Robinson Crusoe, weary of his island solitude, sighed, so the poet tells us, for “the midst of alarms.” He should have chosen the Brighton Road; for ever since it has been a road at all it has fully realised the Shakespearian stage-direction of “alarums and excursions.” Particularly the “excursions,” for it is the chosen track for most record-breaking exploits; and thus it comes to pass that residents fortunate or unfortunate enough to dwell upon the Brighton Road have the whole panorama of sport unfolded before their eyes, whether they will or no, throughout the whirling year, and see strange sights, hear odd noises, and (since the coming of the motor-car) smell weird smells.

The Brighton Road has ever been a course upon which the enthusiastic exponents of different methods of progression have eagerly exhibited their prowess. But to-day, although it affords as good going as, or better than, ever, it is not so suitable as it was for these displays of speed. Traffic has grown with the growth of villages and townships along these fifty-two miles, and sport and public convenience are on the highway antipathetic. Yet every kind of sport has its will of the road.

The reasons of this exceptional sporting character are not far to seek. They were chiefly sportsmen who travelled it in the days when it began to be a road: those full-blooded sportsmen, ready for any freakish wager, who were the boon companions of the Prince; and they set a fashion which has not merely survived into modern times, but has grown amazingly.

But it would never have been the road for sport it is, had its length not been so conveniently and alluringly near an even fifty miles. So much may be done or attempted along a fifty miles’ course that would be impossible on a hundred.

The very first sporting event on the Brighton Road of which any record survives is (with an astonishing fitness) the feat accomplished by the Prince of Wales himself on July 25th, 1784, during his second visit to Brighthelmstone. On that day he mounted his horse there and rode to London and back. He went by way of Cuckfield, and was ten hours on the road: four and a half hours going, five and a half hours returning. On August 21st of the same year, starting at one o’clock in the morning, he drove from Carlton House to the “Pavilion” in four hours and a half. The turn-out was a phaeton drawn by three horses harnessed tandem-fashion—what in those days was called a “random.”

One may venture the opinion that, although these performances were in due course surpassed, they were not altogether bad for a “simulacrum,” as Thackeray was pleased to style him.

Twenty-five years passed before any one arose to challenge the Prince’s ride, and then only partially and indirectly. In May, 1809, Cornet J. Wedderburn Webster, of the 10th (Prince of Wales’s Own) Light Dragoons, accepted and won a wager of 300 to 200 guineas with Sir B. Graham about the performance in three and a half hours of the journey from Brighton to Westminster Bridge, mounted upon one of the blood horses that usually ran in his phaeton. He accomplished the ride in three hours twenty minutes, knocking the Prince’s up record into the proverbial cocked hat. The rider stopped a while at Reigate to take a glass or two of wine, and compelled his horse to swallow the remainder of the bottle.

This spirited affair was preceded in April, 1793, by a curious match which seems to deserve mention. A clergyman at Brighton betted an officer of the Artillery quartered there 100 guineas that he would ride his own horse to London sooner than the officer could go in a chaise and pair, the officer’s horses to be changed en route as often as he might think proper. The Artilleryman accordingly despatched a servant to provide relays, and at twelve o’clock on an unfavourable night the parties set out to decide the bet, which was won by the clergyman with difficulty. He arrived in town at 5 a.m., only a few minutes before the chaise, which it had been thought was sure of winning. The driver of the last stage, however, nearly became stuck in a ditch, which mishap caused considerable delay. The Cuckfield driver performed his nine-miles’ stage, between that place and Crawley, within the half-hour.

The next outstanding incident was the run of the “Red Rover” coach, which, leaving the “Elephant and Castle” at 4 p.m. on June 19th, 1831, reached Brighton at 8.21 that evening: time, four hours twenty-one minutes. The fleeting era of those precursors of motor-cars, the steam-carriages, had by this time arrived, and after two or three had managed, at some kind of a slow pace, to get to and from Brighton, the “Autopsy” achieved a record of sorts in October, 1833. “Autopsy” was an unfortunate name, suggestive of post-mortem examinations and “crowner’s quests,” but it proved not more dangerous than the “Mors” or “Hurtu” cars of to-day. The “Autopsy” was Walter Hancock’s steam-carriage, and ran from his works at Stratford. It reached Brighton in eight hours thirty minutes; from which, however, must be deducted three hours for a halt on the road.

In the following year, February 4th, the “Criterion” coach, driven by Charles Harbour, took the King’s Speech down to Brighton in three hours forty minutes—a coach record that not only quite eclipsed that of the “Red Rover,” but has never yet been equalled, not even by Selby, on his great drive of July 13th, 1888; his times being, out and home respectively, three hours fifty-six minutes and three hours fifty-four minutes.

