of Coventry and Lichfield. The style of the See was afterwards reversed,
and the scanty ruins of Coventry’s Abbey Church or Cathedral alone tell
of that ancient dignity. The encircling walls, too, of Coventry are
gone. They kept out many unwelcome visitors in their existence of three
hundred years, and behind them the citizens withstood the Royalists of
1642 with such effect that the memory of it rankled twenty years later,
when the Restoration brought the Stuarts back again, and Charles II.
ordered the fortifications to be destroyed. It was to the Civil War that
the expression of “sending to Coventry” any objectionable person owes
its origin. Every one knows that this means the social ostracism—the
“cutting”—of those thus punished; but its original meaning is not so
commonly understood. It derives from Birmingham, where the townspeople
took up a hostile attitude towards the Royalists, overwhelming scattered
parties and sending them prisoners to Coventry. A very excellent reason
for not keeping them at Birmingham was that, the town had no defences
and no prisons, while Coventry was a fortress-city and had both.
“True as Coventry blue” would, in view of this old attitude, seem a
saying ill-applied to a place of Puritan politics; but it referred to a
dye then used here. When Ogilby came to Coventry in the compilation of
his great road-book, he noted its position “on the little river
Sherborne, whose water is peculiar for the Blue Dye.” Even then, it will
be seen, the city was beginning to recover from the decay of a hundred
years before.
XLII
Romance did not leave Coventry with the passing of mediæval days. It
merely changed its aspect; doffed the “armour bright” the romancists
love to tell of, and went clad instead in russet; put away helm and pike
and broadsword, and sat the livelong day at the loom; changed indeed the
Romance of Warfare for that of Industry, so that it was possible for old
travellers to remark “the noise of the looms assails the passengers’
ears in every direction.” Coming in later years upon its discarded old
warlike panoply of steel, Coventry has fashioned it anew, in the form of
bicycles, for the needs of a peaceful age.
Tennyson, in _Godiva_, writing—
We, the latest seed of Time,
New men, that in the flying of a wheel
Cry down the past,
seems to foreshadow the bicycle, but the early period at which that poem
was produced forbids any such allusion. We must needs, therefore, look
upon those lines as prophetic, especially since, regarded in any other
way, the phrase “the flying of a wheel” appears meaningless. But, even
in the light of a prophetic inspiration, is not the cut at the “new men”
who “cry down the past” an ill description of the typical cyclist, who
uses his flying wheel as a means of communing with Nature and antiquity?
Coventry became earnestly industrial when jousts ceased; and its
industries, in their rise and fall, have had their own romance. There
were, of course, Coventry makers of woollens; pinners and needlers;
girdlers, loriners, and many other tradespeople in the days of chivalry;
but it was only in modern times that the industries of silk-weaving and
dyeing, ribbon-making and watch-making arose, to give a fugitive
prosperity to the place before the cycle industry came to confer upon it
a greater boon. Those trades have gone elsewhere; but ask even the most
ignorant for what Coventry is famous nowadays, and you get for answer
“cycle manufacturing.” Yet before 1869 that industry was unborn, and the
trade of Coventry at the lowest ebb. Silk-weaving and ribbon-making had
then been dealt a deadly blow by the removal of the duty from foreign
goods of that nature, and French ribbons and silks of new designs, and
at low prices, poured in. Coventry weavers and dyers were ruined. At the
same time, cheap Swiss watches had cut out the local watch-making trade,
so that work grew scarce and starvation presently began to stalk the
streets. That was a dark hour in Coventry’s modern chapter of romance,
an hour brightened by the efforts of one man in particular—James
Marriott—to establish a new industry. Those were the first days of a new
invention—the sewing machine—and Marriott thought he saw means of
setting afoot a great manufacture of that labour-saving device. He
contributed £500 to the formation of a business, and was joined by
others, and together they established the Coventry Sewing Machine
Company, an enterprise that failed to realise the hopes centred in it.
But in that failure, unknown to those gallant pioneers, lay the seed of
success. Their plant was lying idle, and might have been dispersed but
for a happy providence: the appearance in France of the velocipede.
