Cycling magazines, 1949–54

Just in are four copies of Cycling, from 1949 to 1954, and The Bicycle, two copies both from 1949. All are from the time when Britain was emerging from post-war austerity, and indeed, the magazines allude to just that.

We’ll come to that in a minute. Meanwhile, I’m told Cycling magazine is, and I’ll happily believe this, the oldest cycling magazine of them all. It was started in 1891 by Temple Press as a weekly, and is still published in paper form now. The other magazine, The Bicycle, was also a weekly and by our calculation started about 1935, but probably didn’t survive the 1950s. Our two copies are from 1949 when it is visibly a thinner alternative to Cycling. Both sold for 4d.

The full-colour ads include one for the Phillips Jaguar cycle, and several for BSA, one for their new Golden Wings cycle, and a duo-tone ad for the ‘New Look’ BSAs. Miller featured their dynamo lighting sets (‘the “Magic Eye” of cycling’!). I was surprised to see the ad for Bailey’s pumps, in brass, aluminium and ‘celluloid’. But this was a time of exciting new materials, and another fashionable one was glassfibre: in 1954, a Hercules bike made out of glassfibre was exhibited as the ‘Cycle of the future’, apparently lighter than aluminium and stronger than steel. Didn’t catch on as a material for frame building..!

I mentioned austerity. The editorial in Cycling for 20 October 1949 reminds us sharply of the conditions under which publishers (and, of course, everyone else) then operated. ‘We are not a little proud of our two-colour features’, it said, meaning the inserted middle pages. ‘We have not since the war been able to use the kind of paper and printing processes that permitted this luxury in the feature pages. But the “warmth” of the treatment afforded by the second printing has been worth waiting for’. And these slow improvements over time can be seen, as, by the 1954 copy, colour and duotone are more abundant.

Just idling through the editorial for Cycling, I see that cyclists had something of an image problem with motorists. ‘Are cyclists putting on a good show?’, Cycling asked, but they didn’t just mean whether cyclists followed traffic regulations or not. In fact, Cycling even fretted over cyclists’ conduct in youth hostels. ‘Because it happens to be raining, and after dark, is no excuse for taking a muddy wheel into a dormitory to mend a puncture and then using a blanket as a wiper’, Cycling decided. Cyclists do that? Perish the thought!