Vol 3, No 19
Articles in this issue
- At the meeting of Monday 19 July, Maynard Hugh Jephson of Hertford College, Oxford, and Spencer Murch Mumby of Gosport were elected members and Mr. W. H. Macmillan's resignation accepted from January last. A motion that from 1881 an extra Bath Trial medal be given for every three starters above the three-year average of twenty-six, to a maximum of fifteen medals, was negatived; only eleven entries having been received for the Club Handicap it was postponed sine die; and the sudden death of Earl Kintore, father of the President the Hon. Ion Keith-Falconer, is recorded with regret.
- Arrangements for the meet at Ewell: the N.E. leave Lea Bridge Road at 3 sharp for 'Jack Straw's Castle', the N.W. leave there at 4 for Kew, and the W. and S.W. leave the 'Coach and Horses,' Kew, at 5, while the Blackheath Division starts from Old Lewisham Church at 3.30 to pick up the Croydon Division at 4.30. Tea is arranged for about 6.30 at the 'Glyn Arms', N. B. Morris offers to house machines and provide a dressing-room at Oak Hill House, no District need give more than ten minutes' grace, and both journeys count for attendance.
- 'The experiment has failed', Captain Theo. Godlee announces that so few entries were received that the Committee has had to abandon the Handicap, apologising to those who had entered and hoping his successors will try again. He warns that while some of the Club's best men are leaving the track, new men do not seem ready to fill their places.
- More than a month after the meeting several members have still not paid for their tickets, and Hon. Sec. Herbert R. Boyce reminds them how much unnecessary work their neglect throws on the Officers of the Club. He again asks urgently for unused tickets and payment for those used, post-office orders to be made payable at the Chief Office.
- An Essex member deserts his native tracks for the N.W. run and is led through lanes he could never retrace, to penny milk at a farm he cannot find again, a bathe in a reservoir he would mistake for a Highland loch, and a shilling tea at Ickenham with the run of the fruit trees. Riding home towards midnight his paraffin lamp goes out; a policeman at Hornsey shakes him off his machine and demands his name, but retreats on being lectured about the Highways Act of 1878 and the magistrates' bye-law powers, and the writer buys oil at a general and blacking shop at a quarter to one on Sunday morning.
- 17 July: the N.E. rode by Abridge and Shonks Mill to Navestock, changed the destination to Dudbrook, Lord Carlingford's seat, borrowed towels and bathed in the lake, diving for swan's eggs, before tea and raspberries in the garden. The N.W. took Captain Theo. Godlee by Wembley Park, Perivale and West End to milk at Ruislip and a swim in the reservoir, then a capital 1s. tea at the 'Coach and Horses,' Ickenham, 34½ miles in all, with a Wednesday evening run to the fireworks at the Alexandra Palace and N. B. Morris's proposal of a Bank Holiday party at the 'Bedford Arms,' Chenies. Eleven S.E. men rode to the 'Grapes,' Reigate, three deserting at Caterham Junction for East Grinstead and Douglas Smith's backbone breaking on the way to the meet.
- On the badness of West End macadam, recorded through the kindness of Stephen Smith: a deputation of Paddington ratepayers complained that the vestry's granite blocks were the bulk of a very large orange where MacAdam's were the size of a walnut, the interstices being filled with sand that washes out and is carted away again as mud. The report of surveyors George Wilmot and Colin A. Macaulay is reprinted in full, condemning the drilling, gravelling, watering and rolling of the main roads and the oversized Guernsey granite in the parish stone-yard, backed by MacAdam's own 1819 evidence to the Commons and by figures showing £1,459 of an £8,862 materials bill thrown away on sifted gravel.
- A Christchurch correspondent reports that the Pioneer Bicycle Club now musters a score of active members, with other clubs at Dunedin, Invercargill and Oamaru, and praises the thirty-mile roads to Amberley and Southbridge. He describes riding thirty-one miles to Cust through execrable rain-soaked roads, a forty-mile duck-shooting run to Southbridge by Hallswell and Lincoln with five miles done in twenty minutes, and the club's first championship meeting at one, five and twenty miles, advising visitors to Canterbury to bring their machines.
- Members can now direct their tailors to obtain the uniform cloth from Mr. Angus, 13 Knightrider Street, E.C., who is prepared to supply it in two thicknesses.
- Wonders whether anyone reads the long race reports that bristle in the sporting papers at this season, so much less readable than yacht-racing accounts with their sea breeze and incident. Returns to 'velociman', recalling one propelled by the arms of four men seated in file with a fifth steering aft, wishes for a museum showing the evolution of the 'cycle from the protoplasmic hobby-horse, now as extinct as the Dodo, to the elaborated 'Humber', and traces through Darwinian glasses the horse's head of the hobby surviving as a rudimentary prow on the pillar; also the Treasurer signalled from Sydney, and a visitor tempted to keep a machine in the N.W. by penny milk and a shilling tea. Signed L'Homme qui Rit.
- Gentlemen belonging to the North Warwickshire, Redditch, Speedwell and other clubs propose to secure a central club house with extensive accommodation for the use of bicyclists in general, independent of any club; a meeting at the White Horse Hotel, Congreve Street, Birmingham, is to decide the question this week.
- The opening of the new quarter-mile racing track, put off from the 7th by wet weather, came off in fine weather in the cricket field on the Wimborne Road, which Lord Wimborne granted after the committee had contemplated converting a sandpit near the Workhouse. Sub-captain J. A. J. Keynes prepared the plans and Mr. Pond of Corfe Mullen built the track for about £80, half already raised by subscription; the programme was one, three and five mile handicaps, a ten miles championship and a one mile flat race.
- Henry Alfred Bench of Marlborough Place, Harrow Road, was summoned at Marylebone for riding furiously round Dudley Place, Paddington, at about twelve miles an hour and knocking down Mrs. Mary Ann Woodbridge, who was cut, bruised and partly insensible. Mr. de Rutzen said he knew no greater source of danger than a bicycle ridden without the greatest care, especially round a corner, and fined him 40s. with 10s. costs.
- W. T. Thorn junr.'s 32 lb. 58-in. nickel-plated racer by Humber and Co. at £15, E. H. Pollock's 56-in. 'Timberlake' roadster at £8 and a 51-in. 'Stassen' with eccentric brake at £4 4s. that 'would fit a beginner', Wadham Wyndham's japanned 56-in. 'Humber' racer reduced to £13, and H. V. Cleaver's six-week-old 33 lb. racer at £15.
- Four meetings, all on 24 July: the Lombard B.C. at Catford Bridge, the West of England Bicycle Meet and Races at the Zoological Gardens, Clifton, Bristol, the Arion B.C. open meeting at Stamford Bridge, and the Brixton Ramblers B.C. races at the Crystal Palace.
- The new Metropolitan District Railway branch to Putney puts both racing grounds in direct communication with the City and West End, West Brompton serving Lillie Bridge and Walham Green, five minutes' walk, serving Stamford Bridge, twenty-five minutes' run from the Mansion House, with cheap first, second and third class fares quoted.
- Standing note that contributions must be addressed to the Editor, L.B.C. Gazette, Eastcheap, E.C., bear the author's name, be written on one side of the paper only, and reach him by Wednesday morning. Messrs. Darling supply badge-stamped portfolios for unbound copies at 2s., a few 1878 covers remain, and back numbers cost 1d. each.