And the shouts of the ladies will quite fill the air
For the Links that will turn into bonds Matrimonial,
And for husbands our daughters in future will seek
With the powerful aid of the putter and cleek!
In 1892 the confessions of the "Duffer" at Golf after forty years' experience are interesting from the classified gradations of competence:—
The Learned have divided golf into several categories. There is Professional golf, the best Amateur golf, enthusiasts' golf, golf, Beginners' golf, Ladies' golf, Infant golf, Parlour golf, the golf of Scotch Professors. But the true Duffer's Golf is far, far below that. The born Duffer is incurable. No amount of odds will put him on the level of even Scotch Professors.
To-day these categories need revising; the ladies have gone up two or three classes; amateurs have not for the first time held their own with the best professionals, and even the infants are becoming formidable.
Mentions of cycling in the 'eighties are mainly confined to the tricycle. There is a strange picture of a kind of tricycle for four in 1882. Du Maurier's Pillion-Bicycle is a romantic anticipation of the "Flapper-rack" of a later age. The four chapters on "Cyclomania" in 1885, including an account of a "spin" to Brighton ending in a smash, are largely burlesque, but indicate that, though clubs were multiplying, the cult had not yet outgrown its fashionable phase, or established itself on a democratic basis.
Signs of advancing popularity, however, are manifest in 1887, when the old Scotswoman in Keene's picture observes: "Ah dinna ken what's come ower the Kirk. Ah canna bide to see our Minister spankin' aboot on yon cyclopaedy!" The publication of a new edition of Mr. Sturmey's Handbook of Bicycling in the same year inspires a set of verses reviewing the immense progress made since the days of the old "bone-shaker," the expansion of the industry at Coventry, and the exploits on the racing track of Keen and other professionals. The safety bicycle associated with the name of J. K. Starley dates from 1885, but it was not until the invention of the pneumatic tyre by Dunlop in 1888 that what had been a pastime was revolutionized and became an universal mode of locomotion. Punch celebrates the coming of the "Safety" in October, 1890, in "Breaking a record on the Wheel" (after Tennyson's "Break, break"), but his admiration of the exploits of Messrs. Mecredy and Osmond is tempered by regret for the heroes of the "ordinary"—Keen and the Hon. Ion Keith Falconer. Punch was not aware that he was in the presence of an epoch-making invention, the most wide-reaching in its influence in our time between the railway engine and the coming of the motor. The verses make no mention of the pneumatic tyre; the present writer saw a bicycle race in 1891 at Eastbourne at which all the competitors save one rode on the high model, and he proved the winner.