How Britain Worked Page 7

  Mass manufacture drove down the price of bicycles and they became transport for the common man, and woman. The Victorians were very wary about women taking up cycling as they thought it was bad for a young lady’s health, morals and reputation. Cycling entailed wearing shorter skirts that might expose a stockinged ankle or calf. It was deemed improper for a young lady to wear a knee-length dress and bloomers, baggy trousers fastened tight around the ankle. Indeed, anything a woman might wear that was suitable for cycling was, in the eyes of many, liable to invite the unwelcome advances of the wrong kind of man. What would they think of Lycra cycling shorts?

  It was even believed that cycling would be unhealthy for women in that it would damage their reproductive systems and that the leather saddles might even encourage ladies to indulge in the habit of masturbation. I know a lot of girls who go cycling, and I find it pretty hard to believe that that is the sport’s major attraction for them ... As it turned out, cycling’s detractors played right into the hands of those who were increasingly demanding reforms to give women the same standing in society as men. Girls went cycling and that, of course, simply encouraged more boys to do likewise.

  All of this turned cycle manufacture into one of the boom industries of the late nineteenth century. There were only 100,000 cycles on the roads in Britain in 1881 but within ten years there were 248 cycle manufacturers in Coventry employing almost 40,000 workers, and by 1906 these Coventry firms were turning out more than 300,000 machines every year. The cycle industry also expanded into car manufacturing, the industry that changed the world forever: John Starley’s Rover Safety Bicycle spawned the Rover Company, which started producing motorcycles in 1902 and cars from 1904. The name lives on in today’s Land Rover and Range Rover marques. The same is true of Triumph, which started life as the Triumph Cycle Company and also went on to produce motorcycles and cars.

  The bicycle business was, therefore, very much an integral part of the Industrial Revolution. It remains a major industry worldwide with around a hundred million new bikes produced every year and a billion bikes in existence. Mave and I were about to make that a billion and one!

  TROUBLE AT MILL

  Back at Gayle Mill there were still a few jobs that we could get on with while we waited for the new turbine parts to arrive. Tony was on hand to explain a bit more about the mill and where the power comes from. They don’t simply syphon off water from Gayle Beck to run the turbine. There is a whole system in place that would have worked pretty much the same way when the old water wheel was running – pretty much the same way for every water-powered mill, in fact. In order to make sure that they had enough water to turn the mill wheel, even when the weather was dry and the river was low, they created an artificial pond way upstream from the mill. The pond was topped up when there was plenty of water in the river and tapped whenever they needed more water down at the mill.

  Immediately above the mill is a man-made waterway, a kind of aqueduct that is often called a ‘race’ but known as a ‘leet’ at Gayle Mill. The leet takes water from the river to a header tank at the mill, which in turn delivers a regular supply of water to the turbine. They can’t have sticks and leaves or any other debris from the river going through the turbine, and there are metal grates that filter out such debris. These need to be cleaned, otherwise they restrict the flow of water to the header tank, and I helped out by raking muck off one of the grates. At one time the leet had a slight uphill section near the final grate; a drain hole at the bottom of the uphill section could be opened to let the water in the leet drain away, taking the accumulated debris with it. That was the Victorian solution to the problem but a later refurbishment of the leet managed to do away with it. Now it is a regular job for someone when the turbine is running.

  There are always plenty of chores to do at a place like Gayle Mill and I don’t mind mucking in, especially when I’m also being given the chance to learn completely new skills. One of those was making wheels.

  WHEELS OF FORTUNE

  I needed two wheels for my MacMillan and they had to be made of wood. There are very few craftsmen in Britain today who can create a wooden wheel from scratch and I was lucky enough to be shown the ropes by Greg, who looks after the wheels and the carriages that are used by the Queen. His family have been working as wheelwrights and coachbuilders for centuries – Greg’s been doing it for twenty years and no one knows more about wooden wheels than he does.

