Two-wheeled transport of delight

Judging by the number of Cream era dads who spent Christmas Eve wrestling a flat pack box from the garage to the living room (and the rest of the night attempting to piece cogs, wheels, mudguards, duralia and brake-cables together into something resembling a Claud Butler six-speed), getting your first “proper” bike was hardly the sumptuous fantasy of a generation of shoeless urchins, more an achievable, almost inevitable, Chrimbo day rite of passage. But why would any child ask for one of these built-for-speed, not-for-comfort bikes, rather than a Chopper or Grifter? Like the man in the Yellow Pages ad said, just look at that saddle. It’d be like sitting on a razor blade.

Well, there are two reasons. Firstly, consider the sheer desirability and range of two-wheeled vehicles on offer (ferchrissakes, let’s make it clear, no-one ever bought a trike). Saturday afternoons were made for covetous browsing of Halfords’ window and comparative studies of tube-grips, spoke types and numbers, Sturmey Archer gear shifts, cantilever brakes, metallic or pearlised paints, stickers and accessories, and (literally) bells and whistles. We’re into the realm of the “spec” here, you may note.

Secondly, and most sacrilegiously, it’s because we just grew out of those iconic sit-up-and-beg bikes because they were, well, childish¹. The cartoonish big seats, handlebars and tiger tail ribbons weren’t meant for serious bike-riders. The Elswick Sprint was an elegant bicycle for a more civilised age. Lean, mean teens needed lean, mean racing wheel trims and lean, mean drop-handle bars (to lean on). A louche, leather-jacketed lad from the estate could ride such a bike at a menacingly slow speed, circling the bus stops like a shark, fag in mouth². You can’t do that on a Tomahawk, kid.

If you get the chance, take a look at the Albert Finney kitchen sink drama Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, much of which was filmed in and around Raleigh’s Faraday Road factory in Nottingham. Finney, as the film’s anti-hero, Arthur Seaton, spends a lot of time cycling along the canals of Radford and Renton on his 28” frame Dawes, on his way to do mischief or “a spot of fishing”. The film’s director, Karel Reisz, died just a week after that factory, once the world’s largest cycle manufacturing plant, closed down for good in 2003.

These days, we’d rather walk. Raleigh are back and doing well with a Mark 3 Chopper, MTBs, tourers and full sus/hard tails (surely they’re making this up?). But for everyone who ever forgot the combination on their chain lock, or wondered what that little block in a puncture repair kit was for, or scraped their shins on metal-toothed pedals, or wrapped luminous masking tape around their handlebars³, we’re slotting the front-wheel of a Cream-era bike into the concrete block of immortality.

We were right about that saddle, though.