INTRODUCTION
THE other day I saw a revival of The Belle of New York. Its cast includes a shabby lunatic who amongst other eccentricities strolls into a candy store, interrupts the lyrics of the spangled chorus, and orders a ton of coal. The assembled knuts and flappers receive him, with a bored, puzzled politeness. That is exactly how we pioneer motorcyclists were regarded by the general public twenty years ago - we were incomprehensible lunatics. Our room was preferred to our company, and only persons with perfect manners forebore to tell us so.
Indeed, unless we frightened people's horses, they were quite astoundingly polite to us. Our weird hobby seemed to be without excuse or justification : it veneered us with a permanent grime which, exceeded every known form of filth alike in squalor and in adhesiveness. The uncertainty of being able to start on a journey was only exceeded by the improbability of our ever reaching our destination in the saddle. We were unquestionably doomed to spend long hours by the roadside, under conditions that ranged from grilling sun to a frosty night, from desperate solitude to a seething mob.
Such times of penance were usually devoted to the identification of some mystic ailment which afflicted our machines. The odds in the first place were heavily against our being able to trace the trouble; in the second place the betting was equally strong against our being able to remedy it, if found.
There were no garages; the longest push could only bring us to the door of some ambitious cycle repairer, more ignorant and less cautious than ourselves.
When it rained, we sideslipped and got drenched, for our machines were wofully top-heavy, and the modern dreadnought clothing was not dreamt of. In winter we suffered from frostbite. In summer our engines over-heated. Our belts slipped and broke and pulled through without partiality under all conditions ; the slip which they developed in wet weather was not more habitual than the glaze from which their leather suffered when roads were dry and dusty
Most of us were ex-cyclists; but such a hideous past was no palliation of our folly. We could not claim that motorcycles were faster than pushbikes; we often covered a few miles at a speed which was then regarded as suicidal - say 24 miles an hour or so; but from beginning to end of a cross-country journey the prehistoric motorcycle was generally slower than a scissors-grinder's handcart. We could not claim that we preferred the motorcycle for hillwork; for the main difference between it and the pushbike where gradients were concerned, was that the latter was very distinctly easier to push. Economy could be no factor in our inexplicable conduct. A new machine might easily cost £ 75 to buy. Its repair bill was long enough to stagger a munition magnate, and it was out-of-date soon after it had been delivered. The most sympathetic student of human nature might be pardoned for comparing us to the gentleman who carried a slice of toast with him under the impression that he was a poached egg.
Now that the horse is all but extinct, I may inform the curious that it was an observant, suspicious and ignorant animal. When motorcycles first dawned on its vision, it took careful stock of them. Several disturbing points were immediately obvious. Motorcycles smelt abominably. The men who accompanied them on the roads were dreadful ruffians. Sometimes a motorcycle might be met travelling at inconceivable velocities. On other occasions, indeed more commonly, they were found stationary by the roadside. This latter attitude was pure cunning, intended to entice unwary horses up to close range before the noise and smell began. The new monster was evidently a lethal projectile, a kind of bomb on wheels; when it was in motion, you could hear the clockwork whirring in its inside, and you would be half deafened by its repeated efforts to detonate. We produced some such impression on the horses of our day
The consequence was that when they sighted us they immediately did an "about turn" and worked up to maximum revolutions in an amazingly few yards. The staidest old Dobbin would instantly become oblivious to the presence of kind mistress and the family barouche behind him. Many nasty accidents occurred as a result, and timid horse owners became afraid to venture on the roads
In a somewhat different fashion we troubled human nerves to an almost equal degree. People habitually ignore any familiar noise - the roar of a night express 30 yards from their bedroom windows, or the grinding of municipal trams over worn points at 5 a.m. - but the instant they are subjected to some quite minor uproar of a novel character, they clamour for its suppression. An aero engine factory opened a testing shed two miles from a certain town during the war, and the town council was almost lynched as a result. The prehistoric motor-cycle did not really make a very tremendous noise. It usually had a small and feeble engine, a large silencer, and a silent transmission; if we except the geardriven tricycles which certainly scrunched abominably after a little wear, the early engines made less noise than some modern lightweight machines. But the pother we used to cause!
Pedestrians twisted round in their tracks when we were half a mile away. People ran to their windows to stare. Only a very Prussian foreman could keep his hands at work when the unaccustomed "tuttatutta" in slow time was audible in the road. Presently the public decided, as it always does, that a new noise was an intolerable nuisance. Jeers or scowls became our portion we knew what it was to have an elderly stranger shake his fist at us in front of an empurpled and twitching countenance. Even our nearest and dearest could furnish up no sort of defence for us. As far as was possible they hushed up our delinquencies, and spoke of our insane hobby behind closed doors and with bated breath, much as if we had cheated at cards or made an unsuitable marriage
The uplift beneath motorcycling in those early days must have been equivalent to a religion, or we should never have borne its manifold disagreeables as we did. It was derived from three motives. Some of us were engineers; we may hardly have believed in the ultimate road possibilities of a featherweight highspeed engine, but even if we privately regarded the machine as a product of Bedlam, it was certainly an amusing little toy. Others gambled on its commercial possibilities. Others, again, were adventurers, pure and simple. When there is no war on, no filibustering in South America, no uncharted islands to explore, this land of policemen and accurate maps and black coats on Sundays is apt to bore a certain type of temperament. The purchase of a motorcycle imported a spice of risk and uncertainty and Bohemianism into such a life.
So we were not quite as mad as we seemed, though we were unquestionably odd. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Somehow or other we stuck to our job or our hobby during the years which motorcycling spent in the "teething stage." We have reaped our several rewards. The men who came in because of technical interests have travelled farther than their dreams - many of them are leading lights in aviation nowadays. The cycle agent who hoped to double his annual turnover very probably owns acres of garages ere this. The sporting youngster has a cabinet full of medals, and what is worth more than ten sideboards full of cups - a memory richly packed with reminiscences of effort, peril and fun, which may serve to keep his heart young when his limbs are stiff with age and rheumatism. So I pass on to some assorted memories, linking the dim age of the pioneer motorcyclists to these times in which the machine threatens to become disgustingly utilitarian.
To be continued...
Notes: "pother" - similar to bother. "knuts" - a dandy - see The "Knut" Cracker. "wofully" archaic form of woefully.
