Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (70 page)

The pieces were all in place for an industrial boom, much like the railway mania of the 1830s and 1840s. Ernest Terah Holley appeared in 1895 with £100,000 and a good reputation. He purchased the Dunlop works for £3 million and floated the company for £5 million just a year later. In the next few years he promoted two dozen companies with, between them, nominal capital of £18.6 million. Fifteen of these companies were cycle manufacturers, including Raleigh, which was floated for £200,000, and the Singer Cycle Co., floated for £80,000.
*
The bubble soon burst, as it was bound to, and Holley was bankrupted and jailed for fraud.
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With this sort of volatile market, it is hard to say how many cycles were produced, but it is suggested that, by the 1890s, on average 750,000 a year were being manufactured. Whatever the actual figure, cycles had become part of everyday life. In the twenty years that cycles had been manufactured in Britain,
Punch
artists had mentioned or drawn them in their cartoons just over once a year. Even in 1894 there were only two cartoons. Then in 1895, the boom year, there were twenty-three, in 1896 thirty-five. Cycles were now part of the vocabulary of cartoons just as omnibuses and hansom cabs were: vehicles for a joke, not joke vehicles.

In the first year of the decade there were 300 cycling clubs in London alone. Cycling was no longer just for hobbyists: it was for delivery boys, for postmen, for policemen, for poor curates and for teachers. Cycles were rather like pianos: the best ones were expensive, at up to £30 when bought new in 1895, but many could be found of a lesser quality for about £10, and secondhand ones were even cheaper. Those that did not have the latest tyres, or seats with springs, could be acquired for as little as £2. When the first boom period was over in 1897, even the expensive models became affordable to more of the population: a Rudge-Whitworth Special, one of the best cycles on the market, dropped in price from £30 to 16 guineas, while the company’s standard model was priced at 12 guineas, down from £20.
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Many took advantage, because, while the initial commercial manufacturing boom might be over, there was no diminution in the number of enthusiasts. If anything, as the industrial depression deepened and
prices dropped, more and more of the population became cyclists. In 1878 the Bicycle Touring Club (shortly the Cyclists Touring Club, the CTC, as it remains today) had been set up to help its members who wanted to tour through the countryside on their cycles. The CTC negotiated with the railways to reduce the charges for carrying its members’ cycles - in the summer of 1898 the Great Eastern carried 60,000 cycles in and out of Liverpool Street station alone.
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Once members reached the town of their choice, they could consult the CTC publication which listed all the inns and hotels in the country, dividing them into ‘Headquarters’ or ‘Quarters’, depending on price and quality. On showing their club badges, members received a discount of between 1
¹
/
₂
d.
and 3
d.
in the shilling at any of the hotels or inns listed.
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These hotels also had set prices for tea and dinner for club members - between 1
s.
6
d.
and 2
s.
6
d.
(an extra 3
d.
if attendance at meals was required, and 6
d.
for the maid).
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By the 1890s the publishing industry had joined the tourist market, and the dedicated touring cyclist could purchase ‘Safety’ cycling maps, with different roads marked in different colours, indicating difficulty of ascent, the speeds that could be achieved, and unrideable roads. The
Contour Road Books
at the end of the century showed all this plus elevations, gradients, lighting-up times, railway rates for cycles, maps of the main towns, and blank ‘summary’ pages to be filled in by the cyclist.
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It was the quality of the roads that formed one of the CTC’s most sustained - and successful - campaigns. As early as 1874 the
Book for Riders
was a litany of roads that were impassable to cyclists: ‘Liverpool to Prescott, 8 miles of good road, then within 6 miles of Newcastleunder-Lyne [
sic
] a very bad bit full of holes…From Mansfield to Doncaster stiff clay, very rutty and uneven. Tadcaster to York is quite impassable…from Rivesby to Horncastle nearly all loose flint: after this the road degenerates into two wheel ruts and a horse track, driving [i.e. riding a cycle] being sometimes impossible.’ ‘The road between Birmingham and Wolverhampton is very bad and wearying: in fact it is full of holes and tramway ruts. The bicyclist had better train this bit.’ Except for the reference to trains, this sounds much like Josiah Wedgwood and his friends campaigning for the arrival of the turnpikes a century before. In the mid-1880s a meeting of the National Cyclists
Union was held in Birmingham to attempt to find a solution to poorly maintained roads. The Union funded test cases in which road surveyors were brought before local magistrates for failing to keep the roads passable. Ultimately the NCU and the CTC formed a Roads Improvement Association ‘to circulate popular and technical road literature in order to enlighten ratepayers…and to guide county councillors, highway boards and their employees about proper road repair and maintenance; to remonstrate with responsible authorities where neglect of roads became a public scandal, and take legal action where necessary; to watch or introduce fresh legislation to remove anomalies; and to take up the question of fingerposts and milestones and their erection and maintenance.’
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In 1896, as a result of the Association’s campaigning, the Locomotive Highways Act was passed, which raised the speed limit to twenty miles per hour (from twelve).
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This was swiftly satirized by W. S. Gilbert in his ‘Bab Ballads’:

