Vol 3, No 29
Articles in this issue
- The Gazette announces that after this number it will appear monthly for six months, and advises members who want their communications published early to send material to the office at 35, Eastcheap as soon as possible.
- Fred. W. Morris, Hon. Sec., calls the general meeting adjourned from 7th July for Thursday 7th October at 6.30 p.m. at 35, Eastcheap, when the committee is to be elected and the rules confirmed.
- A special reporter's account of the Kildare B.C. sports at Lillie Bridge on 25th September 1880, run before some 4,000 spectators and finished in near darkness. R. A. Woolnough (Rovers B.C.) took the Two Miles Handicap final off 190 yards by a hundred yards from Liles, Chambers and Kemp, while H. L. Cortis, the "Demon," won the Five Miles Scratch Race by a foot from A. P. Shaw with C. Liles the same distance away third.
- A single advertisement: J. M. Cazenove of St. Mark's Vicarage, Reigate, offers a 54-in. "Keen" semi-racer of 33 lb., japanned except the front forks, balls to front and cones to back, as good as new, on approval at £10 10s.
- Closing-of-season reports from the four districts: the N.E. crossing stiles and dykes to the "Forest Hotel" at Chingford, where twenty "new-laid" eggs proved hard-boiled and cost 5s.; the N.W. taking seventeen men to the "Black Lion" at Shenley for a lamp-lit ride home; the S.W. down the Brighton road through Leatherhead and Epsom to tea at the "Griffin," Surbiton Hill; and the S.E. filling the "Clayton Arms" at Godstone with twenty-two men and four visitors, who sang "Auld Lang Syne" hand in hand.
- The unofficial October fixture list for the Blackheath (Old Lewisham Church, 3.30 p.m.) and Croydon (Central Croydon Station, 4.15 p.m.) divisions: Bletchingley ("White Hart"), Downe ("George"), Walton-on-the-Hill, Ewell ("Glynn Arms") and Godstone ("Clayton Arms").
- "Soupsquares Junior" describes leaving the iron steed for a Canadian canoe built by Tagg, towing and paddling with a Belsize B.C. companion from Hampton Court up the Wey to Guildford and back, five shillings a pass through the locks, an expensive night at the Oatland's Park Hotel, home-brewed ale from an old gentleman at a Byfleet flour mill, and forty-eight miles with twenty-four locks in two and a half days.
- A New York Times piece, prompted by the Newport bicycle convention and the coming canoe convention at Lake George, weighing the two sports as rival forms of self-inflicted suffering: the bicycle breaks eleven fingers, two legs and five arms per hundred riders a season, but canoeing wins outright on cooked meals, wet clothes, cramped legs and mosquitoes.
- Coventry's police and postal authorities have put the tricycle to work: an "Excelsior" by Messrs. Bayliss, Thomas, and Co. carried the rural post twice daily between Coventry and Brinklow, thirty-two miles in all, through the winter of 1879-80, and now serves the Meriden round in place of the mail cart.
- "A. B." traces the club from the short-lived Tension B.C. and the London Amateur Bicycle Club to the meeting near Charing Cross on 11th November 1874, Nevill, Millar, Jolly, Tegetmeier and the two Barretts, which dropped "Amateur" from the title and made James Inwards president; then the Whiting v. Keith-Falconer race of January 1875, the £200 Alexandra Palace meeting, the captaincy races, the four-district system and the Bath road medals.
- A correspondent signing "X" protests against "F. P. H.'s" coinage, arguing that the u of kuklos is naturally short and that the Greek suffix -ist suits the root, whereas "bicycler" tacks a Saxon ending onto a Latino-Greco-Saxon hybrid; he prefers the good Saxon "wheelmen" to either.
- Reprinted from the Bombay Gazette of 31st July 1880: a correspondent driving down the Dadur Road watched a young man on a tall bicycle chased at fourteen miles an hour by an infuriated bull, turn his machine about amid the cheers of the natives, and ride straight into a herd of buffaloes.
- Paragraphs signed "L'Homme Qui Rit": thanks voted in the S.E. to the District Captain and to W. Johns for the musical club teas, the extinct Dandy Horse discovered among the lumber at the Royal Polytechnic in Regent Street, danger-boards put up on Kentish hills by five clubs, the Slough of Despond on the Barking-to-Rainham road, and the N.W. District Captain writing from Paris on his way to Italy.
- The standing note: contributions to the Editor at 35, Eastcheap, written on one side of the paper, bearing the author's name and in by Wednesday morning; Messrs. Darling supply badge-stamped portfolios at 2s., a few 1878 covers remain, and back numbers cost 1d. each.