A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (21 page)

Riding one of these machines was as difficult as it sounds. Anyone using a high-wheeler needed legs long enough to work the pedals, and enough physical strength to handle such a big machine. It was not suited to older people or to women. Riding
any
sort of bicycle was not something that could easily be picked up simply by finding a quiet stretch of road and pushing off. It was necessary to have a course of lessons to do it well, and all over the country cycling schools appeared, as ubiquitous in late Victorian Britain as the driving school is in our own
time. To us, the instructions seem self-evident, but a generation unused to these practices had to be taught them:

1. Always look where you are going. 2. Always sit straight. 3. Pedal evenly and use both legs. 4. Pedal straight. 5. Keep the foot straight. 6. Hold the handles naturally. 7. Don’t wobble the shoulders. 8. Hold the body still and sit down. 9. Don’t shake the head.

Once equipped with the necessary skills, many people joined clubs, for there was greater pleasure in cross-country trips with organized groups than in solitude. On holidays, flocks of men in the distinctive insignia of cycle clubs became a noticeable feature of rural life from the seventies onwards, rushing along lanes, congregating at crossroads to study maps, lounging outside the country pubs that were usually their meeting-points or destinations. They often attracted a good deal of ridicule, and local urchins would gather in the hope of seeing them fall off – ‘take a spill’ in cycling parlance – or might even engineer such an accident by leaving obstacles in the road.

Cycling became established as a sport, with contests in speed and of endurance over rough terrain. Though the British were used to seeing themselves as the inventors of sport, and regarded their country as the home of this one, nobody could dispute the greater claims of the French – especially when in 1903 they were to establish the world’s premier cycle race. It also became a national institution in Belgium and the Netherlands, where there were even units of bicycling soldiers with cycling bands.

The tricycle had developed at the same time as the two-wheeled variety, and was popular among those of a less athletic bent. These were driven by levers through a double-cranked axle, or might have a small steering-wheel. With more
wheels, it was not necessary to keep one’s balance, and thus it was possible to rest whenever necessary. The ‘quadricycle’ never enjoyed the same public favour, for it was something of a brute to handle. The first model was seven feet wide, and its driving wheels tended to skid when taking corners. Ladies, whose dress prevented them from using a high-wheeler, could, however, sit comfortably on one of these other models, and propel it without loss of dignity. They often cycled in the company of a man, for many versions had two seats – either fore-and-aft or side-by-side (the latter was known as a ‘sociable’). This was naturally convivial, and not the least of its attractions was that it offered possibilities for courting couples to out-distance a chaperone. The tandem – a two-seater bicycle of the type still seen today – enabled women for the first time to use an upright bicycle. What a contemporary female author called ‘the first revolution’ came about when women were persuaded to take the front seat on tandems, ‘under masculine convoy and protection’. After this, a two-wheeled bicycle for ladies gradually appeared.

Women cyclists were, to begin with, a source of amusement and a target for ridicule – more likely than their male counterparts to have stones thrown at them by urchins or obstacles scattered in their path, for if all cyclists were eccentric, female ones were also unfeminine and unnatural. The clothing they wore, by necessity, was ugly and unflattering.