  The process starts with the hub, which is made from a piece of seasoned elm. Elm tends not to tear or split as it grows, so you can be sure of a perfectly solid block of wood. That block is turned on a lathe to make it into a solid cylinder: the positions for the spokes are then carefully measured and marked up, and the spoke holes drilled out. These spokes are hand carved from square wooden rods of seasoned ash, and are planed one stroke at a time to give them exactly the right shape. This isn’t a measuring process – it’s one of the things that Greg said was right if it looked right. It’s one of the elements of making a wooden wheel that is about judgement, feel and shape. That’s what made me realise that this isn’t so much a disappearing trade as a dying art. I did my best, and sat at the workbench for ages planing a little here and a little there. I know I got it right in the end – Greg wouldn’t have been slow in telling me if I hadn’t!

  The holes in the hub (the hub mortices) are drilled at just the right angle so that the spokes can be hammered in to create the right pattern; pointing outwards left and right to distribute the weight that the wheel has to take evenly around the rim. The spokes have to be hammered in tight, but not so tight as to split the hub, at which point you’re just about ready for the rim sections. There are usually half as many rim sections as there are spokes, with each section fitting on to two spokes. The rim pieces are carved and shaped based on a number of different templates that the wheelwright will have and butted roughly against each other. I was a little concerned by the number of little gaps – this wasn’t what I was used to seeing when Mave turns out a piece of joinery – but Greg assured me that all was well.

  We then used a measuring wheel – the kind of thing that you see people rolling along the ground to work out distance – in order to measure the outside of the wheel for the tyre. This was a metal tyre, made from a strip of mild steel. We bent the steel on a forming roller, then used a wheel to measure the inside of the tyre. It had to be a little smaller than the wheel, small enough that when it was fitted it would squeeze shut any gaps where the rim sections butted up against each other.

  I welded it. I’m a dab hand at simple welding, so I was fairly confident about that part of the operation. When we offered it up to the wheel I couldn’t believe that it would ever fit around the rim. It looked way too small but the idea was that we would now heat up the tyre in a bonfire so that it expanded. We’d then put it around the wheel where it would cool and contract to give a really tight fit, and squeeze shut those gaps.

  The tyre needed just five minutes in the flames. We didn’t want it so hot that it would buckle when we tried to pick it up and we certainly didn’t want it to set our carefully crafted wheel alight! It had to be hot enough to scorch a piece of wood laid against it when it was sitting on the bonfire. When we took the tyre off the fire, we had to work quickly to make sure that it didn’t cool prematurely. It was levered and hammered down onto the rim. A ladle or two of water cooled it off completely and forty-odd joints were squeezed into place, creaking and squeaking – ‘talking’ to us as it all fitted tightly together. Greg tested it with a few taps of a hammer and you could hear that it was tight as a drum.

  That was a real creative experience, making something that is practical and quite beautiful out of a few simple pieces of wood. It’s an impressive skill. Not so long ago you would go into town and have a wheelwright to look at your carriage, a blacksmith to shoe your horse and a pub down the road to take care of your driver. If your carriage wheel broke while you were out on the road, a wheelwright would come out from the nearest village w
ith his tools and fix it for you. There were wheelwrights – the surname Wainwright means the same thing, ‘wheel worker’ – all over the country. Today there are probably fewer than fifty left.

  SADDLE UP!

  The other thing that I was going to need for my MacMillan was a good leather saddle. I had a look at how leather is made, starting with a piece of cowhide, and it was a thoroughly unpleasant business. The cowhide itself stank to high heaven, but there was worse to come.

