I was just reminiscing yesterday about the cycles our family had from the 1940s onwards. We lived in very flat terrain and at peak hours the roads heaved with pedal power.
(" ... According to Hull's Streetlife Museum, 100,000 people in the city still rode regularly in the early 1950s – one third of the population. ...")
My first real bicycle was a small gents rusty cycle, which was a bit too large for me so I had to set off with my foot on the kerb and stop near the kerb, unless I wanted to do myself an injury lol.
By the mid 1940s instead of walking to visit relatives, I had a new "Rudge" cycle, my mother also had a new cycle with a baby seat at the back and my father had added a seat onto his crossbar for my brother Gordon to sit on. I don't ever recall cleaning the old rusty cycle, but one of my Saturday jobs was to clean my own, plus my father's, cycle. I have the newspaper advert where both my mother's and my bicycle were offered for for sale for the princely sum of £7.10s.. That was the end of my mother's cycling days but my cycle was replaced by a gold coloured straight handlebar "Sun" cycle. The "special" thing about that cycle was that I could turn the handlebars upside down and have a half drop handlebar, plus I could turn the back wheel around so that when I stopped pedalling the bike stopped = no need to use the hand brakes. I must have been standing in manure because by the time I went to the "big" school two miles away I needed a bike that wasn't too small. My final bicycle that I didn't outgrow was a speedy, drop handlebar, purple coloured lightweight Raleigh Sovereign with Sturmey-Archer gears and very narrow wheels = .
I got to know the backs of buses and no bus could leave me behind
When I eventually left school for an office, my dad took 20 minutes to get to the same office, that I cycled to in 12 minutes flat.
When I was about nine/ten years old, my younger brother and I were quite bored and asked if we could cycle to the seaside, which was about 22 miles away on the other side of the town. The answer was "Yes, be careful", the one drawback was that our six year old brother heard the conversation and he wanted to come with us. We three cycled along empty roads, a bottle of water and jam sandwiches in the saddlebag, with me on my dad's large green cycle, Gordon on my bike and in between us being pushed (!) was the pest sitting on the rusty bike. Every couple of minutes Gordon and I would shout that he wasn't peddling - he must have been dog tired poor little thing. lol
Oh to be a kid again, doing what we did again.
