The Sisterhood of the Wheel

When I first moved to Newport, Essex, I was mystified as to what was making the strange sounds on Sunday morning. While the village could be beautifully still and quiet at this time, a regular swishing noise seemed to be emanating from somewhere. It didn’t take long to work out that the sound was being generated by the cyclists racing on the High Street outside, each of them with their own number marked in day-glo yellow on the backs of their racing jerseys.

 

Essex cyclist Alex Dowsett

We still get races taking place on the street outside our house. The long, straight-ish road, with its gentle climbs and declivities, seems perfectly suited to the sport. It was a revelation to hear that on-road racing of this kind had technically been illegal until the 1960s, though had been practised for at least half a century before then. Essex was particularly known for its cycling scene, with hundreds of clubs established, some of which remain very active. Police permission is now required before a race, or more correctly, a time trial, is held.

 

ERO D/Z 518/1 - the guest book of the Cock Tavern, Chipping Ongar, used by cyclists to record their stay

The occasion for this outbreak of reminiscences about the heyday of Essex cycling was a talk in our village by Dr Sheila Hanlon, an expert in women’s cycling history. Sheila traced the particular story of ‘ladies cycling clubs’, from the 1890s through to the present day. Ladies Cycling Clubs were a manifestation of the cycling craze of the 1890s, but as Sheila explained they had all sorts of other meanings too. Ultimately, they were a political movement, associated with the progressive idea (for the time) that women had independence, agency and autonomy. Sheila’s research has traced the connection between cycling and the campaign for women’s suffrage, for example, and it was timely to hear her paper in the year we mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act.

 

The ladies' cycling craze of the 1890s - from www.sheilahanlon.com

Women’s cycling clubs emerged in London and in northern English cities in the early 1890s. One of the first, the Hammersmith Ladies Cycling Club had as its President the actress Ellen Terry. The Graphic teased that one of its club rules was that ‘No gentleman was to be spoken to during our runs under any pretext whatsoever’. Despite the somewhat predictable scorn they attracted from male journalists, there were soon a great many such clubs, and the Ladies Cyclists Association was formed as an umbrella representative body. The link between cycling and progressive politics was apparent in the number of political parties that established their own cycling clubs, in particular on the left (such as the Clarion socialist cycling clubs). The Countess of Warwick, of Easton Lodge, Dunmow, Essex, was a noted cyclist about whom the song ‘Daisy, Daisy’ is said to have been written. She was a friend and associate of the campaigner WT Stead, who established the Mowbray House Cycling Association.

 

LCA meeting, from www.sheilahanlon.com

The early cycling craze had lost some momentum by the time of the First World War, not least as motoring increased in popularity as a leisure pursuit. But cycle races were now becoming a more popular pastime, and in 1922 the Essex-based Rosslyn Ladies Cycling Club was founded. The Rosslyn, typical of racing clubs at the time, made use of cycling huts that were established off the main road at Ugley, just down the road from Newport. Members would cycle out to the huts on a Saturday, often from homes in north London, spend the night in dormitories there before then devoting Sunday to race meetings. The huts were basic and lacked running water or electricity. Club members who came to the talk recalled having to pump up the Tilley lamps if they were first to arrive at the club, as well as the rules about male visitors being required to ring a bell to announce their arrival and leave by 930pm at the latest. Nonetheless, there was clearly much camaraderie between the men’s and ladies’ cycling clubs, as evidenced by the fact that so many of the women ended up marrying men from the other clubs.

Dr Sheila Hanlon and some of the Rosslyn Ladies Cycle Club members

Our talk was all the more interesting because a number of members of the Rosslyn Ladies Cycling Club were in the audience, including PatSeeger who won numerous prizes in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Pat explained that her interest in the club was first sparked by the fact that she regularly cycled between London and Nottingham in the early years of her marriage. We were thrilled Pat and the other members of the Rosslyn (and other cycling clubs) were able to join us for Sheila’s lecture and the discussion afterwards – it made for a fascinatingly rich account of the vibrant Essex cycling scene.

Roman Holidays

Romans don’t seem to make much of a fuss over Valentine's day. This proved a welcome relief from the somewhat over-commercialised version of the day that is now marked in the UK. Hence, we were able to find somewhere to eat easily enough in Rome on Wednesday, without discovering that every trattoria was suddenly full of candlelit tables for two. Only at the top of the Spanish Steps did we observe one of Rome’s legion of street vendors trying (without much luck) to sell individual red roses to courting couples.

