I can’t remember much about it except that it was the mid-1970s somewhere near Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. But I remember that my relative - my father’s cousin’s husband, whom we called my uncle - asked if I’d like a ride on his tandem. For a minute or two, I lurched around a field on the stoker seat at the back, before being deposited back with my father. It was the kind of brief, new experience that children from fortunate backgrounds are lucky enough to enjoy many times while growing up.
This experience had a far more profound effect on me than most other bits of childhood excitement, however. The ride was the first time I’d ever made a journey on two wheels, part of a process of learning about bicycles that has helped to shape both how I get about and, to some extent, who I am. My uncle and aunt were critical role models for me, much the keenest cyclists in the wider family and thoroughly steeped in the small-scale, self-contained British bicycling culture of their era. For a long time, I nurtured the intention of getting back in touch with them to tell them how much their example had meant to me. I wanted to share with them the many simple joys that riding a bike had brought into my life.
Yet a chance twitter exchange on December 21 led me to do a Google search on their names and come up against a surprising, sad discovery. Without my hearing about it, both died within the past two years - my uncle in February 2015 and my aunt this past November. I won’t be able to share a last conversation about cycling. Nor will I be able, as I’d long planned, to get to their funerals by bike, as a quiet tribute to how they inspired me.
The recognition of their having gone has, nevertheless, prompted me to reflect again on how the habit of cycling is propagated. In countries like the UK and the US, where cycling is a minority activity, many of us who ride bikes do so at least in part because some relative initiated us into cycling’s mysteries. My father taught me how to ride a bike and how to handle myself on the roads. But my uncle and aunt were examples of how a bike could be central to one’s daily transport and leisure time. They showed me that the self-reliance and communion with the world around that come with transport cycling could shape much of one’s life experience.
News of their passing has also led me to reflect on how people such as my uncle and aunt kept cycling going in less cycling-friendly countries during the mode’s leanest years. It must have felt hard, sometimes, to maintain enthusiasm as roads were gradually redesigned to encourage private motor car use and to disadvantage cyclists. Yet sheer, naive enthusiasm kept them going.
The ride in Northumberland stood out in part because it was a relative rarity. My aunt and uncle lived in Newcastle, a fair distance from where I grew up in Glasgow. We saw each other mainly on short visits during school holidays, spent largely with my aunt and uncle’s son, six months older than I.
But there was greater intimacy than the relationship might suggest. My father, an only child, grew up partly with my aunt, who with her brother stayed with my grandparents during their holidays from boarding school. Their own parents were abroad with their father’s work in the diplomatic service. There was a sibling-like fondness between my dad and my aunt and their family formed part of my family’s emotional furniture.
I should admit that it was part of that emotional furniture that my mother, who never learned to ride a bike, found my aunt and uncle vaguely baffling. She used regularly to tell people, in amused disbelief, how they’d turned a whole room of their end-of-terrace house in Jesmond, Newcastle, into a space for storing and working on bikes. She was similarly horrified they’d wallpapered one wall of their front room with Ordnance Survey maps of areas 100 or so miles either side of Newcastle, to facilitate planning of touring trips. She scoffed over how my uncle had modified a tandem so that his son could help out with pedalling.
I quietly thought their way of doing things rather cool, though. I recall their once visiting us in Glasgow with their touring bikes, watching them heading off down the road afterwards, turning smoothly onto the main road and aspiring to their calm poise and control on their laden machines. It is no accident that I’ve ridden a touring bike almost exclusively since 2007.
But the point that influenced me most, I think, was not a specific technical point or some notion about how one got to work each day. It was that they enjoyed getting about by bike more than they cared what other people thought. This was, I think, the point that ultimately my mum both admired and found baffling - their indifference to convention. It’s because I feel something similar that I’m prepared to cycle to distant meetings without much concern about how I’ll look when I arrive.
While there are ways of looking cool on a bicycle - riding a minimalist fixie or cruising along on a retro-looking Dutch bike - both my aunt and uncle and I belong to a rather different, what-matters-is-what-works school of thinking. In contemporary, English-speaking societies, even as it’s become more socially acceptable to cycle, one still needs a bit of that spirit to make a bicycle one's main mode of transport.