In March, 1868, the first of the walking records was established, the sporting papers of that age chronicling what they very rightly described as a “Great Walking Feat”: a walk, not merely to Brighton, but to Brighton and back. This heroic undertaking, which was not repeated until 1902, was performed by one “Mr. Benjamin B. Trench, late Oxford University.” On March 20th, for a heavy wager, he started to walk the hundred miles from Kennington Church to Brighton and back in twenty-five hours. Setting out on the Friday, at 6 p.m., he was back at Kennington Church at 5 p.m. Saturday, having thus won his wager with two hours to spare. It will be observed, or guessed, from the absence of odd minutes and seconds that in 1868, timing, as an exact science, had not been born; but it is evident that this stalwart walked his hundred miles on ordinary roads at an average rate of a little over four and a quarter miles an hour. “He then,” concludes the report, “walked round the Oval several times, till seven o’clock.”

To each age the inventions it deserves. Cycling would have been impossible in the mid-eighteenth century, when Walpole and Burton travelled with such difficulty.

When roads began to deserve the name, the Mail Coach was introduced; and when they grew hard and smooth, out of their former condition of ruts and mud, the quaint beginnings of the bicycle are noticed. The Hobby Horse and McAdam, the man who first preached the modern gospel of good roads, were contemporary.

I have said the beginnings of the bicycle were quaint, and I think no one will be concerned to dispute this alleged quaintness of the Hobby Horse, which had a certain strictly limited popularity from 1819 to 1830. I do not think any one ever rode from London to Brighton on one of these machines; and, when you come to consider the build and the limitations of them, and then think of the hills on the way, it is quite impossible that any one should so ride. It was perhaps within the limits of human endurance to ride a Hobby Horse along the levels, to walk it up the rises, and then to madly descend the hills, and so reach Brighton, very sore; but records do not tell us of such a stern pioneer. The Hobby Horse, it should be said, was an affair of two wooden wheels with iron tyres. A heavy timber frame connected these wheels, and on it the courageous rider straddled, his feet touching the ground. The Hobby Horse had no pedals, and the rider propelled his hundredweight or so of iron and timber by running in this straddling position and thus obtaining a momentum which only on the down grade would carry him any distance.

Thus, although the Hobby Horse was a favourite with the “bucks” of George the Fourth’s time, they exercised upon it in strictly limited doses, and it was not until it had experienced a new birth and was born again as the “velocipede” of the ’60’s, that to ride fifty miles upon an ancestor of the present safety bicycle, and survive, was possible.[4]

The front-driving velocipede—the well-known “boneshaker”—was invented by one Pierre Lallement, in Paris, in 1865-6, and exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. It was to the modern pneumatic-tyred “safety” what the roads of 1865 are to those of 1906. It also, like the Hobby Horse, had iron-shod wooden wheels, but had cranks and pedals, and could be ridden uphill. On such a machine the first cycle ride to Brighton was performed in 1869. This pioneer’s fame on the Brighton Road belongs to John Mayall, junior, a well-known photographer of that period, who died in the summer of 1891.

This marks the beginning of so important an epoch that the circumstances attending it are worthy a detailed account. They were felt, so long ago as 1874, to be deserving of such a record, for in the first number of an athletic magazine, Ixion, published in that year, “J. M., jun.,” who, of course, was none other than Mayall himself, began to tell the wondrous tale. He set out to narrate it at such length that, as an editorial note tells us, the concluding portion was reserved for the second number. But Ixion never reached a second number, and so Mayall’s own account of his historic ride was never completed.

He began, as all good chroniclers should, at the very beginning, telling how, in the early part of 1869, he was at Spencer’s Gymnasium in Old Street, St. Luke’s. There he saw a packing-case being followed by a Mr. Turner, whom he had seen at the Paris Exhibition of 1868, and witnessed the unpacking of it. From it came a something new and strange, “a piece of apparatus consisting mainly of two wheels, similar to one I had seen, not long before, in Paris.” It was the first velocipede to reach England.

It is a curious point that, although Mayall rode a “velocipede,” and although these machines were generally so-called for a year or two after their introduction, the word “bicycle” is claimed to have been first used in the Times in the early part of 1868; and certainly we find in the Daily News of September 7th in that year an allusion, in grotesque spelling, to “bysicles and trisicles which we saw at the Champs ElysÉes and the Bois de Boulogne this summer.”

But to return to the “velocipede” which had found its way to England at the beginning of 1869.The two-wheeled mystery was helped out of its wrappings and shavings, the Gymnasium was cleared, and Mr. Turner, taking off his coat, grasped the handles of the machine, and with a short run, to Mayall’s intense surprise, vaulted on to it. Putting his feet on what were then called the “treadles,” Turner, to the astonishment of the beholders, made the circuit of the room, sitting on this bar above a pair of wheels in line that ought to have collapsed so soon as the momentum ceased; but, instead of falling down, Turner turned the front wheel at an angle to the other, and thus maintained at once a halt and a balance.