While women’s everyday outfits were not suited to cycling, even men dressed specially for it, in knickerbockers and short jackets. Because a large proportion of cyclists belonged to clubs, they often wore a quasi-uniform of matching coloured suits or caps sporting an emblem. The Cyclists’ Touring Club,
which was founded in 1883 and became the supervising body for the sport, recommended garments the fabric and design of which were suited to the level of activity necessary. The CTC even designated a colour – grey – for their members. It became a uniform by which one serious bicyclist could recognize another. As women became more involved, they also wore grey. Mrs Harcourt Williamson, aware of the insult and danger that might await a lone woman in remote areas, valued the anonymity it offered. She wrote, somewhat patronizingly, that ‘One reason for the protection which ladies undoubtedly find in the C.T.C. grey uniform lies in the fact that . . . it so closely resembles that ordinarily worn by the wife of a parson or doctor, and therefore the bucolic intelligence sets down the passing stranger in his mind as probably a friend or acquaintance of the local lady.’
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The Club made minute recommendations regarding what they should wear too. The list included underwear, for it stated that: ‘Nothing but wool should be worn next the skin. A good many riders of both sexes prefer those excellent garments known as “combinations”.’
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It went on to suggest ‘a bodice or jacket’, a plain skirt, or loose knickerbockers, or ‘a pair of trousers cut loose to just below the knee’, as well as ‘a pair of “Tilbury’d” doeskin gloves’ and ‘a helmet or hat of the Club cloth, with a special and registered ribbon’.
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It was, it will be noticed, assumed that cyclists could afford tailor-made outfits for participating in their hobby, but there is a far more important point here: it was also taken for granted that wearing knickerbockers or trousers was acceptable – though these were expected to be covered by a full-length skirt! Female dress was slowly and gradually becoming less cumbersome and more practical, a trend that was to spill over from cycling into golf, tennis and hockey, and into society as a whole. The change came in 1893 with the arrival from France of a
movement for what was called ‘rational dress’. Until then, the great majority of women’s cycling accidents had happened because their long skirts caught in the chain or spokes. Rational dress meant that they could wear leggings and baggy knickerbockers instead, and after brief initial hilarity these became accepted. The word ‘revolution’ was indeed appropriate.

The ease of riding in these clothes made a fad of cycling all over again, and this time among a much wider section of the population. Mrs Williamson, commenting on this, makes the point that because the wealthy took it up, bicycling, far from being seen as a socially exclusive practice, was imitated by those lower down in society:

It might have been always confined to the business of the comparatively few instead of being applied to the many if by some happy chance it had not been taken up by the right people and straightway become the craze of the season.
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She went on to explain how bicycle use was spreading not only as a hobby but as a means of travelling to work:

At a comparatively later date, clerks who lived out of London began to appreciate its uses, and after a time women (also engaged on business) were to be seen winding their way from the suburbs to the City. Then the professional men began to use it a little, [though] still the exercise was condemned by the majority as vulgar, [but now] boys in red uniforms, with the name of ‘Gavin’ on their caps, may be seen waiting on the steps of Mayfair and Belgravia mansions to clean the aristocracy’s bicycles.
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Not everyone approved. In Germany Kaiser Wilhelm did not like to see women on bicycles, and reprimanded the American
Ambassador for allowing his daughter to ride one in Berlin’s principal park, the Tiergarten.

What had also made the sport so fashionable had been the arrival, by the nineties, of the ‘safety bicycle’, which set a seal on the popularity of this form of conveyance and marked the completion of the revolution in personal transport. Anyone could now cycle, provided they could master the steering and brakes and the initially difficult feat of balancing on two wheels. Lessons were still necessary and ‘spills’ still common, for it was easy to take a tumble, but the time and effort required to cycle well was much less. The machine was lower than previously and thus simple to mount and dismount. It had a chain-driven rear wheel and was easy to steer. It had effective brakes, and it had a guard over the chain to prevent clothes from catching. Like all technological innovations, once the teething problems of the bicycle had been addressed the wider public took the invention out of the hands of specialists and enthusiasts and made it their own.

Following fast in the wheel tracks of the bicycle came another, even more revolutionary vehicle – the automobile. This too had had a long period of development from crude and impractical prototype to viable machine. Like the bicycle, the first model appeared in France, where an engineer called Cugnot developed a ‘steam car’ in 1769. It was clumsy, noisy and slow-moving, and did not mark the beginning of a new era. The notion of a steam car had, nevertheless, been established, and was next taken up in Britain. Sixty years after Cugnot, in the 1830s, a
number of coaches were introduced that were powered by steam boilers. Technically they were successful, and provided regular service in several parts of the country, but their noise, slowness and potential combustability meant that they never challenged the dominance of the horse. In the same decade the railway became the most important form of transport, and interest in road vehicles waned for half a century.

