It's All About the Bike (2 page)

‘The stand she is taking in the matters of dress is no small indication that she has realized that she has an equal right with a man to control her own movements,' Susan B. Anthony said. As the leading suffragette of her day, and the woman who gained fame when she was arrested for voting in the 1872 presidential election, she knew. In an interview in the
New York Sunday World
in 1896, she said:

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world . . . It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance . . . the moment she takes her seat, she knows she can't get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.

By the time Butch and Sundance were bound for South America, the bicycle had won broad social acceptance and struck deep into the nexus of society. In a decade, cycling had evolved from a faddish leisure pursuit, exclusive to a tiny minority of wealthy athletic males, to become the most popular form of transport on the planet. It still is today.

The bicycle is one of mankind's greatest inventions — it's up there with the printing press, the electric motor, the telephone, penicillin and the World Wide Web. Our ancestors thought it one of their greatest achievements. This idea is now coming back into fashion. The cultural status of the bicycle is rising again. The machine is becoming more embedded in Western society, through urban infrastructure design, transport policy, environmental concerns, the profile of cycle sport and leisure practices. In fact, there is a whisper that we might today be at the dawn of a new golden age of the bicycle.

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The bicycle can be described in under fifty words: a steerable machine comprising two wheels with pneumatic tyres, mounted in-line on a frame with rotating front forks, propelled by the rider's feet turning pedals attached by cranks to a chainwheel, and by a loop of chain to sprockets on the rear wheel. It's very simple. The bicycle can be ridden, on a reasonable surface, at four or five times the pace of walking, with the same amount of effort — making it the most efficient, self-powered means of transportation ever invented. Fortunately learning to ride a bicycle is easy (so easy, in fact, that many of our primate cousins have got the hang of it too). And, once learnt, riding a bicycle is something we never forget.

I've ridden a bike most days of my adult life. I can't, though, remember the first time I rode a bike as a child. I know I'm supposed to. I'm supposed to recall perfectly that moment of epiphany we've all shared, when the stabilizers were removed on an incline in the local park; when the hand of my father pulled back and I wobbled forward into the great equilibrium that I will never leave; the moment when I unconsciously steered, albeit unsteadily, the support points of the bicycle under the centre of mass, and first grasped the esoteric principle — balance. But no, I'm afraid I can't remember it. In fact, I can't even remember my first bike.

The first bike I can remember was a purple Raleigh Tomahawk, the diminutive version of the Chopper. I progressed to a Raleigh Hustler: purple again, and pimped up with white handlebar tape, a white saddle, a white water bottle, white cable guides and white
tyres — it was the '70s. When I outgrew this, Grandma stepped in with a fifth-hand, Dawes three-speed, kids' roadster. Compared to the Hustler, it had the panache of coveralls, but it flew. During the summer of 1978 I rode loops of my neighbourhood from dawn to dusk. My parents saw I'd got the bike-bug. The following spring, I was given a ten-speed Viking racer—a black thoroughbred. It was in the window of the local bike shop when I went to collect it. ‘Ever bike?' Jack London wrote. ‘Now that's something that makes life worth living! . . . Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds . . . and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well, now, that's something!' That's how I felt on my Viking racer. I was born restless. Aged 12, I finally had wings.

When I landed, I was a teenager. The bug — to ride and ride, for the sheer love of it — had gone. I abandoned the rhythmic cadence of two wheels for the rhythmic sounds of ‘Two Tone'. Of course, I still used a bike to get around: three unloved, beat-up racers followed. At the beginning of my final year at university, my flatmate arrived on a red tandem. We did moonlit time trials round the Georgian squares. The bike was so honest and so red; we named it — Otis.

In 1990, I bought my first mountain bike — a no-nonsense, British-built, rigid Saracen Sahara. I rode it from Kashgar in China to Peshawar in Pakistan, over the Karakoram mountains and the Hindu Kush. When I was back in London, working as a lawyer, the Saracen more than carried me around: it represented life beyond the pinstripe suits. Then it got stolen. A succession of mountain bikes, customized for commuting, followed: a Kona Lava Dome, two Specialized Stumpjumpers, a Kona Explosif and others. They all got stolen. I once had two stolen in a weekend. There were excursions along the Ridgeway, and to Dartmoor
and the Lake District, but most of the time these bikes merely conveyed me across the city's backside.

On a wintry Saturday afternoon in 1995, I walked into Roberts Cycles, a venerated frame builder in South London, and ordered a bespoke touring frame. It was called ‘Mannanan', after the mythical Celtic figure Mannanan mac Lir, who protects the Isle of Man, where I grew up. I cycled across the USA, Australia, South-East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe — effectively around the world. The American bike mechanic, Lennard Zinn wrote: ‘Be at one with the universe. If you can't do that, at least be at one with your bike.' After three years and 25,000 miles, I was.