The velocipede was by no means the first attempt of the kind to aid
locomotion on highways. Indeed, in Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ there may
be found a reference, under date of 1769, to a “new-invented machine”
that went without horses. A man sat in it and turned a handle, which
worked a spring, which drove the machine forward. The criticism Johnson
levelled against this device was one that will probably appeal
powerfully to all cyclists who have stored up in their memories horrid
experiences of hill-climbing and head-winds. “What is gained,” said the
learned Doctor, “is the man has the choice whether he will move himself
alone, or himself and the machine too.” Nothing came of that invention,
and it was not until 1810 that the “Hobby Horse,” as it afterwards
became known, was devised in Paris by a M. Niepce. He named it a
“Celeripede.” This machine, improved by a Baron von Drais, of Mannheim,
does not appear to have found its way to England until the autumn of
1818, when a coach-maker of Long Acre, one Dennis Johnson by name,
introduced it as a “Pedestrian Curricle.” From 1819 to 1830 this
machine—the popularly-named “Hobby Horse”—enjoyed a certain favour,
although on country roads it could but seldom have been seen, for no one
could ride it twenty miles and remain in an able-bodied condition. Its
mere weight was appalling, constructed as it was of two heavy wooden
wheels shod with iron, and held together by a stout bar of timber. For
saddle, the rider had a cushion, and leant his chest against another
cushion, supported by ironwork. Bestriding this fearsome contrivance,
the adventurous rider’s feet easily reached the ground. As the Hobby
Horse had no cranks or pedals, the method of propulsion was that of
running in this straddling position until a sufficient impetus had been
gained, when the lumbering machine would carry its owner a short
distance on the flat. It was, of course, impossible to ride up even the
slightest rise; but, considering the momentum likely to be accumulated
by a mass of iron and wood, scaling considerably over a hundredweight,
the pace down hill must have been furious enough.
By 1830 the Hobby Horse had disappeared, and it was not until 1839–40
that the first machine with cranks was invented by a Scots blacksmith,
Kirkpatrick Macmillan, who produced a rear-driving dwarf bicycle that
foreshadowed the type now popular. Several machines of this kind were
made and sold by Macmillan, but they did not attain a lasting vogue; and
it was not until a French mechanic—one Pierre Lallemont—in 1865 or 1866
designed the front-driving velocipede in the workshops of Michaux & Cie,
of Paris, that the second era of cycling began. It was this machine that
Michaux exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. It was seen either
then or the following year in Paris by Mr. R. B. Turner, agent in that
city for the Coventry Sewing Machine Company. He, together with Charles
Spencer and John Mayall, junior, became a pioneer of cycling in this
country. In the pages of the BRIGHTON ROAD, details of their first
long-distance ride, February 17th, 1869, may be found.
But Turner not only became an enthusiastic cyclist: he drew the
attention of his firm to what at once proved „to be a profitable
manufacture, supplementing, and eventually taking the place of, the
declining sewing-machine business. The style of the firm was altered to
the “Coventry Machinists Company,” and “bone-shakers,” as Velocipedes
were speedily nicknamed, began to be turned out in considerable numbers.
The “boneshaker” was well named. It had a solid iron frame, and wooden
wheels with iron tyres, and was only a degree less weighty than the
Hobby Horse itself, of ponderous memory. Its front wheel was the larger,
and was the driving-wheel, fitted with “treadles,” as pedals were then
named. The machine turned the scale at 93 lb.
Thus, in 1869, the pastime of cycling and the industry of cycle
manufacture found a beginning on these shores. In that year the actual
word “bicycle” was first introduced, to eventually render “Velocipede”
obsolete. When the first syllable of “bicycle” and “bicycling” was
dropped is a more difficult matter to determine. The present use grew
gradually, as one by one the different bicycling and tricycling clubs
sloughed off those cumbrous prefatory distinctions, as unnecessary and
unwieldy; but certainly the modern use was known by 1879, when the
_’Cyclist_ was established, with the half-apologetic ’ that may even yet
be seen on its engraved title-page. Two years earlier, when the
_Bicycling News_ was founded, the elision of the distinguishing syllable
was evidently not foreseen.
