The legacy of the radical bike-riding clubs of a century ago lives on
Cycling’s radical traditions are part of Britain’s social history. Recalling her teenage years in the 1890s, the great suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst wrote beautifully about the band of carefree lefties with whom she rode out of Manchester each weekend. Criss-crossing rural Lancashire and Cheshire, her cycling club was one of many associated with the Clarion, a popular socialist weekly newspaper. The more earnest socialists of the time saw this crowd as ideological dilettantes, too keen on having a good time. And their trips do seem to have been rather fun.
While there was some political evangelism and propagandising, “good fellowship” was the main object of the exercise: “At our journey’s end,” Pankhurst wrote in a 1931 edition of the Clarion, “was always an enormous shilling tea, in which phenomenal quantities of bread and butter and tinned fruit disappeared, then a walk round and frequently afterwards a brief ‘sing-song’.” A favourite anthem was a marching song written by the utopian socialist Edward Carpenter. “England, arise! The long, long night is over” resounded outside many rural pubs on Sunday afternoons. How many regulars were converted to the cause is not clear.
