In March, 1868, the first of the walking records was established, the sporting papers of that age chronicling what they very rightly described as a “Great Walking Feat”: a walk, not merely to Brighton, but to Brighton and back. This heroic undertaking, which was not repeated until 1902, was performed by one “Mr. Benjamin B. Trench, late Oxford University.” On March 20th, for a heavy wager, he started to walk the hundred miles from Kennington Church to Brighton and back in twenty-five hours. Setting out on the Friday, at 6 p.m., he was back at Kennington Church at 5 p.m. Saturday, having thus won his wager with two hours to spare. It will be observed, or guessed, from the absence of odd minutes and seconds that in 1868, timing, as an exact science, had not been born; but it is evident that this stalwart walked his hundred miles on ordinary roads at an average rate of a little over four and a quarter miles an hour. “He then,” concludes the report, “walked round the Oval several times, till seven o’clock.”
To each age the inventions it deserves. Cycling would have been impossible in the mid-eighteenth century, when Walpole and Burton travelled with such difficulty.
When roads began to deserve the name, the Mail Coach was introduced; and when they grew hard and smooth, out of their former condition of ruts and mud, the quaint beginnings of the bicycle are noticed. The Hobby Horse and McAdam, the man who first preached the modern gospel of good roads, were contemporary.
THE HOBBY-HORSE
I have said the beginnings of the bicycle were quaint, and I think no one will be concerned to dispute this alleged quaintness of the Hobby Horse, which had a certain strictly limited popularity from 1819 to 1830. I do not think any one ever rode from London to Brighton on one of these machines; and, when you come to consider the build and the limitations of them, and then think of the hills on the way, it is quite impossible that any one should so ride. It was perhaps within the limits of human endurance to ride a Hobby Horse along the levels, to walk it up the rises, and then to madly descend the hills, and so reach Brighton, very sore; but records do not tell us of such a stern pioneer. The Hobby Horse, it should be said, was an affair of two wooden wheels with iron tyres. A heavy timber frame connected these wheels, and on it the courageous rider straddled, his feet touching the ground. The Hobby Horse had no pedals, and the rider propelled his hundredweight or so of iron and timber by running in this straddling position and thus obtaining a momentum which only on the down grade would carry him any distance.
Thus, although the Hobby Horse was a favourite with the “bucks” of George the Fourth’s time, they exercised upon it in strictly limited doses, and it was not until it had experienced a new birth and was born again as the “velocipede” of the ’60’s, that to ride fifty miles upon an ancestor of the present safety bicycle, and survive, was possible.[4]
THE BONESHAKER
The front-driving velocipede—the well-known “boneshaker”—was invented by one Pierre Lallement, in Paris, in 1865-6, and exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. It was to the modern pneumatic-tyred “safety” what the roads of 1865 are to those of 1906. It also, like the Hobby Horse, had iron-shod wooden wheels, but had cranks and pedals, and could be ridden uphill. On such a machine the first cycle ride to Brighton was performed in 1869. This pioneer’s fame on the Brighton Road belongs to John Mayall, junior, a well-known photographer of that period, who died in the summer of 1891.
This marks the beginning of so important an epoch that the circumstances attending it are worthy a detailed account. They were felt, so long ago as 1874, to be deserving of such a record, for in the first number of an athletic magazine, Ixion, published in that year, “J. M., jun.,” who, of course, was none other than Mayall himself, began to tell the wondrous tale. He set out to narrate it at such length that, as an editorial note tells us, the concluding portion was reserved for the second number. But Ixion never reached a second number, and so Mayall’s own account of his historic ride was never completed.
He began, as all good chroniclers should, at the very beginning, telling how, in the early part of 1869, he was at Spencer’s Gymnasium in Old Street, St. Luke’s. There he saw a packing-case being followed by a Mr. Turner, whom he had seen at the Paris Exhibition of 1868, and witnessed the unpacking of it. From it came a something new and strange, “a piece of apparatus consisting mainly of two wheels, similar to one I had seen, not long before, in Paris.” It was the first velocipede to reach England.