The Bicycle Book

So it’s fortunate that Dave and Debbie Yates are keen on engineering in general. Their smallholding is about half a mile from the end of Coningsby’s runway, and life for them is punctuated by the roar of approaching bombers. They moved here four years ago from the North East, and have set the whole place up as a smallholding. In the winter, they train spaniels as gun dogs. And in the summer, Dave makes bicycles.

Dave Yates is famous for his frames. In his time, working either as part of larger manufacturers or for himself, he has built the basic skeletons of over 12,000 bikes of every shape and size. Most of his time is spent here in the workshop either putting together bespoke frames for clients or repairing their old favourites. The rest of his time is spent teaching the secrets of framebuilding to others. It’s a rare skill. Once, there were thousands of small-scale frame-builders all over the country, producing a few steel-framed bikes a year for their local markets. But few individual framemakers managed to survive cycling’s long decline in popularity, and fewer still were prepared to teach what they knew to a new generation. Dave is one of only a handful of those who kept the faith. And after half a professional lifetime working for small-scale companies in the North East, he and Debbie came south and set up here.

His workshop is over in a discreet corner of the farm well away from the main house. One half contains a lot of light industrial machinery – mills, lathes, obscure bits of componentry – while the horizontal bit is a light, comfortable space including three workbenches, a stack of Reynolds 531 and 521 tubing, a jig and several shoulder-height canisters of oxyacetylene gas. Despite the midsummer fields outside, the workshop has a very particular smell to it, a potent combination of metal, fire and instant coffee. For nine or ten individual weeks during the summer months, Dave takes two students (more would be impossible, since so much of his time involves working with things that might explode) and guides them through the construction of their own frame. That frame can be any shape or size as long as it is made from steel, can reasonably be made from scratch in five days and is not something silly like a tandem.

Partly because he’s rare and partly because he’s good, there is usually a waiting list of about two years for a place on one of Yates’ courses. He has the patience of a born teacher, unflappable, generous with what he knows and truly passionate about his subject. As the week progresses, he begins to remind me of Gimli the dwarf in The Lord of the Rings. Not because he’s unusually small, but because there does seem to be some irresistible connection between fire and metalwork and dark, bearded Northern men. Besides, no one works with one element for the whole of their professional lives without taking on a few of its characteristics. His father worked in the Swan Hunter shipyard on Tyneside, and Dave took his passion for bikes first into teaching metalwork and then into framebuilding. ‘I loved making things, I loved fiddling about with things, I loved building things. But I never had a point where I thought, I want to be a framebuilder, I want to make my living at this. It was just natural that I got stuck into bikes because it was there that there were things needed doing.’ In his younger days, he did a lot of racing around the North East, got his pro licence, went to France for a bit. ‘I was never good. I was good, but I wasn’t good. Because I had a switch up there’ – he points to his forehead – ‘which …’ – there is a long pause – ‘… I wasn’t a winner. I didn’t want to win at all costs.’

There are two types of people who usually sign up to his courses, he says. There are the experts who have been studying the science of bicycles for a long time and who want to build something to an exact specification. And there are people like Graeme and me, who like bikes but not to the point of perversion. Graeme Symington, who teaches cycling maintenance and road safety courses in Sheffield, knows much more about frames and framebuilding than I do. He wants to make a big solid classic porteur-style bike, bombproof in its construction but elegant as well. I want to make a classic lugged-frame road bike – a 1950s sort of frame but with modern gears and componentry. Both ambitions are judged to be well within the scope of a week’s work, even though Graeme’s metalworking experience is minimal and I have none at all.

Obviously, the different demands we’re making from our bikes will dictate their eventual shape and weight. Graeme’s porteur will be a copy of the strong, elegant bikes once used by messengers and delivery boys to haul newspapers or shoeshine kit round the streets of Paris or Rome. They needed to take big loads at both front and back, so they had to be very stable. They also had to be capable of dealing with all weathers and of surviving for years with minimal maintenance. Graeme intends to use his for commuting, for cycle training in schools, and for ‘coping with runs to the shop, where it needs to carry shopping for a family of three’.

