'A Monstre Cycling Social' - Blackheath 1886

Continuing my research on SE London sporting history, I came across this report of  'A Monstre Cycling Social'  held at the Green Man Hotel in December 1886. The Green Man stood at the top of Blackheath Hill (left hand side if you are going up it) for three hundred years before being demolished in 1970. It played an important social and cultural role, being at various times the HQ of England's oldest golf club (Royal Blackheath) and a significant folk, jazz and R&B in the 1960s (Paul Simon and Manfred Mann among the performers).

Green Man in 1880s - image from pubmywiki

There are a few interesting points to note about this 'large attendance of cyclists and their friends'. The lists of cycling clubs represented gives an idea of the popularity of the sport in this part of London at this early point in its history. South London clubs mentioned include New Cross, Argus (who were based in Deptford), Brockley, Dulwich, Brixton Ramblers, Norwood Safety, Peckham Rovers, Pelham (Sydenham), Clapham Park, Croydon, Anerley etc. 

Present too were a few running clubs - at this period there was quite an overlap between the two. One such club was Blackheath Harriers (today Blackheath & Bromley Harriers AC), also based at the Green Man, which had moved to the area in 1878 due to urbanisation around its former Peckham home (they had previously been known as Peckham Hare and Hounds, formed in 1869). Other running clubs mentioned including South London Harriers, Brockley Harriers and Lewisham Hare and Hounds. 

As discussed in a previous post here, Catford CC itself had only been founded in April 1886, and grew out of Lewisham Hare and Hounds. The Cycling Club is still going today, and Lewisham Hare and Hounds became part of Kent Athletic Club, founded in 1898 and still running hard at Ladywell track.

Kentish Mercury - Friday 10 December 1886

 Another interesting feature of this report is that it mentions that the event included a 'Mile Open' race on a 'Home trainer' bike. I had no idea that stationary indoor bicycle trainers existed at this point, but seemingly designs based on riding on rollers or with one wheel were already being marketed. Would be interested if anybody had come across an earlier example of a competitive use of a home trainer/exercise back than this one from 1886.

The following example made by Longford Wire Iron and Steel Co of Warrington dates to 1897:

image sourced from Grace's Guide

Catford Cycling Club and its athletics origins

My running club, Kent Athletic Club, traces its origins back to an earlier club in this part of South East London - Lewisham Hare and Hounds, which merged with West Kent Harriers to form Kent AC in 1898. Lewisham Hare and Hounds also helped spawn another sporting body that exists to this day - Catford Cycling Club.

The story of this episode is told in the book 'The first 50 years of the Catford Cycling Club' by E.J. Southcott, published in 1939.

A key driver of the formation of the cycling club was Charles Percival Sisley, an 18 year old who lived with his parents in Morley Road, Lewisham. He had been been a member of a small local club, Mount Pleasant Cycling Club, based around Mount Pleasant Road in Lewisham.

His plan to create a wider Catford Cycling Club was not universally popular. The Brockley BC complained that 'there were enough clubs already in the SE of London' (there were also Lewisham and Sydenham clubs). But Sisley's plans did find support from 'an athletic club called the Lewisham Hare and Hounds' which 'was also considering the formation of a cycling club'. The club's secretary Ernest G. Brabrook talked to Sisley and the outcome was the inaugural meeting of the cycling club at the Hither Green Hall - HQ of Lewisham Hare and Hounds - on 12 April 1886.

In the Chair was the Reverend W. Hook Longsdon, a keen cyclist, goalkeeper for Colfe’s Grammar School's football team and later curate at St. Mary’s Lewisham.  The meeting agreed a set of rules and that 'All Club runs shall start from the Black Horse, Catford'. The club's first inter-club race in June 1887 was with St Peters Bicycle Club and headed to the ''Salt Box' at Cudham, a popular resort for cyclists for many a year'.

Geraldine Biddle-Perry has explored the history of CCC  further in an excellent article in The London Journal,  Fashioning Suburban Aspiration:Awheel with the Catford Cycling Club,1886–1900 (Vol. 39 No. 3, November, 2014, 187–204).

The author has made good use of material held in Lewisham archives to analyse the membership of the cycling club: 'Using Cross-referencing CCC membership lists between 1886 and 1900 with 1891 Census data reveal a social constituency drawn from a cross-section of middle- and lower-middle-class British suburban society at the turn of the twentieth century. Members were predominantly unmarried young men in their late teens and twenties living with their parents (or boarding) in larger villas and neat terraced houses, sometimes in the same roads in Lewisham, or in neighbouring South London boroughs. Most members were employed as mercantile, commercial and stockbrokers’ clerks, but there are also draughtsmen, commercial artists, travellers and agents, managers, journalists and engineers'. I would imagine that the associated athletic club had a similar membership.

While membership was not explicitly socially exclusive, there were financial barriers to joining it, including the cost of the club's uniform 'consisting of a grey check tunic and breeches in a cloth... this could be made by Messrs Clare & Son, of French Street London, priced at 42/- with an extra 2/- for the addition of a fleece lining.The suit would be worn with black stockings and a black cricket cap adorned with the Club badge (a wheel with the word ‘Catford’ inscribed across it)'.

