You may not like bicycles, you may not be that keen on cyclists, but the history of cycling and its impact is fascinating, and radical. In this two-part episode we talk to Les Doherty of the mighty pedal4progress about that history, more next week.

Les is a smooth talker as he's persuaded me to take part in some of the marathon pedal4progress fund raising runs, and I am most definitely not a cycling fan; find out more about their work here:

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/pedal4progress-cyclists-saddle-help-range-socialist-causes

https://pedal4progress.wordpress.com

The widening of gene pools which resulted from the growth of cycling led the biologist Steve Jones to rank the invention of the bicycle as the most important event in recent human evolution.

In 1969, geographer P.J. Perry completed a study of how the gene pool changed in rural Dorset in western England. What he found was that before 1887, 77 percent of marriages took place between people from the same parish. However, between 1907 and 1916, this had dropped to 41 percent.

At the same time, marriages among people who lived between six and 12 miles apart doubled. But, Perry pointed out that “It must equally be remembered that, as late as 1927-36, three-quarters of all working-class marriages were to a distance of less than 12 miles.”

Perry concluded that the greater genetic diversity brought about by the change in distance between marriage partners was caused by the arrival of the bicycle.

According to the BBC’s Quite Interesting “The invention of the bicycle increased the average distance between the birthplaces of spouses in England from one mile to 30 miles.”

And the impact on the spread of socialism, one of the reasons why the authorities didn't like people cycling in groups.

The first Clarion Cycling Club was founded in Birmingham in 1894. The National Clarion Cycling Club was established in 1895, and had eighty affiliated clubs by the end of that year; its object was to organise ‘Cyclists for Mutual Aid, Good Fellowship and the Propagation of the Principles of Socialism, along with the social pleasures of Cycling.’ In his history of the Clarion Cycling Club, Denis Pye comments how ‘the bicycle seemed admirably suited to the beliefs of people dedicated to the spreading of what was to them a new religion of freedom and equality’.  Pye notes how ‘in the twenty years before the First World War a Clarion cyclist, almost by definition, was someone riding a machine with saddlebag crammed or carrier piled high with copies of [The Clarion newspaper, a left wing publication], all of which would eventually be sold or given away.’ Pye notes that ‘most of the growing number of local clubs in the 1890s regularly cycled to open-air meetings and distributed masses of literature. This required courage as well as energy, for they encountered much opposition and harassment, not least from the police’.

https://clarioncc.org/about-the-national-clarion/

Have a listen, there's a lot more to it than you imagined.