»Strange vehicles were not always a roaring success Nostalgia
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APOLOGIES for the poor quality of the photo you see here in which a woman in long dress and a chap in heavy tweeds appear sitting uncomfortably fore and aft on a strange three wheeled cycle.
Although the picture isn’t good (it dates from about 1880), the story it has to tell is.
The young woman was Louise Hawkins, who lived with her family in a house called Lower Moorcroft in Minsterworth.
When her brother developed TB the family sought medical help and it arrived in the shape of a young Arthur Conan Doyle. That’s him perched behind Louise on the weird cycle.
Unfortunately, Louise’s brother died of the disease, but she and Arthur, whose first Sherlock Holmes novel “A Study In Scarlet” was published in 1897, fell in love and married.
A happy ending you might be thinking, but alas no. Louise died of TB in 1906.
The cycle on which Mr & Mrs Conan Doyle were pictured was of a type that didn’t catch on and you only need a look to see why.
Another venture that didn’t catch on can be glimpsed here in the picture showing a pair of rickshaws in Montpellier, Cheltenham in 1910, which appears in Sue Rowbotham and Jill Waller’s book “Cheltenham, A History” published by Phillimore in 2004.
Sitting in the rickshaws are Mr & Mrs Alexander Clifton who introduced the novel form of getting from A to B.
Their idea, you’d think, was a good one. Plenty of ex-colonials who retired to the town after serving in far flung parts of the empire would surely have enjoyed the nostalgic experience of being pulled around the town, especially by sturdy young moustached chaps in safari suits and bush hats.
But not a bit of it. The business soon folded and rickshaws disappeared from Cheltenham’s streets. Not forever though.
During Gold Cup week in 2003 Ladbrokes ran a rickshaw service from Lansdown station to Prestbury Park.
Much more successful than the Cliftons’ rickshaws were Bath chairs. At least that’s what the baby buggy for grown ups-like conveyances were called everywhere else in the country.
In Cheltenham they were called wheelchairs, because to mention the name of its great spa rival was out of the question.
The main rank for wheelchairs was in the Promenade alongside Neptune’s fountain. There the old, infirm, or just plain lazy could hire a chair for a few pence and be pulled round the town by a gent in bowler hat, frock coat and shiny shoes.
One of the last working wheelchairmen was Alfred Coveney, pictured here, who was still pulling in the 1920s.
Surely taking the biscuit for odd conveyances is the one wheeled carette you see pictured here, which was built by the Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Company for the Crown Agent for the Colonies.
In far flung parts of the red painted globe representatives of the British Empire tootled about in these unstable contraptions attending to bureaucratic matters and presumably struggling hard not to fall out.
The Gloucester company was also briefed to build a gantry car for a railway that ran in the sea off the coast of
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Brighton. (Yes, really.) This striking contraption stood on 23 feet tall stilts. Called Pioneer, though nicknamed Daddy Long Legs, the car was powered by overhead electric cables and had an elliptical deck 45ft long by 22ft wide on which stood an enclosed compartment.
There was much debate about whether the vehicle should officially be designated a railway carriage, or a sea going vessel.
In the end the latter definition was applied, which meant that as well as having a train driver at the controls, Pioneer by law could not leave the station without a qualified sea captain on board as well.
It also had to be fitted with a lifeboat and lifebelts.
We perhaps think that electric vehicles are something new. But in fact they’ve been around since Victorian times. In September 1957 an exhibition of electric cars was staged in Cheltenham.
To drum up publicity for the event, the racing driver Ivor Bueb, who lived locally, drove the town’s Mayor Charles Irving to the show in a veteran electric car. In the Echo picture you see here Mr Bueb appears to be rowing the vehicle, but in fact he is steering it with a tiller.
Yet another idea that didn’t take off as intended was the Flying Flea. In the 1930s Gloucester’s leading department store, the Bon Marche, sold these miniscule aircraft in kit form. You could simply walk into the store, leave with an aeroplane, take off and kill yourself.
Which is what happened to quite a number of would-be, do-it-yourself aviators.
The tiny planes were designed by a Frenchman. They were cheap, easy to build and as you didn’t need a pilot’s licence people with no previous experience of flying beavered away with screwdriver and spanners then promptly took to the skies.
Unfortunately the Flying Flea had a drawback. Once in a dive it kept diving. Pulling back the joystick made no difference, as a number of amateur airmen found to their fatal cost.