THE BICYCLE

Evening Star, Issue 20993, 6 January 1932, Page 9

THE BICYCLE

A PHENOMENON OF THE 'NINETIES The other day, from a mouth organ so rusty that it must have been courageously played on many a rain-swept kerbstone, came in wavering putlines an old tune originating in the ’nineties Whether the player had heard of the Victorian revival or whether this was the only kind of tune he knew, there was no means of deciding without interrupting the song; for song it was, the words heavily implied by the accents on the notes; Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer, do. I’m half crazy All for the love of you. It won’t be a stylish marriage, For I can’t afford a carriage, But you’ll look sweet upon the seat Of a bicycle built for two. Such was the “ book ” of what the tired little man was playing. What was it all about? (asks Nettie Palmer, in the Melbourne ‘ Argus ’). Before the ’nineties, as old magazine illustrations show, there were street vehicles propelled by human legs. Such were velocipedes, such were the spidery boneshakers, the front wheel like a crown piece, the back wheel like a farthing. Their riders earn our respect. The weakness of these machines was revealed when their successors, these pneumatic-tyred affairs, with two even wheels, as we know them, were described emphatically as safety bicycles. To ride a safety bicycle_ after a boneshaker was a come down in several senses, but I fancy it meant a considerable rise in expense. The boneshaker had been rather a flimsy joke for a few acrobatic gentlemen; the safety earned respect as a reputable means of getting_ about. Respect, indeed ! Such was its respectability that, when some ingenious person invented a feminine variety, ladies actually responded, and rode forth on the streets —alone.

The bicycle was thus by way of being acknowledged as a sort of chaperon, lint was it? Were these ladies in their temerity still considered quite nice? Was there no resistance from parents and brothers and husbands? Of course there were battles, now pitched, now guerrilla. A woman who rode a bicycle was, unless she courted calamity, one who wore a short skirt—short, oh, yes, quite an inch and a-half off the ground! More than that, she would be likely to dress “ sensibly,” which implied a contradiction in terms, for what is woman’s dress except delightful nonsense? Scon a certain truth became apparent. It was that the safety bicycle tended towards the emancipation of woman. A hint •was enough. Once this was grasped the lady’s bicycle was discovered to possess every kind of dangerous fault. To begin with, its construction, lacking a crossbar, was weak; nobody should be allowed to ride a bicycle without a crossbar; that is, no woman should ride a bicycle. Again, it was bad for a woman to ride along dusty or along muddy roads; the position of a bicycle rider was cramped and unhealthy; women could never stand the strain of long rides; and/or women were already riding too many miles at a stretch. Other desperate and contradictory _ assertions were made, but in vain, since a determined woman could always put on her bicycle skirt, pump up her machine, and so, in the silence of her tyres, away.

THE SOCIAL ASPECT. Sometimes, when she rode away in her tweed skirt with large buttons, her shirt blouse with its mannish, starched collar and tie, and her alpine hat, it was, indeed, to a meeting of the Women’s Franchise League. Her men folk had been right in their suspicions: the bicycle was the thin end of the wedge. Riding along the streets, she felt aware of street life as never before, aware of social problems that were important to women and of a natural comradeship with other women as she passed. She felt that she was riding out of the clutches of Mrs Grundy and toward some freer future state. From drawing room meetings to promote women’s franchise, and from meetings of the Women’s Progression League, she would perhaps ride home by way of the markets, her head full of altruistic dreams, her handlebars hung with string bags full of purchases that she would never have been seen to carry home if she had been walking. Beside, with one hand holding a train up and the other a parasol, you could carry almost nothing. The woman on a bicycle was a purely revolutionary phenomenon. There were some men who_ made the best of it. They bought bicycles for themselves and for their wives; then they formed bicycle clubs and planned excursions, and took the whole thing with a jaunty air. “Harm in the bicycle? None at all. My wife and I rode to Sorrento and back in one day.” That really was a fairly usual ride, it seems—and on roads where bitumen had never been imagined and macadam was dubious and unequal. Not much time for dreaming about women’s rights on outings like that! The bicycle was thus creeping into family life from all directions, altering people’s habits and programmes on work days and holidays. After its inroads were well established and its influence had begun to be observed everywhere, attacks were made upon it as upon a serpent that had somehow appeared on the very hearthstone of humanity. It was said to be destroying home life, to be changing all standards of behavioiir, to be an invention of the devil. While this agitation, which perhaps did not last very long, was at its height, a characteristic piece of news was cabled from America—America, where they never do things by halves. It seems that in America, too, there had been strong attacks on tho bicycle, as later on alcohol. One clergyman, however, had formed an opinion that the bicycle, rightly used, might he a means of good. He admitted that it was altering our way of living, but he thought that it was for the better, since it was taking people into the open air and giving them freer_ ways of living. He hoped that bicycles would increase until every one on earth had one. To emphasise his theme he had beside him in the pulpit nothing less than a bicycle, entirely decorated with flowers! THE SUPPLANTER. On tho whole, the bicycle was winning, handles down and tyres _ up. Women even took it for an additional reason, hoping to acquire “ the slim figure at present so fashionable” —in 1896 or so. By this and by that there seemed to he nothing to stop its indefinite multiplication, yet when you come to think of it rabbits were checked, and prickly-pear. There was, indeed, nothing that could stop the bicycle— except a super-bicycle. People would not bo persuaded to _ put back tho clock and do without a bicycle, but suppose someone offered them not a mere tandem or ".a bicycle built for

two,” but, after all, a bicycle that was a horseless carriage ? The thin end of another wedge was beginning to be visible through the unspeakable clouds of dust that it raised. The early and unconscious strength of the horseless carriage actually lay in its incidental and continuous dust. With this and with its vigorous smell it drove other vehicles off the roads, which ever since have been in ado to suit its growing and changing requirements. Cyclists continued to exist, of course, first covered with dust, and in recent years, at their considerable peril; but the bicycle from the first had been ousted by its offspring, the motor car. Cyclists, if they could spare a hand, may well have held their sides laughing at the first horseless carriages, those high, rattling buggies, in which the horse seemed simply to have been overlooked. They may soon have laughed, too, to see all the attacks diverted from themselves and towards their successors. Did they guess that as they had survived, so would the car? Perhaps that “bicycle built for two ” was, after all, not a tandem, but a construction holding two cyclists side by side, something amounting to an engineless car. Perhaps, again, every modern single-seater is, to the eye of an enlightened antiquarian, simply a bicycle built for two.