Porteurs – and their long-distance equivalents, roadsters – are the spiritual ancestors of hybrids, the bikes which most adults now start out on when they return to cycling. Roadsters were the classic old Edwardian bikes used both for jaunts in the countryside, long-distance touring and city errands. They were big, roomy, comfortable bikes, well made and designed to be ridden slowly but steadily all day. They wouldn’t set the world on fire, but nor would they leave anyone looking like Quasimodo at the end of the day. The modern hybrid still has the roadster’s practicality, but has borrowed elements from two other bicycle types. The better ones should have a bit of the sturdiness and adaptability of a mountain bike while keeping the speed and responsiveness of a road bike. In practice, a lot of the cheaper, less well-made ones just have the weight of a truck and that’s it. The advantage to them is that they can be loaded with panniers and racks and baskets for groceries and whatnot, and their upright riding position helps to make the rider visible. The downside is that they’re dull. Most people treat them as the two-wheeled equivalent of an estate car; the bike you use to get to and from work, do the shopping, take the kids to nursery. Practical and useful, but totally anonymous. Which is fine, because the other very useful thing about hybrids is that they make riding anything else feel thrilling. If you’ve spent five years riding round town on a heavy bike festooned with laptop bags, then the first time you get on a road bike you’re going to feel like Chris Hoy. All that time spent hauling around a lump of cheap badly-adjusted chromoly might not necessarily do you any anatomical favours in the long term, but, in the short term, it’ll do your glutes and your confidence a power of good.

Meanwhile, I’m after something more lightweight. A classic road (or racing) bike is not a thing to be laden at all, but a thing made of air designed for speed and hills and huge distances. It isn’t practical in the sense of either transporting big loads or being a particularly comfortable ride, but if both bike and cyclist can be made to match each other, then a good racer is unquestionably a thing to make the soul sing. And building a steel-framed racer here will inevitably be a nod to the classic road bikes of the past. Over the past few decades, the drive for faster and lighter bikes has pushed the majority of manufacturers towards newer, stiffer materials. Steel is regarded as a heavy, spongy, tolerant substance which has enormous tensile strength but which is far too slow and unresponsive for modern racers. And so, apart from a few specialist events such as Italy’s annual L’Eroica audax, the majority of modern road bikes long ago left Reynolds 531 behind and took to aluminium, titanium or carbon fibre instead. The bikes used by pros in the Tour de France will be made from woven carbon-fibre weighing at or around the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale – cycling’s governing body) minimum of 6.8kg. Anything lighter than that is judged to be too expensive to develop and too unstable to ride. Producing carbon-fibre bikes simply isn’t possible for small individual framemakers like Dave Yates. Since the fibres are moulded rather than brazed or welded, it requires a very different set-up to manufacture. Dave can and does make or repair aluminium and titanium frames, but for teaching purposes he likes to stick to good old-fashioned steel.

Racing bike.

If I’d wanted a fast bike purely for the city, I could have gone for a single-speed or a fixie. They’re the beautiful pared-down essence-of-bikes which have become increasingly fashionable for urban cyclists in the past few years. For those who live in places without many hills, they’re ideal. They don’t have racks or panniers or baskets, they don’t have derailleurs or cassettes or (sometimes) brakes. They’re just a frame, a set of wheels, and a prayer. Single speeds have one gear and a freewheel, fixies have one gear and no freewheel – in other words, the pedals will always be turning while the bike is in motion. Both are light, elegant and good for posing. In most cases they’re not about logos and branding, but about riding something bespoke. Hence the occasional double-take sight of someone blazing down the Marylebone Road on a white frame with gold rims or swanking around Hoxton on a frog-green number with hot pink tyres. Most are made of steel, which keeps the price down, but because they come without any of the bells and whistles associated with most bikes, they’re still very light. Messengers and fakengers like them because they need almost no maintenance at all apart from a squirt of lube once in a while, and everyone else likes them because they look beautiful and they get you where you want to be, fast. But since I want to climb hills – proper, grown-up hills – then I need a bike with gears: a racing bike.

Once in a while, Dave gets someone who wants to make either a BMX or a mountain bike. Out there on the open market, a really good MTB with suspension at both front and rear can set you back more than a top-of-the-range modern road bike will, and an amazingly fancy one can cost you five figures or more. The money goes on the geometry. The sheer complexity of fitting suspension at both front and rear, and then in making that suspension strong enough to take anything that earth and wood and rock can hurl at it, and then in making it light enough to carry with ease, and then just for good measure making it simple enough so you don’t need a degree in aeronautics to repair it all comes at a price. The sheer pounding that a heavily used downhiller takes means that it’s no use stinting on materials: anything cheap or badly made will get destroyed by the first tree stump it meets. It isn’t that uncommon to hear downhillers complaining of getting through two or three front forks within the space of a single competition, and since the hydraulics in a good-quality fork can cost hundreds if not thousands of pounds, it’s not a sport for the parsimonious or faint-hearted.