  The place where they used to produce leather, the tannery, was generally a building on the outskirts of town, and preferably downwind. Almost everything about the process creates the most disgusting stench. The tanners would soak the skins in water to clean them and scrape off any decaying flesh or fat with blunt knives. The skins were then soaked in urine or allowed to putrify for a few months to loosen any hair fibres, which were also then scraped off with knives. The skin then had to be pounded with dung or soaked in a solution of animal brains. This was done to alter the chemical make-up of the cowhide, in order to help preserve it and to keep it supple. The favourite dung they used was from dogs. If you spotted someone walking the street carrying a basket and wearing one glove, you didn’t need too many guesses to work out what he was up to. These were pure gatherers. Apparently the white dog poo was the most valuable!

  Naturally, the TV people wanted me to have a go at curing the hide. Maybe they expected me to get carried away with the work, start rabbiting on and come out with something like ‘By heck, much more of this and I’ll have shit on me muscles.’ I didn’t give them the satisfaction, but I did suddenly appreciate why tanners tended to get married to other tanners.

  Nowadays, we’re all quite conscientious about picking up after our dogs so, thankfully, they couldn’t send me out scouring the streets for the required tanning ingredient. They got buckets of the stuff from a nearby dog kennel instead. Unlike the Victorian tanners, the people at the kennels were glad to see the back of it.

  The skins had to be soaked in a solution of dog poo and water, and kneaded constantly for up to two hours. I gave it a go using a tin bath. I had on heavy-duty rubber gloves – the kind you would use for handling hazardous chemicals – but the Victorian tanners wouldn’t have had such a luxury. Any kind of cloth gloves, of course, would have been ruined and soaked through within seconds, so they just used their bare hands. In fact, they would even mash it up with their bare feet! It was a mucky job all right.

  The tanning process actually takes months and as we didn’t have that much time, thankfully, we were able to dispose of our tin bath concoction (properly – as hazardous waste) and head for the factory in sweet-smelling Birmingham, to see how the finest leather bicycle saddles are made.

  Brooks of Birmingham have been making bicycle saddles since 1882. The firm was started by John Boultbee Brooks, who travelled to Birmingham from his home in Leicester with just £20 to his name, determined to earn his fortune. He started a business making horse harnesses and other leather goods when, in 1878, he was on his way to work one day when his horse dropped dead. They had me riding a horse to introduce this piece for the TV show. I’m much more used to riding something with two wheels than four legs but the horse was a lovely girl and she put up with me nattering away to the camera as we went down the street. Fortunately for all concerned, she remained very much alive all the way to the Brooks factory. The death of Mr Brooks’ horse, you see, prompted him to borrow a bicycle from a friend in order to get to work. He found the saddle so uncomfortable that he decided to design his own, and the Brooks saddle was born.

  The saddle we decided to make was one of the company’s original designs, the Brooks Flyer Special. When I first saw it, it just looked like a bit of plastic with a few rivets in it, but this wasn’t plastic, it was leather. It takes a whole day to make a Flyer Special. Brooks make 1,000 a day but they use Henry Ford-type production line processes, with each worker concentrating on doing one or two short jobs before passing the component on.

  The first stage of the process is to form the metal frame of the saddle. You don’t see much of this once the leather seat is in place, but the flexibility of the frame is what makes the saddle’s ‘suspension’ work. Two springs, a right – and a left – turning one, are then twisted from a straight metal rod in a machine that heats the rod, twists it, cools it with water and pops it out as a fully formed spring.

  That part was fun to watch but next I had to meet Lucas the leather expert. I was relieved to find that he didn’t smell at all bad! Lucas showed me how the basic saddle pattern is pressed out of a thick leather sheet. The flat sheet is then squeezed and compressed between two saddle-shaped moulds. The machines that they were using in the factory were from the 1950s, doing the same sort of job the same sort of way that it has been done since the first saddles were made, so I didn’t feel like we were cheating too much by not doing it exactly as they did in the 1880s. The Flyer Special hasn’t really changed, hasn’t really evolved at all. Then again, it doesn’t really need changing – if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.

