Cycling Then And Now: The More Things Change...

Michael Hutchinson picks up a few of the threads from his new book, Re:Cyclists, which takes an entertaining and insightful look at cycling and cyclists' first 200 years. Some things may sound familiar.

Reading a modern cycling magazine, or looking at a cycling website, it’s very easy to assume that 21st century cycling is somehow very different from everything that went before. We have a love of looking at old black and white pictures, and the appeal has everything to do with the differences: skinny tubed bikes, women in baggy khaki shorts, wool jerseys with the pockets on the front.

But how different is it really? Many similarities resonate down the ages.

Motorists v cyclists 

This is perhaps the biggest current issue facing cyclists. It feels as if 21st century conditions are uniquely difficult. But, in 1934, the editorial in this magazine said: “Magistrates hesitate to take away a motorist’s licence, they say, because it might cause him inconvenience. Inconvenience indeed! Let us hear no more of this disgraceful sympathy for the living person whose behaviour was such that life and death was involved in the mere act of permitting him on the highway.” Sound familiar?

The current hostility to cyclists among politicians and the press is nothing compared to the bloodthirsty Lieutenant Colonel John Moore-Brabazon, Churchill’s transport secretary, talking about the 7,000 people killed on the roads annually: “Many of you will remember the number of chickens killed in the old days. We used to come home with the radiator stuffed with feathers. Same with dogs. Dogs get out of the way of motorcars now, and you never kill one. There is education even in the lowest animals.” Just keep killing cyclists (the lowest animals — he means us). How else will they learn?

Stand-out argument