Keats-Shelley house at the foot of the Spanish Steps

There is an irony here: not only is Rome one of the world’s great romantic cities, but St Valentine himself was a Roman. Little is known of who exactly he was, but Valentine may have been either a priest from Rome, or the Bishop of Terni who happened to be staying in the city (or indeed it is possible that both martyrs have somehow come to be known as St Valentine). Either way, a beheading on the Via Flaminia to the north of Rome, in the time of Emperor Claudius (around AD 269-73), is what is really being marked on 14 February. 

St Valentine's beheading

Not that there was any connection between such gruesome events and ideas of romantic love – that was a later, medieval, fabrication, perhaps contrived simply because the date helpfully coincides with the first signs of spring, when lovebirds start to choose their mates and so on. (As ever, I take my information here from the endlessly fascinating book by Steve Roud, The English Year.)

Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome

It turns out that being in Rome for February half-term also meant we were there for another even older date in the Roman ritual calendar: Lupercalia (15 February). Lupercalia was a festival of purification, and ought to be better remembered, not least because the name of the month derives from februum (meaning ‘purgings’). The Roman festival involved the priesthood of the Luperci sacrificing goats and a dog and then, blooded and naked, running through the streets around the Palatine Hill administering lashings with their ‘shaggy thongs’. Receiving such a lashing was said to boost the fertility of childless women. The festival was likely to be pre-Roman in date, and links back to the foundation myths of the city itself (Romulus and Remus suckling on the she-wolf, and all that). Not surprisingly, Rome’s early Christian leaders attempted to end all such rituals, though it would seem the festival continued to be marked for some time subsequently, even by those professing the Christian faith.  

Lupercalia

We did not see any evidence of Lupercalia being observed in the streets of modern-day Rome, as we searched (with some difficulty) for a reasonably priced lunch on the day we visited the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill. But we had been fortified in the morning by our trip to the Colosseum – a most amazing structure, where even the barest historical imagination is sufficient to bring the days of imperial Rome to life. It was said that the opening of the Colosseum in AD 80 was marked by a hundred consecutive days of games, during which 9,000 animals were slaughtered. The arena was built to hold 70,000 spectators and took 100,000 Jewish slaves to construct over a period of eight years from AD 72.

 

Colosseum

Another astonishing building we experienced was the 2,000-year-old Pantheon, built as a temple to all the gods but converted into a church in the 7^th century. The Pantheon’s dome is constructed of blocks made from poured concrete, thicker at the base (6m) than they are at the top (1m), where a 6m-diameter hole (the oculus) lets in sunlight and rainwater. 

The dome of the Pantheon, with oculus

The hole is integral to the entire construction, apparently, since the compression ring that lines it helps to redistribute the tensile forces that otherwise might bring the dome crashing down. As it is, the dome is the largest unreinforced concrete structure of its type anywhere in the world. The proportions are beautiful: the diameter of the rotunda (142.2 ft) is the same as the height to the oculus, meaning that the whole thing would sit in a perfect cube, or that it could contain a perfect sphere of 142.2 ft diameter.

Pantheon, Rome

The Pantheon continues to inspire engineers today, and no wonder that it was also an inspiration for 18^th-century travellers. One of these was Robert Adam, the Scottish architect who spent time in Rome imbibing the classicism of the architecture at places like the Pantheon and Colosseum. He wrote to his sister to say,

“Rome is the most glorious place in the universal world. A grandeur and tranquillity reigns in it, everywhere noble and striking remains of antiquity appear in it”.

As I learned at an excellent lecture given by Jeremy Musson the week before our trip (part of the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage celebrations), Adam’s particular inspiration was Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who depicted the Pantheon like this: 

Not far from where I live, Audley End house features a suite of rooms designed by Adam in the neoclassical style, when he was at the height of his fame after his return from Rome. How perfect therefore to travel such a distance to spend time in a foreign country, only to be better informed about one’s starting point. And that, surely, is the whole point of the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage (for more information, do visit european-heritage.co.uk).

 

Little Drawing Room, Audley End, from Jeremy Musson's book on Adam's interiors http://interiordesignmasterclass.com/robert-adam-country-house-design-decoration-the-art-of-elegance-from-rizzoli-new-york/