In the years following the introduction of the “boneshaker,” this new
industry prospered and increased in an eminently solid way. Bone-shaking
was not a pastime for the many, and it was not until the old “ordinary,”
as it is still called, was introduced that the youth of that period went
bicycling in any great numbers. The “ordinary,” or high bicycle, long
since become extraordinary by supersession in favour of the dwarf
“safety,” was gradually evolved through the middle Seventies to 1880. It
was probably an early example of this build that so terribly frightened
the rustic in _Punch_, who, going home in the dark, was scared by an
“awful summat” he declared to be “a man a-ridin’ on nawthin’.”
It was a graceful, albeit exceedingly dangerous type, and from its
height of fifty-eight inches a rider surveyed the world as he went at a
lordly altitude. The reverse of that commanding eminence was found when
he was thrown: a happening that recurred with remarkable frequency and a
nerve-shaking unexpectedness. Little in the shape of ruts or stones was
required to upset the “ordinary,” and few long rides were ever made
without a “spill.” To be shot off suddenly in mid-air was in fact so to
be looked for, that riders studied how to fall, and practised the art so
well that, although involuntary flights were many, serious injuries were
few. The height of this art or science was to fall clear of the
machine—an object attained, down hill, by riding with the legs over the
handlebars, when, in the event of an accident, one fell a greater or
shorter distance, according to the speed or the force of the shock.
[Illustration: THE “OLD ORDINARY.”]
The “ordinary” was at its height, in measurement and popularity, in
1880, a year that also marked the palmiest period of cycling clubs. The
cyclist of that era made a brave show. Arrayed in a tight-fitting
uniform, that in its frogged patrol-jacket and gauntlet gloves aped
military costume, and in its tight breeches made the sudden strain of a
fall the utter dissolution of those garments, his was a wonderful figure
as he wended his uncertain way, gazing from his point of vantage over
the countryside.
But as his first youth waned, and his agility with it, rendering the
exercise of vaulting into the saddle increasingly more of an enterprise,
the cyclist yearned for a less giddy height than that of the “ordinary,”
and his growing infirmities, more than any other consideration,
eventually brought about the modern geared-up, rear-driving, dwarf
bicycle the “safety”; but Time, the cynic, that has robbed the term
“ordinary” of its meaning, has brought about many more fatal cycling
accidents in these “safety” days than occurred in the era of the high
bicycle.
XLIII
It was the late J. K. Starley’s “Rover” of 1885 that opened the way for
cycling’s modern development. It was a design rightly claimed to have
“set the fashion to the world,” and the difference between it and
patterns of the current season is only in detail. Already, before
Starley, attempts had been made to produce a “safety,” as shown by
Lawson’s patent of 1876 and his “bicyclette” of 1880, together with the
designs by Shergold and Bate in 1876 and later, in which 26- to 30-inch
wheels, provided with gear, were to do the work of the 56- and 58-inch
ungeared wheel. But none of these designs attained any commercial
success.
The “Rover” brought many thousands more into the ranks of cyclists, and
gave an added prosperity to Coventry, but what has been called the
“great boom” was yet to come. A contributory cause of that event,
although antedating it by some six years, was the introduction of the
pneumatic tyre. So long ago as 1815 a pneumatic rubber tyre for
carriages had been invented by Thompson, and forgotten, and it was not
until 1888 that Mr. J. R. Dunlop designed the first pattern of the tyre
bearing his name. Like many another epoch-making invention, its
importance was originally not so much as guessed at, and it was only as
a home-made device for securing the easy running of his children’s
cycles that it first came into being. It began to be manufactured in
1889, and certainly since 1891 pneumatic tyres for cycles have been
universal. They practically first rendered it possible for ladies to
adopt the pastime, and first made cycling luxurious, rather than
necessarily an athletic exercise. The result was the “boom” that began
in the early summer of 1895.
Suddenly, from being looked down upon by all who pretended to any
culture or social consideration, cycling became fashionable. Cyclists,
who had cycled ever since the days when Edmund Yates in the _World_,
speaking for Society, had bitterly called them “cads on castors,” smiled
sardonically when they saw all Mayfair and St. James’s cycling in Hyde
or Battersea Parks, and submitted to be knocked down by wobbling
novices—Earls and Countesses—upon the road with an ill grace. It is a
mad world, and time brings strange revenges in it.