The bikes Graeme and I want to make are less demanding, and the parts are a lot easier to come by. So our first job is to come up with a series of measurements. To get a proper, comfortable ride on a bike, you need to know how heavy you are, how long your torso is, how long your arms are and what your inside leg measurement is. As a very rough rule of thumb, most men have proportionately longer torsos and shorter legs, while with women it’s the reverse. The length of your torso dictates the length of the top tube, the length of your leg dictates the length of the seat tube and the length of your arms will eventually dictate where and how you arrange your handlebars. Your weight will determine what type of materials you use. Clearly if you’re 6ft 3in., 13 stone and use your bike for doing the school run, it’s no good welding a couple of metal twigs together and hoping for the best. And so the next job is to pick out the parts we’ll need for our frames. There are four main tubes in a classic diamond-frame road bike: the head tube (the short, thick post running down from the centre of the handlebars to the top of the front wheel forks), the top tube (or crossbar), the down tube (which runs from the head tube to the bottom bracket) and the seat tube (which runs from the bottom bracket to the saddle). The forks flare out from the head tube to enclose the front wheel. At the back there are the two chain stays on either side of the rear wheel, and the seat stays, which run from the top of the seat tube to the centre of the rear wheel.

Within those basics, there are a lot of possible variables. The angles will vary substantially from person to person and from bike to bike, and each type of bike has a different geometry. Mountain bikes, for instance, will have long head tubes with slacker head angles to help absorb shock. Road bikes will have a short head tube with a steep angle – usually between 73° and 74° – and an equally upright seat tube. The more upright both head tube and seat tube are, the more responsive but less comfortable the ride. The sharp angles mean that the rider has to reach forward over the top tube, reducing his resistance to the wind. The more curved the angle of the forks, the more comfortable but less efficient things will be. Road and track bikes are usually designed to be ridden with the saddle higher than the handlebars – in other words, when you’re riding it, your bum will be higher than your hands. Which is aerodynamic, but uncomfortable.

According to Dave, the first and most important thing in framemaking is to find out what the bike will be used for. ‘The primary requisite is that the frame fits the rider and is suitable for the purpose. So if you want a touring bike, there’s no earthly use in making an audax bike. You can do anything on anything – you can tour on a racing bike, you can race on a touring bike, but you’ll do neither very well. So you have to get the frame to fit the customer and the purpose. If you’re going to build a track frame to ride in Manchester, the position of the track frame is completely different to a touring frame you’d make for riding around the world. With a track bike, the priorities are speed and efficiency. A track bike is not much good for anything other than riding on a track or short trips on the road. A touring bike, other extreme, you want something that’s comfortable to sit on all day, that will carry a load. A good racing bike, you steer with your backside and you think it round corners. You don’t have to physically steer it, it just goes. It’s an extension of the body and everything flows. When you’re racing at a high level, the bike is absolutely critical – the rider has to have complete confidence in it. And if there’s anything not quite right, it will affect his performance. That’s the trick in building a good frame – in getting inside a rider’s head, seeing what his or her vision is and translating that into something that’s going to do the job.’

Will a well-made bike make you a better rider? ‘No. But it will stop you being a worse rider. There are some people who will never be good racing cyclists. I’ve seen many riders with the right physical attributes, but nothing up there. They haven’t got the confidence, they haven’t got the drive to succeed. I’ve seen riders that wanted like nothing else on earth to succeed and flogged themselves almost to death. But they would never do it because they haven’t got the physical attributes – the lung capacity, the heart capacity, whatever. You’ve got to have those physical attributes, and if you haven’t got them, you’ll get to a level and that’s the size you’ll stay. And the best frame in the world won’t make a blind bit of difference. A good bike will stop you being any worse. If you put a good rider on a bad bike, he won’t ride to his full potential. If you put a rubbish rider on a good bike, he’ll still be a rubbish rider.’

