As for Biggleswade itself, it is a town with an extraordinarily broad and empty market-place, a church with a spire of the Hertfordshire type, and two old coaching inns—the “White Swan” and the “Crown”—facing one another in an aggressive rivalry at a narrow outlet of the market-place. The “White Swan” was the inn at which the up “Regent” coach dined. It was kept at that time by a man named Crouch, “that long, sour old beggar,” in the words of Tom Hennesy. Here “the process of dining on a really cold day in winter,” to quote Colonel Birch Reynardson, “was carried on under no small amount of difficulty. Your hands were frozen, your feet were frozen, your very mouth felt frozen, and in fact you felt frozen all over. Sometimes, with all this cold, you were also wet through, your hat wet through, your coat wet through, the large wrapper that was meant to keep your neck warm and dry wet through, and, in fact, you were wet through yourself to your very bones. Only twenty minutes were allowed for dinner; and by the time you had got your hands warm enough to be able to untie your neck wrapper, and had got out of your great-coat, which, being wet, clung tenaciously to you, the time for feeding was half gone. By the time you had got one quarter of what you could have consumed, had your mouth been in eating trim and your hands warm enough to handle your knife and fork, the coachman would put his head in, and say: “Now, gentlemen, if you please; the coach is ready.” After this summons, having struggled into your wet greatcoat, bound your miserable wet wrapper round your miserable cold throat, having paid your two and sixpence for the dinner that you had the will, but not the time, to eat, with sixpence for the waiter, you wished the worthy Mr. Crouch good day, grudged him the half-crown he had pocketed for having dined so miserably, and again mounted your seat, to be rained and snowed upon, and almost frozen to death before you reached London.”
Leaving Biggleswade, the Ivel is crossed and Tingey’s Corner passed. Tingey’s Corner marks the junction of the old alternative route from Welwyn, by Hitchin to Lower Codicote, the route adopted by record-breaking cyclists. The hamlets of Lower Codicote and Beeston Green open up a view of Sandy, away to the right, with its range of yellow sand-hills running for some three miles parallel with the road, and seeming the more impressive by reason of the dead level on which they look. The canal-like, bare banks of the Ivel are passed again at Girtford, and the roadside cottages of Tempsford reached; the village and church lying off to the left, where the Ouse and the Ivel come to their sluggish confluence, and form a waterway which once afforded marauding Danes an excellent route from the coast up to Bedford. Even now the remains of a fortification they constructed to command this strategic point are visible, and bear the name of the “Dannicke”; that is to say, the “Danes’ work,” or perhaps the “Danes’ wick,” “wick” meaning “village.”
An infinitely later work—Tempsford turnpike-gate, to wit—has disappeared a great deal more effectively than those ancient entrenchments, and the way is clear and flat, not to say featureless, over the Ouse, past the outlying houses of Wyboston, and so into Little End, the most southerly limit of Eaton Socon.
XVIII
Past Tempsford some of the coaches, notably the Stamford “Regent,” turned off into the loop road by St. Neots and Huntingdon. In the winter time, or when the spring rains were falling, they did this at some risk, for the low-lying land by the river Ouse was often awash. Two old ladies were on one occasion given a terrible fright, the road being deeply flooded and the water coming into the coach, so that they had to stand on the seats. They quite thought they were going to be drowned, and perhaps they would have been had the “Regent” been driven by one unused to the road. Had the coachman driven into a ditch—as he might easily have done with the floods covering all the landmarks—it would have been “all up” with the “insides” for certain and perhaps for the “outsides” as well.
The most prudent coachmen in winter time kept to the main road, which lies somewhat higher, and passed through Eaton Socon. Once—to judge by its name—a place of importance, this is now only a long village of one straggling street. At some undetermined period the head of a “soke,” or separate legal jurisdiction, all memories of the dignity implied are gone, save only the empty title, which Dickens makes fun of by calling the village in Nicholas Nickleby “Eton Slocomb.” The “White Horse,” a picturesque roadside inn, may be looked upon with interest by those keen on identifying Dickens landmarks. In later days it became a favourite resort of the North Road Cycling Club, and witnessed the beginning and ending of many a road race in the “eighties” and early “nineties,” when such things were.
The story of the London to York cycling record is fitly to be told in this page. It is not so long a tale as that of the famous one from London to Brighton and back, but it stands for greater efforts and for a vast amount of pluck and endurance. There have been those unsportsmanlike souls who, not finding sport an end in itself, have questioned the use of record making and breaking. But it has had its use, and even from this point of view has amply justified itself, for the continually increasing speed required out of cycles for these purposes has led to the perfecting of them within what is, after all, a comparatively short time; so that the sporting clubman has, after all, while strictly occupied within the range of his own ambitions, contributed to the general good by bringing about the manufacture of a vehicle which, used by many hundreds of thousands of people who never raced in their lives, and are probably incapable of a speed of more than twelve miles an hour, has brought the roads and lanes of the country within the knowledge of many to whom rural life was something new and strange.
The first recorded cycle ride to York in which speed was an object was that of C. Wheaton, September 1872. That pioneer took two days to perform the journey, making Stamford, a distance of eighty-nine miles, the end of his first day’s adventure, in 15½ hours, and on the second day reaching York in a further 26 hours 40 minutes: total, 42 hours 10 minutes. This, with the front-driving low cycle of those days, was an achievement. Wooden wheels and iron tyres did not conduce to either speed or ease, and that now historic figure, painfully crawling (as we should now think his progress) to York is heroic.
Perhaps this tale of hardship was calculated to deter others from trying their mettle, but at any rate it was not until July 9, 1874, that two others, Ian Keith-Falconer and J. H. Stanley Thorpe, followed, and they failed in the effort. After another two years had almost passed, on June 5, 1876, Thorpe made another attempt. Leaving Highgate Archway at 11.10 P.M., he arrived the next day at York at 9.40 P.M. = 22 hours 30 minutes; chiefly, of course, by favour of that then “improved” form of bicycle, the tall “ordinary.”