No one, least of all the cycle manufacturers of Coventry, had any
prevision of the great “boom.” In former years business had eased off
with the coming of summer. “Previously to 1895,” said a representative
of the trade, “business was sound, and all the best houses did well, but
were more or less subject to a very dull period, lasting from the
beginning of August until the end of November. This period began slowly,
and, reaching its dullest point about the end of October, caused much
distress among the more improvident workers. There was no slack time in
1895, _and you know what ’96 was_.”
Toil how they might through the twenty-four hours, the factories of
Coventry could not keep pace with the demand. Orders came in quicker
than cycles were despatched, and every little metal-working firm went
into cycle-making, while thousands upon thousands of mechanics flocked
into the “city of the boom.” Any one could find work and good wages in
Coventry, but the rush was so great that many could find no lodgings,
and payment was frequently offered for shelter in the local workhouse,
offers that, of course, could not be entertained. In some cases cycle
manufacturers provided their new hands with temporary accommodation in
their works. The population, numbering in 1891 58,503, rose at once by
10,000. To meet this influx, building operations were feverishly begun,
and street upon street of entirely new suburbs began to rise.
And for a time the “boom” continued. Newer and immensely large factories
were built on the strength of it, and during 1897 the output of cycles
rose to an extraordinary height.
It was the Company Promoter who killed all this prosperity. Unscrupulous
men, versed in all the dark ways of the financial world, found their
opportunity in those palmy days, and, purchasing and amalgamating,
converted prosperous private firms into unwieldy and over-capitalised
public companies. In the thick of all this juggling with millions, and
snatching of commissions and vendors’ profits, the bubble burst, and an
honourable and highly prosperous industry was wrecked, and became a
bye-word and a reproach all the world over. The events of 1898 make a
painful retrospect. Noblemen who bore ancient and honourable titles were
publicly accused as common touts and commission agents engaged in
hoodwinking the public, and even ready, when opportunity offered, to
cheat one another. The scandal struck the heaviest blow to the House of
Lords and hereditary legislation that that House and that principle of
government have ever suffered.
The professional Company Promoter we have had with us ever since Limited
Liability brought him into being, and bitter experience during a
generation and a half has enabled the public to at last gain a just view
of him and his methods; but the public, at that time, still looked upon
a nobleman as, almost of necessity, a man of honour. The revelations
that followed this sudden crash dispelled that fond belief, and poisoned
confidence at its very spring-head. The Society “boom” had already
ended, and the bursting of the financial bubble left the once
flourishing industry disorganised. Ever since that unhappy year of 1898
Coventry has witnessed a melancholy succession of failures, and has seen
factory after factory closed. Only recently has cycle manufacturing
begun to recover from that staggering blow. Yet, apart from such
considerations as the waxing and waning fortunes of financiers, or of
manufacturers and their hirelings among professional racing cyclists,
cycling as a pastime has been steadily progressive. Where one person
rode a “boneshaker,” twenty bestrode the high bicycle; and, nowadays,
for every twenty who perched on the perilous eminence of the old
“ordinary,” two hundred are found upon the modern cycle. The industry is
thus endowed with elasticity and strong recuperative powers, so that in
this saner period Coventry is doing a great deal more than merely
holding its own, even though many other towns have secured a share in
the business of cycle production.
Here, then, for the present, ends Coventry’s romance. There be those who
look forward to a new and stirring chapter of it, in a wished-for
manufacture of motor-cars; but the future lies on the knees of the gods,
to order as they will.