He gets quite a few gear freaks, the cycling equivalent of the planespotters outside Coningsby, who love the names and numbers more than they love the ride. ‘A classic example is a customer who came to me in the early eighties wanting a frame built. He had a drawing – “Can you make that?” I looked at it. “Yeah, I can make that, who’s it for?” “It’s for me.” “It’s not going to fit you, it’s far too big for you.” ‘But that’s what I want.” “Why do you want this?” And he said, “That’s Eddy Merckx’s bike. That’s the dimensions of Eddy Merckx’s bike.” I said, ‘Yeah, but Eddy Merckx is 6ft 1in. and you’re 5ft 4in.”’ He laughs. ‘Not quite, but there was a disparity. So I made it and I sprayed it and he built it up, and I saw him for years riding round on it looking completely ridiculous – it was far too big for him. It was too long and too big. But that’s what he wanted.’

Anyway. Since the four main tubes are those which dictate the basic geometry of a road bike, they come in a variety of different shapes and sizes. The simplest and strongest will be a straightforward plain-gauge steel tube, same idea as a metal curtain pole. Next up will be single-butted tubes, which have one end thicker than the middle, thereby making the frame stronger at the point of connection. And finally there will be double- or triple-butted tubing, stronger at the ends and lighter in the middle. The strength in plain-gauge tubes will be the same throughout their length, whereas the strength in single- or double-butted tubing will be concentrated at the joints. To join these tubes together, there are two alternatives: welding or brazing. Welding raises the temperature to the point where the steel melts and joins to its neighbour. It produces practical but ugly joints – the cheap hybrids and mountain bikes you see with big gobby lumps of steel at the seams will probably have been TiG (or tungsten inert gas) welded. Brazing, on the other hand, uses another metal inserted between the two steel tubes to make a connection. It’s less heat and energy intensive and therefore less likely to damage the alloys. With brazing, you can use two methods. Either there are lugs, separate, ready-made joints which are then connected to the tubes with brass filler; or there is fillet brazing, where the joints are filed to a perfect fit, filled completely with brass and then sanded down to form a seamless connection. Fillet brazing looks beautiful but requires both time and skill, so Graeme and I are both sticking to lugs. Because over the years Dave has built up a good set of contacts among bicycle-makers, he’s already got a ready-made supply of new- and old-style lugs and tubes in stock. Having picked out the components we want, Graeme and I stand there for a moment or two, daunted.

To begin with, everything is divided into a series of sub-assemblies which will then be joined together on the jig at the end of the week. First job is to file a careful mitre to the bottom of the seat tube and then to connect it to the bottom bracket (the big joint through which four tubes meet and the crank axle for the pedals passes). Having given us the necessary briefing on the uses and abuses of oxyacetylene gas, Dave gives both of us a pair of welding glasses, fits the tube and the bracket into the jig, gives it a daub of flux (to prevent the steel from oxidising), sparks up the torch and passes it over. The brass is a long, thin rod which is held very exactly over the joint until it reaches melting point. The aim is to get the brass to melt neatly and without lumps or gaps into the space between bracket and tube. This is not easy. If you don’t hold the flame over the lug and the brass for long enough then nothing will happen, and if you hold it for too long you’ll burn away the steel of the tube. The intention is to get both the heavy lug and the light brass to the same temperature so that the braze will run seamlessly between them. Both Graeme and I are so nervous before trying it for the first time that our hands shake slightly as we hold the rods.

The gas hisses faintly, and half a mile away the plane-spotters steady their lenses. The lug begins to glow and the air above it shimmers. The brass bubbles, and at a point only Dave can see coming, it melts, vanishing into the gap as we pass the stick round the bracket. Dave stands over us, watching, instructing, telling us to pull away if we get too close to the tube or linger for too long in one place. Inevitably, it takes a while before we work out what the melting point looks like and how fast to move the stick around the join. But when it does go right, it is a moment of purest magic. One metal suddenly liquefies and slips sublimely in between the other as the torch flares round the circumference. When the steel cools, they are joined as solidly as if they had been born like that. All three of us become so absorbed in the work that for several hours we do not even notice that half of Britain’s air-defence capability has just passed overhead.

Next is to bounce up and down on the fork blades. There are many types of curve you can give a fork, and all of them will do something to the way the bike rides at the end of the process. In theory no curve at all would send every bump and pothole from the road straight into your arms, while a very pronounced curve may make the ride too squishy and unresponsive. In practice, it’s possible to have an entirely straight fork with enough offset to give a comfortable ride. By fitting the blades into a ready-made curved jig and then leaning down on them with our full weight, it’s possible to bend them into a couple of EU-approved banana curves, giving a bit of shock absorption but not enough to slow the ride down much. The two fork blades then get slotted into the fork crown and brazed in, and after that the drop-outs (the pieces which hold the wheels and rear derailleur in place) are attached to the chain stays. All of them are comparatively small joints but tricky, since the steel is thinner and lighter, and the risk of burning a hole consequently that much greater. The slot in the chain-stay must be perfectly angled and mitred, and we seem to end up pushing a lot of brass down what looks like a very deep hole. Once the metal cools, pedants – including me – then get to spend hours filing the join down so it looks more attractive, a detail which, when the bike is completed, will be noticed by no one except other pedants and dachshunds.