The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own;
And the lady from the provinces, who dresses like a guy,
And who ‘doesn’t think she waltzes, but would rather like to try’;
And that singular anomaly, the scorching bicyclist -
I don’t think he’ll be missed - I’m sure he’d not be missed!

The results of these campaigns - for improved roads, for better signage, for good roadside food, drink and accommodation - helped create the environment in which shortly the motor-car industry found it possible to flourish.

By this time cycling was no longer just for men. Women had joined in with great enthusiasm. In 1894 Constance Everett-Green, soon to become the leading female cycling journalist, had written that it was ‘still more or less of an open question in England whether ladies can with propriety ride the bicycle’. The following year she commented, ‘It would hardly be too much to say that in April of 1895 one was considered eccentric for riding a bicycle, whilst by the end of June eccentricity rested with those who did not ride.’ And in March 1896 it was reported that, on a pleasant morning, between 2,000 and 3,000 cyclists could be seen daily beside the Serpentine in Hyde Park.
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Cycling was the done thing, and it gained the overtones of conspicuous consumption that many pastimes had tried to do, so that the wealthy might take it up, and the less wealthy would desire to emulate them. The
Illustrated Sporting and
Dramatic News
started a ‘Sportswoman’s Page’ in the 1890s. Describing a new cycle, the page’s correspondent declared, ‘I…fell violently in love with it. It had nickel rims, and the handles of ivory are cased at the end in caps of pieced gold.’
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Writers of all stripes found a new subject in the bicycle. First there was a deluge of travel books:
From the Clyde to the Jordan: Narrative of a Bicycle Journey, In Jutland with a Cycle, Awheel to Moscow and Back, Sketches Awheel in Iberia, A New Ride to Khiva, Across Siberia on a Bicycle.
The first novel to feature a bicycle (or at least the
Athenaeum
reviewed it as such) was Ben Hayward’s
All Else of No Avail
in 1888. Perhaps of more lasting value was George Gissing’s 1901 short story, ‘A Daughter of the Lodge’, in which cycling is portrayed as a rich New Woman’s indulgence. E. Nesbit’s
Five Children and It
(1902) includes an episode where a baby is magically turned into a young man; being grown up, he automatically owns a bicycle. Perhaps the most enjoyable of these ephemeral cycling tales are Grant Allen’s detective stories featuring the female detective Lois Cayley. In ‘The Typewriter Girl’ (two New Women symbols in one!) she frantically cycles away from an anarchist community at top speed, only to crash into another (woman) cyclist. In 1899 Allen’s
Hilda Wade: A Woman with Tenacity of Purpose
, set in Rhodesia, had a heroine who escapes the assegais of the ferocious Matabele by ‘vaulting lightly on to the seat of her bicycle and pedalling for dear life’, while the ‘savages’ draw back, superstitiously afraid of a woman on an ‘iron horse’. She is somewhat hampered by the baby she is carrying, so the hero leaps to the rescue - literally, as he jumps on to her cycle, steering with one hand, while firing a gun with the other, as she swaps her cycle for his pony.
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But short stories filled a small niche market. The real publishing money in cycling was in the new specialist journals. In 1896
Cycling Magazine
claimed to be selling over 41,000 copies every week. This was one among many, though:
Wheel Life
(founded in 1876, and soon incorporated with
Bicycling News
), the
CTC Gazette
and the
Cyclist
(both 1879),
Wheeling
(1884), the
Cycling Budget
(1886),
Cycling
(1891, and surviving until 1957), the
Lady Cyclist
(1895) and
Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News
(1896) all found an audience. The
Boy’s Own Paper
, which had been founded in 1879, was selling 1 million copies per issue by 1900, giving middle-class boys school stories, sports stories and adventure stories, interleaved with advertisements for bicycles and other sporting equipment.