The defiance of convention wasn’t, I think, a principled stand. They seemed simply to feel such youthful enthusiasm for the experience of being on bicycles that it seemed silly to do anything else. My uncle was a member of the Rough Stuff Fellowship, an off-road cycling group that was a precursor of much of what would now be called mountain biking. They both participated in a group called the Tandem Club. After I discovered they’d died, I found an old club newsletter to which my uncle had written, sending in a picture of his son on the tandem with him in 1973 in Jesmond. Sure enough, it has raised rear cranks to let him pedal. But there’s a lightness of spirit to the picture that’s a counterpoint to my mother’s bafflement. My uncle writes that he sent the picture because of his son’s smile, which he says is saying, “Ain’t tandeming grand?”
Eventually, at some point in the 1980s, my aunt quit her job as an architect and they started their own bike shop in Low Fell, Gateshead, near Newcastle. They resisted, I recall, selling Raleigh Grifters, cheap imitation mountain bikes popular with kids, but had to give in. The shop was never, I sense, a huge financial success. The area near the shop houses a big - and not especially well-off - Orthodox Jewish community. My uncle would grumble about his struggle to persuade the community’s boys that maybe it was time for a new bike instead of repairing this one yet again. Fortune seldom seemed to smile on the enterprise. My aunt spent one Christmas cleaning up the flat above the shop after the tenant killed himself. Another Christmas was marred by a costly break-in.
But there remained around them an unmistakable sense that a bicycle was a tool for exploring the world, in a far fuller sense than was possible in a car. The one time we took a foreign family holiday - to Normandy, in 1986 - we quite by chance came upon my aunt, participating in a Cyclists’ Touring Club tour of the area. She used to gripe around then - she was nearly 60 - about being classed a “veteran” when participating in competitive events. When I lived briefly in Newcastle during my newspaper training and I told them of our plans to honeymoon in the Czech Republic, they warmly recommended we visit Český Krumlov, which they’d visited on another touring holiday.
Without their example, I doubt I’d have spent much of one summer of my university holidays cycling around central and southern Scotland. I might not have felt bold enough to drag my own family on cycling-based holidays in western France and on Cape Cod. While they were far from worldly people, they had a clear sense of the boundless possibilities of the outdoors world and a continuous excitement about the the possibilities of using a bicycle to explore it. I had an enjoyable dinner with them while I was training in 1994 and recall my uncle’s explaining that the big risk with riding a tandem was the sheer speed they could gather on downhills.
“If you don’t look out, before you know it you’re doing 50mph,” he told me.
Such youthfulness is, of course, no substitute for eternal youth. When I last saw my uncle, in 2002 at my father’s funeral, he was suffering from emphysema, thanks to a life of pipe-smoking. My aunt eventually needed full-time residential care. But my mother passed on for far longer than one might expect stories of their soldiering on with their tandem, each in their 70s but making up for the other’s shortcomings. I got the sense that they were clinging tenaciously to the activity that had shaped their sense of themselves.
While many of my choices have been very different from theirs, I understand some of that instinct. I live, after all, in a house whose hall is hung with the family bikes. I’ve yearned for a child on a trailer bike to put in at least some pedalling effort. I’ve turned up mud-spattered for an important event because I insisted on making the journey by bike and the trip went less smoothly than I’d imagined. I’ve been determined to keep cycling to work even in weather in which others thought I was mad to try.
It’s partly because of that fellow feeling that I wish I’d found out earlier about my aunt’s death and been able to attend the funeral. I would have liked to represent my father and to reflect some of that warmth among my father’s family towards my aunt. But I’d also have valued the opportunity to pay tribute to what they represented. They kept cycling even as planners drove urban motorways through Newcastle and peppered the city with mini-roundabouts intended to smooth the traffic flow. They continued riding bikes even as once-quiet rural roads became clogged with traffic. They made do with far less sophisticated machines than we now enjoy, braving mountain paths and high-speed roads alike with minimal gears, heavy bikes and rudimentary brakes.
