A Ride To Remember

Thanks to the Ride to the Somme charity cycle ride and Renault Trucks, we combine our popular Long-Distance Diary with a trip around historic World War 1 battlefields

Driving for a truck manufacturer often involves some unusual jobs. Ask Neulla Hughes, demonstration and press test specialist for Renault Trucks UK. She recently got a call to take a trailer load of bicycles to France to support the three-day, 200-mile Ride to the Somme, Passchendaele and Arras charity ride, commemorating the cycling soldiers who fought and fell in the Great War.

While the historic image of World War 1 is of a bloody slogging match between trench-bound troops, at the start of the conflict Britain’s military authorities had long identified the potential of the humble bicycle as a way of getting troops up to the front quickly, especially as a bike was cheaper, lighter and a lot less trouble than a horse.

The first bicycle unit, the 26th Middlesex (Cyclist) Rifle Volunteer Corp, was raised in 1888 and by 1914 there were several cycle battalions based on troops drawn from famous regiments such as the Northumberland Fusiliers, the Black Watch, The Queens Own (Royal West Kent Regiment) and others. Yet when war broke out, many of those cycle battalions were kept at home on coastal defence, being considered too important to be sent to France.

It was only after the creation of the Army Cyclist Corps that cycle units were sent across the Channel in 1915. By then, however, the stalemate on the Western Front meant their mobility could hardly be exploited, so many cycle soldiers found themselves absorbed back into their parent regiments and fighting in the trenches. Others did manage to retain their two wheels and were used on reconnaissance and messenger duties.