It was in 1873 that the firm of Leon Bollee began construction of vehicles. Five years later these were displayed at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. In 1885 a wealthy enthusiast, the Comte de Dion, produced another steam vehicle. In 1894 the first actual meeting of automobiles took place. It comprised a trip from Paris to Rouen and back. This was intended to be merely a promenade by the vehicles, but interest in their speed – and in which of them was fastest – gave the event the character of a race. The Dion-Bouton, which had travelled at all of twelve miles an hour, won.

Enthusiasm for this new machine was at first moderate in the United Kingdom, though there were, as there were in France, wealthy men who were interested in a new sport that involved speed, mild danger and expensive equipment. The Hon. Evelyn Ellis, who had been driving for several years in France, brought a motor car to England in 1895. In the same year another motorist, Sir David Salomons, put on a display of vehicles in Tunbridge Wells that attracted some 10,000 people, including several Members of Parliament – and a further exhibition was held twelve months later, this time at the Imperial Institute, an important London venue. By this time the United Kingdom rights for the Daimler patented machines had been bought by a London financier. When, on 14 November 1896, motor vehicles were allowed by Parliament to run on British roads – without the necessity of a man preceding them with a red flag – there was widespread public interest.

Some of those who wrote about motoring matters felt that they were on the cusp of a new era in transport, and could see that attitudes might change sooner than people imagined. With what seems from our perspective a certain naivety, one of them stressed the advantages that could be looked for over the horse, and mentions the type of electric-powered vehicle that might once have replaced the petrol engine:

It is now admitted by most people that the motor-car has passed the limits of mere experiment, and that it has become a practical vehicle. Motoring has already entered, and will in the future enter yet more largely, into our social life, though we may still be far from the time when the horse-drawn vehicle will be a rarity upon country roads and London has begun to save fifty thousand pounds a year now spent in road scavenging.

The utility of the motor is endless. At whatever distance you may live from your station in the country, the motor is bound to shorten the time occupied on the journey to and fro. Whether you consider the motor from the town or country station point of view, the fact that there are no horses to get tired, and that the motor will run, provided it is efficiently handled, for any hour or all hours during the twenty-four, makes it inevitable that every country house, and nearly every private carriage-owner in London, will have a motor car of some sort in coming years.

There is probably nothing safer in the streets of London to-day than a well-driven electric carriage; there are no horses to fall down when the streets are slippery, and there is brake power available far in excess of any that can possibly be exercised by the horse with his four iron-shod feet on a treacherous surface.
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Although the motor car thus arrived in the reign of Victoria, the vehicles were seen – just as earlier the bicycle had been – as
a plaything for enthusiasts, who might run races or make experimental journeys over long distances. Not only was the motor car unpleasant – it was noisy, difficult to start and prone to break down – it was also highly expensive and initially beyond the reach even of many ‘carriage folk’. The very fact that motoring was included among the subjects dealt with in the Badminton Library of sporting volumes indicates that the car was not yet considered a serious means of transport. The motoring age was not to begin with Victoria but with Edward VII. The Queen herself – though she never personally encountered one – intensely disliked this new invention, saying to the Master of the Horse: ‘I hope you will never allow one of those horrible machines to be used in my stables. I am told they smell exceedingly nasty, and are shaky and disagreeable conveyances altogether.’
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It would only be when her son was on the throne that the Royal Family – which still led fashion – employed automobiles and thus helped to popularize them. It would indeed be in the Royal Stables that they were kept, and the Master of the Horse who would initially supervise them.

An overwhelming difference between the twenty-first century and the nineteenth is the presence of active Christianity in society. It is difficult from a modern perspective to appreciate the importance of this influence, not only on individual thought and behaviour but on social convention, general attitudes, and on parliamentary legislation. Religion mattered to the Victorians in a way that is incomprehensible to many people today.