Canadian Club
Montreal Bicycle Club
Montreal is one of Canada’s best cities to cycle in. It hosts the second of the Worldtour’s Laurentian Classics, the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal, in midSeptember. Mount Royal was also the setting of the 1976 Summer Olympic Games road race, as well as the 1974 road world championships. It’s that history that the Montreal Bicycle Club (mbc) taps into, except the organization goes back even further to the 1800s. Like Vancouver’s Gastown Cycling resurrecting a club originally formed in the late 19th century, Montreal Bicycle Club was re-founded in 2017 from an organization first established in 1878 that disappeared around the start of the First World War.
The club’s rebirth came about when Malcolm Mcrae, a member of the advocacy group Association of Pedestrians and Cyclists of Westmount, helped to make a photo display of 19th-century and modern cyclists for 2016’s Park(ing) Day, which encourages people to travel around Montreal without private automobiles. As Mcrae dug into the Notman Photographic Archives for his display, he became intrigued by photos of the Montreal Bicycle Club and established a website to display and keep track of them. Digging deeper, he found the club’s minute books online and decided to revive the club. “Former members kept extensive records of the rides, rules, uniforms and club business, and I try to follow that model,” Mcrae says.
The club boasts 60 members, and any five to six will take part in the twice-a-week rides, called Fixtures. “Although the original mbc raced,” Mcrae says, “the
modern club is more into urban riding or intercity touring.”
It’s these longer rides that are the annual highlights for club members. Mcrae cites some of the club’s most memorable tours as five- to 10-day rides along bike paths, such as the Pittsburgh to Washington ride or various sections of the Route Verte in Quebec.
Mcrae maintains an attractive website that has one foot in the past and another in the present. There are links to the Canadian Resource Knowledge Network’s digitized collection of the Montreal Bicycle Club minutes from 1878 to 1902, when the bicycle was changing from the giant-frontwheel penny farthing to the “safety bicycle” that became the standard machine. Reams of pages written in elegant cursive outline club business, such as the adoption of the group’s uniform: “Dark Blue Knicker-bocker suit with ‘Fore & After’ cap of same color. The letters M.B.C. to be Embroidered in White Silk on the front of the cap.”
Not only committed to bicycle advocacy, the club also acts as an educator, holding various historical or environmentally themed rides around the Montreal area in addition to a number of talks on different cycling subjects.
Visiting the City of Saints and looking for a ride? Mccrae is proud of the city’s extensive system of bike paths. He recommends exploring the area north of Mount Royal, known as the Plateau, or making a loop formed by the Lachine Canal path and the shoreline beside the Lachine Rapids, starting and ending in Old Montreal. “For longer rides originating in Montreal, I suggest looking at the Route Verte maps by Vélo Québec to plan out a multi-day trip,” he says.