Mayall was fired with enthusiasm. The next day (Saturday) he was early at the Gymnasium, “intending to have a day of it,” and I think, from his account of what followed, that he did, in every sense, have such a day.

As Spencer had hurt himself by falling from the machine the night before, Mayall had it almost wholly to himself, and, after a few successful journeys round the room, determined to try his luck in the streets. Accordingly, at one o’clock in the afternoon, amid the plaudits of a hundred men of the adjacent factory, engaged in the congenial occupation of lounging against the blank walls in their dinner-hour, the velocipede was hoisted on to a cab and driven to Portland Place, where it was put on the pavement, and Mayall prepared to mount. Even nowadays the cycling novice requires plenty of room, and as Portland Place is well known to be the widest street in London, and nearly the most secluded, it seems probable that this intrepid pioneer deliberately chose it in order to have due scope for his evolutions.

It was a raw and muddy day, with a high wind. Mayall sprang on to the velocipede, but it slipped on the wet road, and he measured his length in the mud. The day-out was beginning famously.

Spencer, who had been worsted the night before, contented himself with giving Mayall a start when he made another attempt, and this time that courageous person got as far as the Marylebone Road, and across it on to the pavement of the other side, where he fell with a crash as though a barrow had been upset. But again vaulting into the saddle, he lumbered on into Regent’s Park, and so to the drinking-fountain near the Zoological Gardens, where, in attempting to turn round, he fell over again. Mounting once more, he returned. Looking round, “there was the park-keeper coming hastily towards me, making indignant signs. I passed quickly out of the Park gate into the roadway.” Thus early began the long warfare between Cycling and Authority.

Thence, sometimes falling into the road, with Spencer trotting after him, he reached the foot of Primrose Hill, and then, at Spencer’s home, staggered on to a sofa, and lay there, exhausted, soaked in rain and perspiration, and covered with mud. It had been in no sense a light matter to exercise with that ninety-three pounds’ weight of mingled timber and ironmongery.

On the Monday he trundled about, up to the “Angel,” Islington, where curious crowds assembled, asking the uses of the machine and if the falling off and grovelling in the mud was a part of the pastime. The following day, very sore, but still undaunted, he re-visited the “Angel,” went through the City, and so to Brixton and Clapham, where, at the house of a friend, he looked over maps, and first conceived the “stupendous” idea of riding to Brighton.

The following morning he endeavoured to put that plan into execution, and toiled up Brixton Hill, and so through Croydon, up the “never-ending” rise, as it seemed, of Smitham Bottom to the crest of Merstham Hill. There, tired, he half plunged into the saddle, and so thundered and clattered down hill into Merstham. At Redhill, seventeen and a half miles, utterly exhausted, he relinquished the attempt, and retired to the railway station, where he lay for some time on one of the seats until he revived. Then, to the intense admiration and amusement of the station-master and his staff, he rode about the platform, dodging the pillars, and narrowly escaping a fall on to the rails, until the London train came in.

On Wednesday, February 17th, Mayall, Rowley B. Turner, and Charles Spencer, all three on velocipedes, started from Trafalgar Square for Brighton. The party kept together until Redhill was reached, when Mayall took the lead, and eventually reached Brighton alone. The time occupied was “about” twelve hours. Being a photographer, Mayall of course caused himself to be photographed standing beside the instrument of torture on which he made that weary ride, and thus we have preserved to us the weird spectacle he presented; more like that of a Russian convict than an athletic young Englishman. A peaked cap, an attenuated frock-coat, very tight in the waist, and stiff and shiny leather leggings, completed a costume strange enough to make a modern cyclist shudder. Fearful whiskers and oily-looking long hair add to the strangeness of this historic figure.

With this exploit athletic competition began, and the long series of modern “records” on the Brighton Road were set a-going, for during the March of that year two once well-known amateur pedestrian members of the Stock Exchange, W. M. and H. J. Chinnery, walked down to Brighton in 11 hrs. 25 mins., and on April 14th C. A. Booth bettered Mayall’s adventure, riding down on a velocipede in 9 hrs. 30 mins.

Then came the Amateur Bicycle Club’s race, September 19th, 1872. By that time not only had the word “velocipede” been discarded for “bicycle,” and “treadles” become “pedals,” but the machine itself, although in general appearance very much the same, had been improved in detail. The 36-inch front wheel had been increased to 44 inches, the wooden spokes had given place to wire, and strips of rubber, nailed on, replaced the iron tyres. Probably as a result of these refinements the winner, A. Temple, reached Brighton in 5 hrs, 25 mins.