Such die-hard enthusiasts were the founders of many of the organisations that have been at the forefront of improving cycling across the industrialised world - the London Cycling Campaign, Transportation Alternatives in New York and many others. I see wizened, older cyclists at many activist events and respect the way they kept things going through far harder times. It is easy to get caught up in the present generation’s battles. It is easy to sneer at a previous generation’s focus on riding on roads and neglect of infrastructure. But the memory of my aunt and uncle has reminded me that we all still in a sense ride in their slipstream.
This experience had a far more profound effect on me than most other bits of childhood excitement, however. The ride was the first time I’d ever made a journey on two wheels, part of a process of learning about bicycles that has helped to shape both how I get about and, to some extent, who I am. My uncle and aunt were critical role models for me, much the keenest cyclists in the wider family and thoroughly steeped in the small-scale, self-contained British bicycling culture of their era. For a long time, I nurtured the intention of getting back in touch with them to tell them how much their example had meant to me. I wanted to share with them the many simple joys that riding a bike had brought into my life.
 |
| Bikes at London's pre-Christmas Kidical Mass ride - a reminder that families continue to be critical to propagating the habit of cycling |
Yet a chance twitter exchange on December 21 led me to do a Google search on their names and come up against a surprising, sad discovery. Without my hearing about it, both died within the past two years - my uncle in February 2015 and my aunt this past November. I won’t be able to share a last conversation about cycling. Nor will I be able, as I’d long planned, to get to their funerals by bike, as a quiet tribute to how they inspired me.
The recognition of their having gone has, nevertheless, prompted me to reflect again on how the habit of cycling is propagated. In countries like the UK and the US, where cycling is a minority activity, many of us who ride bikes do so at least in part because some relative initiated us into cycling’s mysteries. My father taught me how to ride a bike and how to handle myself on the roads. But my uncle and aunt were examples of how a bike could be central to one’s daily transport and leisure time. They showed me that the self-reliance and communion with the world around that come with transport cycling could shape much of one’s life experience.
News of their passing has also led me to reflect on how people such as my uncle and aunt kept cycling going in less cycling-friendly countries during the mode’s leanest years. It must have felt hard, sometimes, to maintain enthusiasm as roads were gradually redesigned to encourage private motor car use and to disadvantage cyclists. Yet sheer, naive enthusiasm kept them going.
The ride in Northumberland stood out in part because it was a relative rarity. My aunt and uncle lived in Newcastle, a fair distance from where I grew up in Glasgow. We saw each other mainly on short visits during school holidays, spent largely with my aunt and uncle’s son, six months older than I.
 |
| A tandem with special cranks for a child to pedal - an image that would baffle my mother. |
But there was greater intimacy than the relationship might suggest. My father, an only child, grew up partly with my aunt, who with her brother stayed with my grandparents during their holidays from boarding school. Their own parents were abroad with their father’s work in the diplomatic service. There was a sibling-like fondness between my dad and my aunt and their family formed part of my family’s emotional furniture.
I should admit that it was part of that emotional furniture that my mother, who never learned to ride a bike, found my aunt and uncle vaguely baffling. She used regularly to tell people, in amused disbelief, how they’d turned a whole room of their end-of-terrace house in Jesmond, Newcastle, into a space for storing and working on bikes. She was similarly horrified they’d wallpapered one wall of their front room with Ordnance Survey maps of areas 100 or so miles either side of Newcastle, to facilitate planning of touring trips. She scoffed over how my uncle had modified a tandem so that his son could help out with pedalling.
I quietly thought their way of doing things rather cool, though. I recall their once visiting us in Glasgow with their touring bikes, watching them heading off down the road afterwards, turning smoothly onto the main road and aspiring to their calm poise and control on their laden machines. It is no accident that I’ve ridden a touring bike almost exclusively since 2007.
But the point that influenced me most, I think, was not a specific technical point or some notion about how one got to work each day. It was that they enjoyed getting about by bike more than they cared what other people thought. This was, I think, the point that ultimately my mum both admired and found baffling - their indifference to convention. It’s because I feel something similar that I’m prepared to cycle to distant meetings without much concern about how I’ll look when I arrive.
 |
| My Long Haul Trucker, loaded up: not the coolest type of bicycle, but aspirational for me. |
While there are ways of looking cool on a bicycle - riding a minimalist fixie or cruising along on a retro-looking Dutch bike - both my aunt and uncle and I belong to a rather different, what-matters-is-what-works school of thinking. In contemporary, English-speaking societies, even as it’s become more socially acceptable to cycle, one still needs a bit of that spirit to make a bicycle one's main mode of transport.