XLIV
Coaching history at Coventry begins in 1658, with the establishment of a
stage-coach between London, Lichfield, and Chester. This pioneer,
starting from the “George” Inn, Holborn Bridge, reached Coventry in
three days, or professed to do so. Suspicions that this was only a
profession, not often put into practice, are aroused by the title of a
new coach, put on the road in 1739. This was the “London, Birmingham,
and Lichfield Flying Coach,” that took just the same time to reach
Coventry, and yet arrogated the term “flying” to itself, as a superior
recommendation above all earlier conveyances. The fare between London
and Coventry was 25_s._ In 1773 a wonderful thing happened, for in that
year the “Coventry Flying Machine” winged its way in one day. Later
coaches belong to the road in general, and Coventry was but an incident
on the way; but there were many short distances covered by local
coaches, such as the “Peeping Tom” and the “Manchester Hero,” between
this and Manchester, and numerous others to Birmingham, Lichfield,
Warwick, Leamington, Cheltenham, and Stratford-on-Avon. A “Little
Wonder” Coventry and Birmingham stage ran in the last years of coaching.
Tom Pinner, its driver, was an expert with the whip, and could snatch
the pipe out of a wayfarer’s mouth with it, and not touch him, as he
drove along. One quite expects, in reading Tom Pinner’s career, to light
upon the record of one of the victims of these little pleasantries
waiting for their author and pounding him into a jelly; but no one ever
seems to have had sufficient spirit.
Besides the “King’s Arms,” there were the “Queen’s Head,” the “Bull,”
and the “White Bear” prominent among Coventry inns. The “Bull” stood
where the Barracks are now situated, in Smithford Street. The “White
Bear,” in High Street, changed its sign in 1811 to the “Craven Arms”; a
name it still retains. The change was made out of compliment to the
third Earl of Craven, who had then returned to live at Combe Abbey, a
family seat near Coventry that had long been closed. His residence there
brought much custom to the city and to the house.
The old inn remains just as it was in coaching days. There are the long
yard, with stables of Elizabethan date, and the solid red-brick portions
of the house, rebuilt in the time when George III. was King, facing the
narrow passage. Fronting on the street, the building is of old
white-painted plaster. It was in front of the “Craven Arms” that the
fatal accident, already recounted, to Tom Peck, the guard of the
“Eclipse” coach, happened. Opposite was one of the many coach offices;
the scene, perhaps, of that story of the little girl being booked
overnight at half-price, as the custom was. Her elder sister took the
seat in the morning, when the book-keeper remarked to her mother, “Your
little girl has grown in the night.”
One of the last relics of old times went, unhonoured, in 1872, when the
turnpike-gates on either side of Coventry were abolished; and a
long-enduring link was broken when Thomas Clarke died, in Coventry
Hospital, April, 1899. Clarke was, according to the newspapers
chronicling the event, the “oldest postboy in England.” Not a few, also,
proclaimed him to be “the last”; but last postboys have been dying in
considerable numbers since then, and modest paragraphs in the daily
papers still appear, now and again, recording the passing of another.
The Last Postboy, indeed, is not yet, and those paragraphs are not
uncommonly followed by letters from survivors, who are always found to
write and claim the honour for themselves. They are as inexhaustible as
the widow’s cruise of oil, pieces of the True Cross, or relics of the
saints in Roman Catholic churches. When the traveller of experience has
seen the skull of St. Jerome in one place, he is not surprised „to be
shown another somewhere else, for he has already seen five thigh bones
of some other saint at different shrines, and knows that, if he
perseveres, he will probably find some more. Just in the same way, there
is always another postboy when the last has died. They were—or are, we
must perhaps say—a long-lived race, all bone and gristle; without a
spare ounce of flesh for disease to fasten upon, and, inured for long
years to hard work in all weathers, little affected in old age by the
chills and bitter winds that carry off the less hardy among elderly
folks. The coachman was of another kind. He sat on his box all the time,
and grew fat in fingering the ribbons; while the postboy bumped his
flesh away on horseback. Did any one ever see a fat postboy? And was it
not the exception for a coachman to be lean? His fatness long since
carried off the last coachman of the old days, but the
Three jolly postboys, drinking at the Dragon,
who, in the words of the old chorus, “determined to finish off the
flagon,” are probably still living, in a hale and lean old age, although
coaches, and chaises, and all the old life of the road have gone, and
the “Dragon” itself no longer looks down the dusty highway.
[Illustration: THE OLD “KING’S HEAD,” COVENTRY. _From a Print
after Rowlandson._]