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More than just advertisements for the cycles themselves appeared. Now bicycling was popular enough to be referred to as a socially desirable pastime in advertisements for entirely unrelated products. Elliman’s Universal Embrocation, ‘for stiffness, aches, sprains, bruises’, promised that its product was so splendid that ‘Boys Race for It!’, with an illustration of boys on cycles speeding towards the prize, the embrocation, under glass. Advertisements for prepared foods also often featured cycles: both the foods and the cycles were presented as ideal for the woman who was not always stuck at home. Meredith and Drew merged these two ideas in its ‘cycle biscuit’, heavily marketed for a while. Advertisements for Stower’s Lime Cordial assured readers that it was ‘the only healthy beverage that can be safely taken after cycling or other exercise’. It showed a woman in fashionable dress and hat (although not cycling clothes, see below), sitting down beside a cycle. Another advertisement for Elliman’s was more daring, with a woman in bloomers (although chaperoned by an old man on a tricycle).
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Specialized clothes for sport had been good business for some time. In 1851 at the Great Exhibition one merchant had promoted his specialized wear for ‘deer-stalking, riding, and walking’.
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In Chapter 6 we saw how seaside fashions had altered over the century. Team sports, too, had specialized clothing. By the 1840s the boys playing football at Harrow were wearing different coloured jerseys to identify the two teams, although at Rugby in
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
(1856) the concession to sporting wear was that the boys removed their hats, jackets, waistcoats, braces and ‘neck-handkerchiefs’. In 1867
Routledge’s Handbook of Football
described players wearing broad leather belts and their oldest and dirtiest trousers, with ‘tight’ jerseys, although it suggested that ‘the prettiest costume…[should include] a coloured velvet cap with a tassell’. It also suggested that ‘if it can previously be so arranged…one side [should wear] striped jerseys of one colour, say red; and the other…another, say blue. This prevents confusion and wild attempts to…wrest the ball from your neighbour. I have often seen this done, and heard the invariable apology - “I beg your pardon, I thought you were on the opposite side.” ’ By the 1880s the FA was recommending striped jerseys and below-the-knee-length shorts, with plain or striped stockings.
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As always, however, the larger market was not the players, but the amateurs and the fans. No one was yet buying replica team-wear, but cotton handkerchiefs with a picture of the England team printed on them could
be bought in 1886.
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For the weekend players themselves, in 1880 Lewis’s in Manchester was selling football jerseys for 3
s.
11
d.
, knickerbockers at 6
s.
9
d.
, and stockings at 1
s.
9
d
.
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Tennis, a sport of the middle classes, had even more possibilities for fashionable playing wear. Men wore the same sort of clothes as they did at the seaside: flannels, striped blazers, open-necked shirts. Women, again as they did at the seaside, wore their everyday clothes, barely modified at all. When tennis was first played, in the 1870s and 1880s, this meant corsets, petticoats and trimmed, decorated frocks that were cut narrowly down to the knee and of course included a dress-improver (bustle), with the entire outfit finished off with a hat. A lady’s magazine in 1879 suggested that ‘a cream merino bodice with long sleeves edged with embroidery; skirt with deep kilting, over it an old-gold silk blousetunic with short wide sleeves and square neck’, together with ‘a large straw hat of the coal-scuttle type’, was an eminently suitable outfit for the game.
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The only specialist accompaniments were the new rubber-soled shoes, although for women until the 1880s these continued to have leather uppers, and even heels.
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