The defiance of convention wasn’t, I think, a principled stand. They seemed simply to feel such youthful enthusiasm for the experience of being on bicycles that it seemed silly to do anything else. My uncle was a member of the Rough Stuff Fellowship, an off-road cycling group that was a precursor of much of what would now be called mountain biking. They both participated in a group called the Tandem Club. After I discovered they’d died, I found an old club newsletter to which my uncle had written, sending in a picture of his son on the tandem with him in 1973 in Jesmond. Sure enough, it has raised rear cranks to let him pedal. But there’s a lightness of spirit to the picture that’s a counterpoint to my mother’s bafflement. My uncle writes that he sent the picture because of his son’s smile, which he says is saying, “Ain’t tandeming grand?”
 |
| Cyclists on the 2009 London SkyRide: a reminder that, even as cycling grows cooler, a certain readiness to be uncool remains vital. |
Eventually, at some point in the 1980s, my aunt quit her job as an architect and they started their own bike shop in Low Fell, Gateshead, near Newcastle. They resisted, I recall, selling Raleigh Grifters, cheap imitation mountain bikes popular with kids, but had to give in. The shop was never, I sense, a huge financial success. The area near the shop houses a big - and not especially well-off - Orthodox Jewish community. My uncle would grumble about his struggle to persuade the community’s boys that maybe it was time for a new bike instead of repairing this one yet again. Fortune seldom seemed to smile on the enterprise. My aunt spent one Christmas cleaning up the flat above the shop after the tenant killed himself. Another Christmas was marred by a costly break-in.
But there remained around them an unmistakable sense that a bicycle was a tool for exploring the world, in a far fuller sense than was possible in a car. The one time we took a foreign family holiday - to Normandy, in 1986 - we quite by chance came upon my aunt, participating in a Cyclists’ Touring Club tour of the area. She used to gripe around then - she was nearly 60 - about being classed a “veteran” when participating in competitive events. When I lived briefly in Newcastle during my newspaper training and I told them of our plans to honeymoon in the Czech Republic, they warmly recommended we visit Český Krumlov, which they’d visited on another touring holiday.
 |
| A worried cyclist watches as the driver loads his bike at the end of his French touring holiday: I might not have been there but for my relatives' example. |
Without their example, I doubt I’d have spent much of one summer of my university holidays cycling around central and southern Scotland. I might not have felt bold enough to drag my own family on cycling-based holidays in western France and on Cape Cod. While they were far from worldly people, they had a clear sense of the boundless possibilities of the outdoors world and a continuous excitement about the the possibilities of using a bicycle to explore it. I had an enjoyable dinner with them while I was training in 1994 and recall my uncle’s explaining that the big risk with riding a tandem was the sheer speed they could gather on downhills.
“If you don’t look out, before you know it you’re doing 50mph,” he told me.
Such youthfulness is, of course, no substitute for eternal youth. When I last saw my uncle, in 2002 at my father’s funeral, he was suffering from emphysema, thanks to a life of pipe-smoking. My aunt eventually needed full-time residential care. But my mother passed on for far longer than one might expect stories of their soldiering on with their tandem, each in their 70s but making up for the other’s shortcomings. I got the sense that they were clinging tenaciously to the activity that had shaped their sense of themselves.
 |
| Bikes hang in my hall: not as convention- defying as a whole room, but a reminder of my relatives' influence. |
While many of my choices have been very different from theirs, I understand some of that instinct. I live, after all, in a house whose hall is hung with the family bikes. I’ve yearned for a child on a trailer bike to put in at least some pedalling effort. I’ve turned up mud-spattered for an important event because I insisted on making the journey by bike and the trip went less smoothly than I’d imagined. I’ve been determined to keep cycling to work even in weather in which others thought I was mad to try.
