Re:Cyclists by Michael Hutchinson

Author:Michael Hutchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The assumption of most of us is that the car killed off cycling. It did nothing of the sort, because nothing killed off cycling. Cycling continued to grow into the early years of the twentieth century. Lower prices and large numbers of second-hand bikes meant thousands could be cyclists. Even in 1898, in the midst of the falling roof-joists of ‘the slump’, a record 50,000 cyclists and their bikes passed through Waterloo station over Easter on their way to the coast.2

You would only be able to float an argument that the car (or anything else) killed off cycling if your interest extended no further than the lives of people with titles and/or townhouses in Belgravia. Even then, there were plenty of members of the upper class who continued to ride. However, the view that the car in the first years of the twentieth century was an essential part of cycling’s ‘downfall’ is not even rooted in class snobbery, it’s rooted in just about the only thing shallower: fashion snobbery. Cycling stopped being the thing to be seen doing because poor people could now do it too. That’s all.

But fashion, finally, is where the car comes into the story. Motoring was the thing to be seen doing, despite the small numbers of cars on the road. By 1900 there were still only about 8,000 cars in the UK. Even in 1905, the number was still only around 15,000 – although reliable statistics for very early car numbers are very hard to find, and some sources suggest the number of registered cars was even lower than this. Whatever the exact number, there certainly weren’t enough of them to kill off anything other than by actually running it over. (Something which, it must be said, happened quite frequently.)

Not only were there not a lot of cars, the speed limits for them were low. The ‘great emancipation’ of 1896, when the speed limit of 4 mph in the country and 2 mph in town was lifted (along with the man with a flag) was a liberalisation that extended merely to a not awfully Mr Toad-esque 14 mph. The rather pleasing response of the Surrey police to this was to dispatch 125 officers on bicycles to apprehend speeding motorists. I do very much like the picture of a motorist being pulled over by a uniformed bobby on a bicycle. On the other side of the argument, the AA employed patrols of cyclists to warn motorists of police speed traps. The boot was not quite as firmly on the foot of the motorists as subsequent history might have led many of us to assume.

Early motorists actually owed a lot to cyclists. The cyclists were the ones who had pushed for proper maintenance of the old roads, and had prevented them disintegrating into the total disrepair that would otherwise have been the consequence of the railways. The roads were falling apart when local National Cyclists’ Union branches started to demand the enforcement of the laws mandating their repair.

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