Today, Mannanan is on the wall in my shed. I own five other bikes: a ten-year-old, steel Specialized Rockhopper, which I am continually rebuilding to keep it in serviceable, commuting order. My old road bike, for winter riding, is a hotchpotch of componentry on a Nervex aluminium frame with Ambrosio carbon forks. The new road bike is a Wilier, with a sleek, Italian-designed carbon frame, manufactured in Taiwan. My old mountain bike is a Schwinn. My new mountain bike is the most recent purchase: a super-light Felt aluminium, cross-country hard tail,
perfect for the trails in the Brecon Beacons, where I now live and ride.

With this small troop of hard-working bicycles, my bases are covered. Yet something fundamental is missing. Like tens of thousands of everyday cyclists with utilitarian machines, I recognize there is a glaring hole in my bike shed, a cavernous space for something else, something special. I'm in the middle of a lifelong affair with the bicycle: none of my bikes even hints at this.

I've been riding bicycles for thirty-six years. Today, I ride to get to work, sometimes for work, to keep fit, to bathe in air and sunshine, to go shopping, to escape when the world is breaking my balls, to savour the physical and emotional fellowship of riding with friends, to travel, to stay sane, to skip bathtime with my kids, for fun, for a moment of grace, occasionally to impress someone, to scare myself and to hear my boy laugh. Sometimes I ride my bicycle just to ride my bicycle. It's a broad church of practical, physical and emotional reasons with one unifying thing — the bicycle.

I need a new bike. I could go on-line right now with a credit card and spend $5,000 on a mass-produced carbon or titanium racing bike. I could be tanking through the hills on a superb new machine at sunset tomorrow. It's tempting, very tempting. But it's not right. Like many people, I'm frustrated at the round of buying stuff that is designed to be replaced quickly. I want to break the loop with this bike. I'm going to ride it for thirty years or more and I want to savour the process of acquiring it. I want the best bike I can afford, and I want to grow old with it. Besides, I'm only going to spend this kind of money once. I require more than a good bike. In fact, I require a bike you can't buy on the Internet; a bike you can't buy anywhere. Anyone who rides a bike regularly and has even the faintest feeling of respect or
affection for their own steed will know this hankering — I want
my
bike.

I need a talismanic machine that somehow reflects my cycling history and carries my cycling aspirations. I want craftsmanship, not technology; I want the bike to be man-made; I want a bike that has character, a bike that will never be last year's model. I want a bike that shows my appreciation of the tradition, lore and beauty of bicycles. The French nickname for the bicycle is
La Petite Reine
— I want my own ‘little queen'.

I know where to start. The bicycle frame will be made to measure and hand-built by an artisan frame-builder. Few people know this, but you can have a custom-built frame, designed to fit your body and tuned for the type of riding you do, for a lot less money than many exotic, mass-manufactured stock frames sold in shops. Sixty years ago, every large town in northern Italy, France, Belgium and Holland would have had at least one frame-builder. In Britain, where the concentration was greatest, big cities had dozens. While a handful of giant manufacturers such as Rudge-Whitworth, Raleigh and BSA in Britain, Bianchi in Italy and Peugeot in France catered for the cycling masses, small frame-builders built bikes for clubmen, racers, touring cyclists and the cognoscenti. These craftsmen made a few dozen frames a year, with great attention to detail and individual flourishes. Tim Hilton, in his loving memoir of the post-war cycling scene,
One More Kilometre and We're in the Showers,
called these hand-built frames ‘industrial folk art'. The simple tools — files, hacksaws,
blowtorches and a device to hold the tubes while brazing — rooted the frame-builders in an innovative, artisan culture that dated back to the beginning of bicycle manufacturing. Even Raleigh started as a small workshop, making three bicycles a week in 1888.

By 1951, Raleigh was making 20,000 a week. The early 1950s were dizzy heights for the bicycle industry in Europe. There were 12 million regular cyclists in Britain alone. As the major manufacturers boomed, so did the small-town frame-builders. Collectors now only remember their names — Major Nichols and Ron Cooper in Britain, Alex Singer and René Herse in France, Faliero Masi and Francesco Galmozzi in Italy, to name just a handful from the hundreds.

Up to the end of the 1950s, the bicycle was still the main form of utility transport for working people across Europe. In Britain, cycling was also the major leisure activity. The cities emptied of young people at the weekends. The British countryside, already over-imagined by advertisers and authors, filled to bursting with eager cyclists in pursuit of bucolic bliss.

The car was coming, though. The 3.5 million bikes sold in Britain in 1955 had dropped to 2 million by 1958. The Mini went on sale in 1959. Small frame-builders began to disappear. There was a brief revival in the 1970s, when the oil crisis created an explosion of demand in the USA. For a few years, the Americans couldn't get their hands on British and Italian lightweight racing frames fast enough. Spellbound young men crossed the Atlantic to learn frame-building in London and Milan. Richard Sachs, Ben Serotta and Peter Weigle — a sort of holy trinity of American frame-builders today — all apprenticed at the once renowned Witcomb Cycles in Deptford, south-east London, in the 1970s.