It’s partly because of that fellow feeling that I wish I’d found out earlier about my aunt’s death and been able to attend the funeral. I would have liked to represent my father and to reflect some of that warmth among my father’s family towards my aunt. But I’d also have valued the opportunity to pay tribute to what they represented. They kept cycling even as planners drove urban motorways through Newcastle and peppered the city with mini-roundabouts intended to smooth the traffic flow. They continued riding bikes even as once-quiet rural roads became clogged with traffic. They made do with far less sophisticated machines than we now enjoy, braving mountain paths and high-speed roads alike with minimal gears, heavy bikes and rudimentary brakes.
Such die-hard enthusiasts were the founders of many of the organisations that have been at the forefront of improving cycling across the industrialised world - the London Cycling Campaign, Transportation Alternatives in New York and many others. I see wizened, older cyclists at many activist events and respect the way they kept things going through far harder times. It is easy to get caught up in the present generation’s battles. It is easy to sneer at a previous generation’s focus on riding on roads and neglect of infrastructure. But the memory of my aunt and uncle has reminded me that we all still in a sense ride in their slipstream.
An interesting reflection. I share your fascination with and gratitude to those hardy men and women who kept the cycling flame alive during the Great Extinction. However, my sense is that they were/are mostly recreational cyclists, and that they did most of their riding on rural roads. It seems very clear to me that these rural roads are still getting worse for cycling (and were, in fact, far better for cycling back in the 'dark days' of the 60s and 70s than they are now). Motor traffic continues to increase in rural areas, with more and more commercial traffic, and people doing much longer commutes in faster, more economical and more comfortable cars, plus the school run and the rise of 2, and 3 car families. I own a cycle touring guidebook published by the CTC in the late 70s. Rural B roads feature heavily, they were clearly the bread and butter routes of the Brooks 'n' Carradice generations. Yet many of these roads now offer the worst cycling experiences. Centre lines have been painted in yet the carriageways are too narrow to pass a cyclist safely. Drivers expect to be able to go at 50-60mph, despite restricted sight lines. The measure of progress in cycle infrastructure and road danger reduction that we've seen in London and a few other towns and cities has not yet reached the countryside. And this is reflected in the cycling casualty statistics, which make for particularly dire reading for rural A roads.
ReplyDeleteJack,
DeleteThanks for the comment.
While I was writing this blogpost, I watched an interesting video about the Rough Stuff Fellowship, of which my uncle was a member. One early member there said that most members in Lancashire rode to work by bike but wanted to get out into clean air in the countryside at the weekends. I think it's easy to forget now how much the desire to get into the countryside that inspired both that generation of cycle tourists and ramblers in the UK reflected quite how unpleasant cities like Newcastle, Manchester and so on were because of industrial pollution. I'm pretty sure that my aunt and uncle were riding bikes to work as well as in the countryside a lot of the time. I suspect that, when traffic levels were lower than now, it just didn't seem like the issue it is now to seek better facilities.
You're undoubtedly right, nevertheless, about the state of the countryside. I ride a fair amount in the countryside when visiting my wife's family on the Wirral and it's clear that Satellite Navigation, growing long-distance commuting and so on have made the quiet country roads that used to be the mainstay of cycle touring fairly miserable places to ride a bike. I'm certainly pleased that there's now an off-road path pretty much all the way between where my parents-in-law live and Chester, where I get the train, and between their house and their church. Those mean that I'm no longer jostling with the souped-up SUVs of the Premiership footballers and their wives that are such a depressing feature of life in rural north-west England.
All the best,
Invisible.
I find that motor traffic has not only become higher in volume but motor vehicles themselves have changed over the past few decades. They're bigger and more powerful and are able to accelerate more quickly. Sharing a country road with them is not the same as it was in the past.
DeleteThis is why I find that motorists really have some nerve be complaining about the building of cycling infrastructure when they are the ones that have caused the need for it in the first place.
Clark,
DeleteThanks for the comment. You're absolutely correct that cars have become scarier, particularly in North America but also here in Europe. I'm very struck at the moment by the number of powerful German cars I encounter on back streets in London and by how eager drivers are to drive them too fast.
All the best,
Invisible.
