Vol 2, No 32
Articles in this issue
- The night at Markolsheim: two spare beds only, the second drawn for by lot and won by the Doctor, the other six on the floor, and then "the battle of Markolsheim" against fleas, 240 bites counted on one arm, Marchant escaping by washing in carbolic soap. Next morning the party feeds on wild roadside cherries, bathes in a canal, and reaches Strasbourg, where they watch the cathedral clock's noon performance of planetarium, apostles and crowing cock, before splitting: Williams, Marchant, Trollope and Kinder to take the train to Heidelberg, the other four to ride the 85 miles.
- Three riders, the Northern Guide on a veteran "Stassen," the Western Wanderer on a "Humber" and the Martyr on a sturdy "Club", set out at eight for a place the Ordnance map does not show. They ride the whole of Red Hill beyond Uxbridge in the saddle, drink foul-smelling water at the Gerrards Cross pump, and stop at High Wycombe to climb to Le Despencer's hilltop church, described at length: the mahogany pulpit, the bronze tripod font, the fresco of the Lord's Supper, the ball on the steeple that will hold six people, and the mausoleum with the urn for Paul Whitehead's heart, later stolen from its leaden case.
- A single line of fixtures, every district converging on Ewell: Lea Bridge Road at 3 p.m. by "Jack Straw's Castle" and Kew (N.E.); "Jack Straw's Castle" at 4 p.m., meeting the S.W. at Kew Green (N.W.); Kew Green at 5 p.m. (W. and S.W.); and Central Croydon at 4 p.m. for the circular run (S.E.), with the usual Wednesday evening runs from Acton Church and Croydon.
- M. D. Rucker, Jun. announces the closing official runs of the season: every district rides to the "Glynn Arms," Ewell, on Saturday next to take tea together, a member has promised to photograph all who arrive by 5.30 if the weather and light permit, a piano will be obtained if possible, and there should be a good moon to ride home by.
- N.W.: nine and three visitors rode 32 miles by Child's Hill, Neesdon and Kingsbury Green, where the Western men were waiting, to a shilling tea at the "Black Horse," Eastcott, with a boy putting a stone in Hill's wheel at Child's Hill on the dark ride home. N.E.: C. H. F. Christie, alone at Syborn's Corner, changed the run to Ongar through Loughton and Epping. W.: five from Harlesden Green, the Neesdon lane wrecked by the new railway. S.W.: Rolls waited a quarter of an hour at the "Griffin," Kingston, and went home to tea. S.E.: Blackheath and Croydon men joined at Farnborough for Riverhead and an excellent cheap tea at the "Amherst Arms."
- Three dates: Arion B.C.'s mile at Stamford Bridge on September 27th, and the L.A.C. meetings at Stamford Bridge on October 4th and November 1st.
- At Lillie Bridge on September 20th, about 7,000 people saw a two miles open bicycle handicap in which 36 of 58 entries started in six heats. Cleaver and Wyndham won heats for the L.B.C., Wyndham repassing Runtz up the hill with an old-style spurt, and the final went to R. A. Woolnough (Rivers B.C., 300 yards) by a yard and a half from Petty and Bennett in 5 min. 45 3/4 sec., Keen's handicapping praised and Coleman acting as timekeeper, lap-taker and judge. The writer deplores the "two to one bar one" bookmakers in the shilling enclosure and notes five open bicycle meetings in London that same afternoon.
- "Jack" is driven over to Poole for a meet of more than a hundred local riders, the brown-clad men of Poole under their gold-banded captain, blue jackets from Christchurch, Bournemouth and helmeted Blandford, and the black-coated "Wandering Minstrels" of Wimborne Minster, plus a leading county clergyman who covers thirty miles at a steady seven on a Coventry tricycle. After sailing in Poole Harbour he reaches Bournemouth, where clergymen, solicitors and bricklayers all ride, machines lean against the scaffold poles of every house building, and court-day fills the town hall with wheels.
- "Mucker" finally reaches Pleshy at the seventh attempt, by Ongar and Chelmsford, turning left at the "Red Cow" and taking the Dunmow road past Great Waltham. The village is six houses and a pub; the landlord-cobbler and the blacksmith direct him to the great mound, its three-quarter moat and the single-arch brick bridge worth seeing from below. Home through High Easter and Fyfield, 81 miles in all, and Pleshy commended as an ancient entrenchment undefiled by 'Arry because there is no railway station for miles.
- The club's annual meeting in the Beckenham Cricket Club grounds, with the band of the Commissionaires and a fashionable company. Chater won both the new members-only half-mile handicap and the club mile on a 60-in. "Timberlake" roadster; the youth Sutherland was hissed for showing off after the post. In the open mile, won by J. H. J. Williams from Beeson and Relton in 3 min. 20 sec., the scratch men were nowhere, the thin tyres of their racers sank into the soft grass while the roadsters' larger rubber ran over it.
- Under the sub-head "The Empress," a review of W. Keen ("Bill Keen") of Norwood Junction's roadster: Stanley head, a fluted steel-tube front fork preferred to the D.H.F.'s braced tubes, an oval-sectioned hollow backbone, 60 to 100 spokes to order (70 of No. 13 gauge thought ample on a 54-in. wheel), rollers or balls at the buyer's option, and a two-finger spoon brake on a long lever. The spring is the one failing, it left the writer sitting on the backbone for some 60 miles.
- Eavesdropper on Cooper beating Keen at Lillie Bridge for the mile championship in 2 min. 54 1/4 sec., their seventeenth meeting (Keen nine wins to Cooper's eight), and on Cooper now offering any rider in the world but Gillot ten yards; on the Commissionaires' band at Beckenham making him ill; on meeting the fabulist "McCullum Hill" in a train and capping his times with an eight-foot high jump off a wall; on a winter programme of dinner, concert, Choral, Dramatic and Debating Societies and a ball; and on 11 1/2 miles and 2,000 feet of rise done in two hours up and 1 hr. 9 min. down on a "Stassen" spoke mended by native industry.
- The two professionals met for the seventeenth time for the mile championship and stakes of one hundred pounds. Keen looked over-trained and Cooper still carried flesh; Jack White fired the pistol, Keen led from the inside through laps of 58 3/4 sec. and 1 min. 57 3/4 sec., but Cooper passed him in the railway straight "as if he was standing still" and won hands down in 2 min. 54 1/4 sec. The attendance was wretched because the race had barely been advertised; G. P. Coleman officially timed it.
- The "Pyrenean Representative" reports the end of the mountain trip, four passes of 4,000 to 7,000 feet taken with the machines, all well, and a start for home on Tuesday, two by Bordeaux and the rest by St. Malo. A second extract, from Mr. W. Williams's son, describes the wet crossing from Eaux-Bonnes to Argelès: an eight-mile drag to a 5,610-foot summit among the snow, soup and beans at a cottage, a shelf road cut along a precipice, then Cauterets and St. Sauveur, with the ride through France to St. Malo to begin from Bagnères de Luchon.