Leek Cycling Club in the Edwardian Age

Some time ago the BBC repeated Alan Bennett's 1972 play “ A Day Out”. It concerns a group going on a cycling trip to the Yorkshire Dales in 1911. The piece is elegiac, funny and concludes poignantly. At the end of the play there is a reunion of the club in 1920 who stop before a First World War memorial to honour the memory of members of the club who did not return from the trenches.

I was thinking of the programme after an afternoon spent in Leek Library turning the pages of local newspapers of the Edwardian Era. A report of Leek Cycling Club's tour of the Isle of Man in May 1904 caught my attention. The anonymous writer of the article detailed evocatively an escapade that a group of friends made ten years before the outbreak of war, and I am sure that as in the Bennett play, some of the cyclists would have died in the war.

After a rough crossing from Liverpool the men meet up with old friends in the Smoke Room of the Talbot Hotel, kept by a Staffordshire man Mr Weston. They refreshed themselves and set out for a tour of the island. The camp-site is at the Union Mills near Peel. The weather conditions are poor( so much for the Golden Edwardian summer) and the camp site waterlogged . The party were forced to seek refuge in a laundry room where they make the best of it. The conversations are boisterous and good natured joshing occurs. It is obvious the men delight in each others company. Engaging fragments of comment illuminate the article- the erratic chiming of Douglas Town Clock, the novelty of an early telephone box, the Whit Sunday parade with children dressed in white and a military band playing Strauss.

Cycling by 1904 was a major leisure activity. It was made easier by a number of innovations in the design of the bike. By the 1880s springs were added to seats ( not for nothing were early bikes called bone shakers), later pneumatic tyres was invented. In 1891 Eduard Michelin had patented the inner tube making the speedy repair of the tyre far more easier. ( The intrepid adventurers of the Leek Club repaired punctured tyres at Rainhill on the way back). By the last years of the century Cycling Clubs were being created . Leek now is one of the longest surviving clubs in the country.

An early problem which Clubs tried to exert an influence over was the lamentable state of the roads. A particularly egregious example were the roads of North Staffordshire. According to the 1874 'Book for Riders' “ Liverpool to Prescott 8 miles of good road, then within 6 miles of Newcastle under Lyme a very bad bit full of holes”... plus ça change

Dialect

What links a ginnel, a twitchell and a weint? Answer they are all dialect worlds for alley from Yorkshire, Nottingham and the Isle of Man respectively. Similarly the words wag, bob and twag all mean playing truant. The reason that I draw your attention to this fact arises out of a news item I heard on radio on the future of dialect words.

Linguists at the British Library have assembled a list of thousands of rare words and phrases from dialects in order to preserve them - and make them available far beyond their native area.

Around 4,000 locally-used words have been contributed to the "wordbank" the public who visited the library, in central London, or attended a series of events at provincial libraries, at which they were asked to provide local phrases.

North Staffordshire, I believe, is particularly rich in dialect words both in the urban and rural areas. One word, which is known throughout the North Midlands, is the word “nesh” meaning susceptible to the cold. It has a long provenance cropping up in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and more modern writers such as the Nottinghamshire born DH Lawrence. A word that I particularly like is lozzuck meaning a layabout. There are others like ganzi meaning an outer garment, which may have its origins in Hindi and was probably brought over by soldiers of the Raj. Sometimes words can be misunderstood. The word “starving” in the Moorlands means freezing. In 1947 in the context of the Great Freeze of that year its thought by authority that the natives of Grindon were famished rather than perished. Tragically a rescue plane crashed killing all occupants on what seems to have been an unnecessary mission.

In my travels around the country I have come across other excellent dialect words. My own favourites are “pofagged” from Wigan meaning exhausted, “lakin” a York expression for playing and “clarty” a North Eastern word for “muddy”.

There are those who think that local words are dying out driven out by the media and population movement. I hope not and their continued existence hints at resilience.