"My uncle would grumble about his struggle to persuade the community’s boys that maybe it was time for a new bike instead of repairing this one yet again." There's great satisfaction in keeping on old bike going, though, isn't there. On more than one occasion in the past I've had a bike repaired when it would really have made more sense to replace it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your blog. I'm not a regular reader but always enjoy it when I drop by :-)
David,
DeleteThanks for the comment. I agree there's a satisfaction in keeping a bike going. My Surly Long Haul Trucker will be ten years old this year and it's done around 4,000 miles a year since I bought it. But I guess we're looking at this from the perspective of bike owners. For the owner of a struggling bike shop, another rescue repair on a battered, cheap bike might surely seem a depressing prospect if the alternative is to receive a nice big cash lump sum and get a new bike out of the door.
All the best,
Invisible.
Even better, from the shop perspective - that new bike will probably need more repairs per mile at more dollars per repair than the bike it replaced
DeleteSteve,
DeleteThanks for the comment. I can see how with some new bikes there might end up being a lot of repairs. But I think my uncle was convinced new bikes would work better than the battered old machines he was suggesting they should replace.
All the best,
Invisible.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with Jack. Having spent over a decade riding on the streets of London for a living, I can say that I find most of the roads outside of London in the south of England objectively and subjectively dangerous, uncomfortable and unpleasant.
There are so few roads around London that are pleasant to ride that I reckon that I know all of them, certainly those that lead out from south east and north east.
Having ridden a few audaxes (sp?) around the south of England, I found that most end up sharing routes with other events, such is the dearth of pleasant roads to ride on. One of the appeals of overnight rides like Dunwich et al. is that after midnight there is almost no motor traffic. I used to lead a night ride to Stonehenge on the shortest night, and I can remember riding down the A30 to Basingstoke in a group, and not seeing a car at all. We were able to ride 3 or 4 abreast and chat - unimaginable in daytime.
I was riding with a friend who lives outside Axminster, and to avoid riding along the A35 (which is a horrible, horrible road) to his home, we literally rode in a big circle and over 2 hills.
One of the reasons that touring in France is a vastly different experience to touring in England is that France has the same number of cars, but something like 5 times the length of road, which means it is easy to find a straight road with no traffic on it, unlike in England, where you are forced to detour down muddy tracks and through farmyards to avoid dual-carriageways.
Bill,
DeleteThanks for the comment.
Having moved back to the UK in July after four years in New York, I've noticed, I think, that rural roads have become still less pleasant than they were before we left. Outer bits of London are also pretty unpleasant. I rode on January 2 with my wife and son from our home in Brixton to Kew Gardens and the Invisible Visible Woman remarked on the aggressiveness of the driving on side streets where there are often two ranks of parked cars and only minimal space for moving vehicles. I suspect that satellite navigation, which makes it far easier to wayfind along quiet, twisting roads, has played a role. It's a grim irony that, given the superhighways and some other projects, central London's actually become one of the better places to ride a bike. We also took a family trip over the holidays from Brixton to Greenwich and Quietway 1 was actually very pleasant.
All the best,
Invisible.
I think you were lucky to have that kind of example. It's a shame you didn't get the chance to tell them in person.
ReplyDeleteI think nearly all roads are getting worse for cycling because of motor traffic. The ones that are getting better have superhighways or other infrastructure. Suburban roads have fewer people to make a case for cycling infrastructure - even more so for rural roads. A few rural places have built paths, like Clackmannanshire. Everywhere else will get worse due to increased traffic. It will happen around all UK cities - the larger the population, the worse the effect. I only know the outskirts of Paris from the final stage of Le Tour. I think that different cycling culture must play a part.
I'm a bit more familiar with London and sat nav but its population seems like it would be the main issue. More generally, across the UK, you could equally argue it's town planning, loss of rural buses, Beeching cuts, 'commuter belts', 'Escape to the Country', car ads or any number of other factors. At the end of the day it comes down to traffic.
Derek,
DeleteThanks for the comment.
Population growth is undoubtedly a big part of why traffic is growing worse. But traffic levels in London are generally declining, thanks to high use of public transport and some growth in walking and cycling. That's why I attribute some of the conditions in suburban London to new technology. There seems to be more traffic on out-of-the-way routes at a time when general traffic is falling.
All the best,
Invisible.