Then we join the head tube and seat tube to each other. To connect the two, the end of the seat tube must be perfectly filed down and mitred. If it isn’t – if there’s too much stress on one part of the joint but too little on another – then it’s the joint most likely to crack or fatigue. At this point, my choice of lugs comes back to haunt me. The ones I picked out have frillier edges than normal, and therefore need more careful brazing. Moving round them with the torch, learning the way the heat sucks the brass towards it or pushes it away, remains endlessly fascinating. We mill the end of the head tube down to the right size, stick it in the top of the fork crown and braze them together. Even at this stage, the whole thing has begun to look less like a series of GCSE metalwork assignments and more like a bicycle.

And then there is the moment when, after three days and a lot of coffee, all the different bits and joints are put into the main jig and brazed together. This is the moment of truth, the point at which everything either comes together into one priceless diamond-frame or disintegrates into a load of unrideable parallelograms. The different components might all look great on paper, but no one can really tell you how harmonious it’s going to look when it’s all connected or, more importantly, what kind of ride it’s going to be. Once it’s all been brazed together, it’s left overnight in the jig to cool and settle. The following day, we take it out, poke the fork stem up through the head tube, examine our handiwork and agree unanimously that it looks like a bike. The forks are curvy, the bottom bracket proportionate and the top tube so straight you could hang pictures with it. Once in a while, I glance at the point at which the seat stays attach to the top of the seat tube. In mass-produced hybrids, the join is usually done with a big clot of weld. But in old-style racers, there should be a couple of sharp, cleanly pointed ends, like one-sided spears. Having managed to get those brazed and filed down so they come to a perfectly curved point just below the saddle is a moment of deep private satisfaction. One of the last tasks is to swap to silver solder in order to fit in the bottle bosses (the two little holes in the down tube which take the cage for a water bottle). Silver has a lower melting point than brass, and thus the flame has to be held higher and moved away quicker than with most of the brazing. But silver is good for the smaller tasks where a really clean finish is required, and for joining things to the centre of butted tubing where the steel is lighter and potentially more fragile.

At the end of the week, both Graeme and I have frames. Once they have been shot-blasted and all the excess brass removed, they look as clean and professional as half the frames hanging from the rafters in bike shops all over Britain. A few months later, painted an unrestrained blood-red with gold outlines round the lugs and then fitted out by Rob Sargent in Finsbury Park, I have something I think is properly astonishing. It rides like a dream. It accelerates up hills. And, believe me, there are very few kinds of smugness greater than the smugness of being asked where you got your bike and being able to say, ‘I made it myself.’ Back in Sheffield, Graeme has a similar experience. ‘It is a bike that I can’t ride without people stopping and asking about it (might be because it’s painted bright yellow). I tell far too many people that I built it myself, an immodesty that I put down to my enthusiasms rather than my vanity.’ Sitting in the Coningsby café during our lunch breaks, we had stuffed ourselves with dreams of all the places our fabulous new frames would take us. I wanted to try my bike out in the hills and glens of the Scottish Borders and then see how it did in France. Graeme was mulling over the idea of a full-scale north-to-south trip down through America. But the truth of it was that it didn’t matter where we were going to take them, or why. What mattered was the dream itself. As Graeme said later, ‘There is magic in framebuilding.’

I’d felt the same. Watching Dave with a brazing torch and a stick of brass was as close as I’ll ever come to watching an alchemist at work. Not merely because there’s something occult about watching that flame scorch its white-hot pathway across the steel, but because at the end of it all we’ve been part of the transmutation of those materials from disparate parts to unified whole. And because in the process Graeme and I both learned so much about what a bicycle is and how it works. As Dave says – slightly more prosaically – making a bike is really just plumbing. But it’s definitely magic plumbing.

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.

Chapter Three

Feral Cycling and the Serious Men

Here lies the body of Jonathan HayWho died defending his right of way.He was right – dead right – as he strolled along;But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong.

QUOTED IN GEOFFREY BOUMPHREY,