I have boasted before of my hometown’s importance to the history of bicycle manufacturing in Britain. Wolverhampton, already a metalworking centre (my paternal great-grandfather was a locksmith), was poised to profit from the Golden Age of Cycling.
The city became the third largest source of bicycles in the UK. By 1900 the industry employed 3,000 workers and, through the boom years, was home to more than 200 manufacturers.
One of the most successful companies was launched by Daniel Rudge (1840–1880), landlord of the Tiger Inn on Church Street.
In 1869, the year he won the first cycle race to be held at Molineux—a track later to be eclipsed as the home of the Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club—Rudge joined with entrepreneurs Walter Phillips and George Price to produce a velocipede designed by Phillips.
The first penny farthings took shape in a shed attached to Rudge’s pub. This arrangement, which presumably allowed for a quick pint between shifts, eventually gave way to a proper workshop on Bishop Street, employing 100.
The restless racer, inspired by the need for speed, set out to improve on the designs of the day. In 1870 he began selling his racing machines, heralded as the best of their kind.
In 1878, the same year he was awarded a gold medal at the London Cycle Show, Rudge took out British Patent No 526 for a revolutionary invention: the adjustable ball bearing hub.
Around this time Rudge visited the famous French racer Charles Terront, sojourning in London. Terront was so taken with Rudge’s innovations that he bought one of the inventor’s racing bikes on the spot.
As described on the randonneuring homepage, in 1891 Terront rolled into the annals of cycling by taking first place in the inaugural 1,200 km Paris-Brest-Paris race, now held every four years as the most prestigious of all bicycle randonnées.
With Terront’s endorsement, Bicyclette Rudge found a huge market in France. Rudge himself was one of the first Brits to compete in the French racing scene.
Following Rudge’s untimely death from cancer at 39, the company he built went through several incarnations, in factories around the West Midlands.
The first sale, to George Woodcock of Coventry, included a pension for Rudge’s widow, Mary. A subsequent merger with The Tangent & Coventry Tricycle Company formed D. Rudge & Co., which emerged in 1894 as Rudge Whitworth Cycles.
In 1895, a 29 lb Rudge (Whitworth) No. 3 Road Racer could be had for £17.
The marque was later bought by Raleigh and, like my Sun racer, was retired in due course from their product line.
The fascinating film below, produced in 1945 by Signet Pictures Corporation Ltd., now housed in the British Council Film Collection, shows the manufacture of Rudge Bicycles, from design, through fabrication, to the showroom floor, in the huge Nottingham Raleigh factory.
The scenes of roads dominated by cyclists recall the days of my youth in England, lucky as I was to catch the sunset of an era when the bicycle underpinned the economy, and brought “relaxation, health and happiness” to the people of the “Black Country.”
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