  I trimmed off the excess leather around the mould with a very sharp knife and was then able to buff up the edges and make my saddle look the business. I admit I took a bit longer than the ladies who normally do this job and yes, I did hold up the assembly line, but they were very patient with me. They knew that I wanted to do a proper job and produce a saddle that was worthy of wearing that famous Brooks’ stamp!

  Eric was the man who oversaw the final assembly process – the last of around a dozen different jobs that were going on all over the factory – and he looked a bit nervous as I hammered in the copper rivets that fastened the saddle to the frame. It can’t be easy for someone who takes pride in their work watching someone who looks like he could make a complete hash of it at any moment. He was as relieved as me when I finished the riveting, bolted the springs in place and produced a finished item that looked just the job. With a bit of suspension in the seat, my backside certainly thanked me when we finally got round to taking my MacMillan for a spin.

  GET ON YOUR BIKE AND RIDE...

  Before then, of course, we were back to Gayle Mill to put the turbine back together and fire up the tools to fashion the wooden parts of my new bike. There was a bit of metalwork involved as well but it didn’t take too long to pull it all together once we got down to it. There was nothing else as complicated as those marvellous wheels that I’d made with Greg.

  When I finally got to ride the bike, it went really well – a good deal more comfortable with the Brooks Flyer Special saddle than the MacMillan at Drumlanrig Castle. Even so, pedalling my MacMillan was a completely different experience from pedalling my Orange mountain bike racer. They are both state of the art for their time: it’s just their times came at different ends of the factory phenomenon that completely changed the face of Britain.

  Most of us, then, don’t have much of a clue about different kinds of rope and, unless you paid attention when you were at Cubs or Brownies, you probably aren’t too good at tying proper knots either. All things considered, you might not think that you know anything about rope, but we still refer to it more often than we might think.

  ‘A load of old rope’ is a common phrase for something that is pretty useless or a bit dubious. The phrase stems from the fact that old rope is not as strong as new rope. It will not take the same sort of strain, or load, before it breaks. We’ve all heard someone say, ‘he’s a bit of a loose cannon’ (I’ve heard it said about me more than once!) and a loose cannon aboard ship was one that had broken free of its restraining ropes. A three-ton loose cannon rolling around on deck could cause all sorts of trouble. You wouldn’t want one of those trundling over your toes! We often say that someone in a new job is still ‘learning the ropes’, which comes from the way that sailors had to learn the specific use for every rope on a sailing ship. If you say that you are ‘at a loose end’, meaning that you don’t have anything to do, you’re describing yourself as a piece of rope. A ‘loose end’
on a sailing ship was an unattached rope that either wasn’t doing its job, or had no job to do. You might have used the expressions ‘tying the knot’, ‘getting hitched’ or ‘getting spliced’ (again something that I’ve heard a few times recently), meaning ‘getting married’. Hitching and splicing are ways of joining two ropes together to make one.

  And if you’ve ever ‘let the cat out of the bag’, meaning that you’ve blurted out a secret that means trouble for someone else, then you’ve used yet another ropey nautical term. The ‘cat’ in the phrase is the ‘cat o’ nine tails’ whip that was used to punish sailors. It was kept in a bag and when it was taken out, it meant someone was in for a flogging. Why ‘cat o’ nine tails’? Because it was made from thick rope that had been unravelled at one end.

  The thick rope consisted of three thinner ropes wound together, and the three thinner ropes were each made of three strands. When they were unravelled, the ‘cat’ had nine tails. Knots were tied in the tails that would cut into the flesh of a sailor’s back when he was being flogged.

  Even if we don’t realise it, then, we all have a connection with the ropes that were used for centuries aboard sailing ships. Ropes are still used aboard ships today, of course, the most obvious use being for mooring, but back in the nineteenth century a big, three-masted Royal Navy ship-of-the-line like HMS Victory needed more than just a mooring rope. The Victory needed around thirty-one miles of rope – twenty-six miles of that rope in the rigging. So where better to go to find out about rope than the birthplace of this famous boat – Chatham Dockyard?