FROM THE ARCHIVES:A little-remembered Easter event was commemorated in 1995 by Donal Dorcey in this Irishman's Diary.
EASTER WEEKEND marks the centenary of an event which will almost certainly go unmarked everywhere except in these columns.
Yet the event could profoundly have altered the course of modern western thought and literature.
For it was on the Easter weekend 100 years ago that George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell learned to ride bicycles – and came close to annihilating one another.
It was all the fault, naturally enough, of Mrs Beatrice Webb, who should have known better but obviously didn’t since she was in the habit, according to Amy Strachey, of cycling the back streets of Pimlico “with both hands behind her back, steering by her pedals”.
Had she come a cropper, her husband would no doubt have described it as the inevitability of suddenness.
It was this irresponsible woman who lured two of the greatest minds of this century to a potentially fatal tryst at a little hotel on the top of Beachy Head, where she equipped them with what were then dubiously called safety bicycles, and sent them off to practise on the clifftop paths.
It was the heyday of the bicycle. Max Beerbohm, HG Wells and Jerome K Jerome were at it that same spring, but Beerbohm stuck to Battersea Park, Jerome preferred overhauling his machine to riding it, and Wells knew what to do with his brakes.
Fortunately for the Diary, Shaw was at the time in the habit of boasting of his exploits in letters to Janet Achurch, and the Little Oxford Book of Cycling has reproduced extracts. Of the Easter 1895 weekend, he wrote: “After a desperate struggle, renewed on two separate days, I will do 20 yards and a destructive fall against any professional in England. My God, the stiffness, the blisters, the bruises, the pains in every twisted muscle, the crashes against the chalk road that I have endured.”
But Shaw had discovered a new mission. After a collision with Russell in which, he told Achurch, he himself “smote the earth like a thunderbolt”, he beat his front wheel back into shape by stamping on it, and rode on another 15 or 16 miles.
“I am not thoroughly convinced yet,” he told her, “that I was not killed. Anybody but a vegetarian would have been. Nobody but a teetotaller would have faced a bicycle again for six months.”
In his memoirs, Russell, whom Shaw of course blamed, added a prologue that Shaw seems to have forgotten: “He got up completely unhurt and continued his ride; whereas my bicycle was smashed and I had to return by train. It was a very slow train, and at every station Shaw, with his bicycle, appeared on the platform, put his head into the carriage and jeered. I suspect that he regarded the whole incident as proof of the virtues of vegetarianism.”
Like many vegetarians, however, Shaw appears to have had little regard for the objects of his concern when he found himself in too close proximity to them. He seems, from various accounts, to have enjoyed jousting with pantechnicons.
Of one such encounter he wrote: “I went ahead gallantly and hit the horse fair and square on the breastbone with my front tire, fully believing that the most impetuous railway van must go down before the onslaught of Bernard Shaw. But it didn’t. I hit the dust . . . my bike came out a mangled, shrieking corpse. It was rather exciting for a sedentary literary man like myself.” Not a word about the fate of the horse.
It seemed in those days that cyclists might rule the world. The Irish Cyclistof January 1900 reported that the chief constable of Surrey had purchased 100 Singer bicycles – the fastest model on the market – so that his men could apprehend motorists as they tried to break the speed limit, then a death-defying 12mph.
Everyone appeared to be cycling. Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy and HG Wells were enthusiasts, as were Henry James and Leo Tolstoy. Rudyard Kipling, however, did not approve.
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