandem bicycles to demonstrate the speed such a design could convey a stretcher. Two of the four riders were medically trained in the treatment of injured patients and showed how the machine could be ridden along a route three miles long in busy traffic in around sixteen minutes. In one month one machine was used to transport more than 100 patients to the hospital. It could also carry equipment to treat the patient during the trip, such as bandages and sutures.

Other emergency services saw the benefits offered by this combination and soon police forces were using ‘bicycle ambulances’ to support medical emergencies. Red Cross Societies used the combination and the military adopted it too.

Dr Hinkley’s trials showed great promise but they were conducted under peacetime conditions far removed from the chaos and dangers of the battlefield, where the ground could be torn up by craters and trenches. During the First World War, one Frank Dunham served in a Cyclist Battalion of the British army. Coming from a middle-class family and being a deeply religious man he joined a Red Cross unit as a volunteer at the start of the war. Thinking that his medical training would be best used in the army he enlisted in the 25th (County of London) (Cyclists) Battalion of the London Regiment. However, as he soon discovered, not everyone who served in these units was issued with a bicycle. Given the conditions of the battlefields it was not easy for bicycles to be used for the evacuation of the wounded, nor for that matter, any of the other roles for which it had been identified.

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