CCC was ambitious to be much more than just a local club and to make its wider mark in the world of cycling: 'in its first season Catford held the first ‘open’ public road race—over 25 miles on a circuitous route (kept secret until the start of the event) around the adjacent Kentish countryside—a practice the National Cyclist Union described as ‘illegal, illegal as prize-fighting, cocking or any other tabooed sport’'. While the cycling world, like the Athletics world, agonised about the vagaries of amateurism, CCC members made  their living from the sport in various ways. Club founder Sisley became editor of the popular  magazine 'Cycling', while another member, 'T.C. Pullinger started a small manufacturing workshop in New Cross producing his own version of the new safety bicycle, ‘The Parade’. Other members belonging to the Argus Bicycle Club in neighbouring Brockley included a cycle salesman for Stanley bicycles, a self-employed cycle manufacturer producing their own machine ‘The Austen’, a cycle engineer and repairer, as well as a tailor and outfitter selling ‘Cycling, Cricketing and Tennis Suits made to order’. 

 A race at Catford in the 1890s

In 1894/95, the club - nicknamed the Kittens- was involved in the development of the first cycling track with banking in England. The Catford stadium also hosted athletics events before it was sold off to property developers in 1900 (see details at Running Past)

CCC is still going strong today, though focusing on the Bromley and Sevenoaks area rather than its former Lewisham heartland.

[post updated April 2018 with details from '50 years of the Catford Cycling Club']

Running in The Railway Children

The Railway Children - both  Edith Nesbit's 1906 novel  and the 1970 film adaption of it - feature a paperchase/hare and hounds race in the north of England. As mentioned here before such races, where a 'hare' runs ahead scattering a trail of paper and is chased by the 'hounds', were important in the early history of organised cross country running in the 19th century - hence many clubs retaining the name 'harriers' to this day.

In the story, the hare leads the hounds down a railway tunnel where one of them trips and is injured, narrowly escaping being hit by a train. But it all end's well, as the children look after him and in return the boy's grandfather helps secure the release of their father from prison. 

 '"Let me pass, please." It was the hare—a big-boned, loose-limbed boy, with dark hair lying flat on a very damp forehead. The bag of torn paper under his arm was fastened across one shoulder by a strap. The children stood back. The hare ran along the line, and the workmen leaned on their picks to watch him. He ran on steadily and disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel...

And now, following the track of the hare by the little white blots of scattered paper, came the hounds. There were thirty of them, and they all came down the steep, ladder-like steps by ones and twos and threes and sixes and sevens. Bobbie and Phyllis and Peter counted them as they passed. The foremost ones hesitated a moment at the foot of the ladder, then their eyes caught the gleam of scattered whiteness along the line and they turned towards the tunnel, and, by ones and twos and threes and sixes and sevens, disappeared in the dark mouth of it. The last one, in a red jersey, seemed to be extinguished by the darkness like a candle that is blown out' (E.Nesbit, The Railway Children - full text here).

The author (and socialist) E.Nesbit lived in various places in South East London from the 1870s until the First World War including Blackheath, Lewisham (Elswick Road), Lee, and Well Hall in Eltham. I wonder whether she ever saw Lewisham Hare and Hounds in action, the predecessors of today's Kent Athletic Club? They were formed in 1888 and certainly ran paperchases in the period when Nesbit was living in the area.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Morrissey - List of the Lost

Burns Night Running Thoughts

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

Herbert Cowper Scard (1865-1931): Lewisham and Blackheath Cross Country Champion

Today sees the final races of the 2014-15 Surrey Cross Country League, sore foot permitting I hope to run at Richmond Park in a Kent A.C. vest later. So as part of my continuing research into the history of running in my part of South London, I thought I would write about a previous cross country champion and founder of my club - Herbert Cowper Scard. An obituary notice from 1931 sets the scene:

'Sportsman Solicitor: Death of Former Athletic Champion

Mr Herbert Cowper Scard, a solicitor who had practiced at Greenwich and Woolwich police courts for many years, died at the age of 65. In the late eighties and nineties Mr Scard was regarded as one of the finest cross-country runners of his day. He was champion of the Lewisham Hare and Hounds in 1888-89-90-92-95, and 96, and also held the Order of Merit of the Blackheath Harriers as their champion in 1889, and possessed scores of other trophies. Mr Scard was also associated with the Kent Athletic Club' (Straits Times, Singapore, 29 May 1931)

According to geni.com, Scard was born on July 8 1865 in Enfield and died April 9 1931 at 23 Blackheath Road, Greenwich.

Scard seems to have started out running for Blackheath Harriers. In 1888, he 'ran grandly and did the fastest time' in the club's Four and Three-Quarter Miles Members' Race at Blackheath (Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, 18 November 1888), and he ran for the club in the National Cross Country Championship at Kempton Park Racecourse in 1889 (Manchester Courier, 4 March 1889).  Between 1888 and 1892 he won the Blackheath Harriers Cross-Country Challenge Cup four times.

In 1892, 'A Members' Two Mile Handicap produced a splendid struggle between two men, H C Scard 50 yds start, beating F Stephens 230 yds, by half a yard in 9 min 53 1/5 sec' at Blackheath Harriers' annual athletic meeting. This took place at Catford Bridge with 'a large and fashionable attendance' (York Herald, 18 July 1892). The following year he is reported to have run for Blackheath Harriers in the One Mile handicap in the the Spartan Harriers athletics and cycling meeting at Invicta Athletic grounds, Plumstead: 

Scard also seems to have run with Lewisham Hare and Hounds from its foundation, judging by the obituary reference to him being their champion in 1888, the year the club was founded. In 1895 he came joint first in a Lewisham Hare and Hounds 'paper-chase over eight miles of stiff country' with 30 other runners: 

See also mention of London races organised by Southwark Harriers (at Wimbledon), Allenbury's A.C. (at Lower Clapton), Polytechnic Harriers (at Pinner), Earlsfield Harriers, Columbia Harriers (at Walthamstow) and Herne Hill Harriers (at Streatham).

I have come across reports of Scard winning the One Mile Handicap at Colfe's Grammar School Sports in Catford (Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, 19 April 1896), and the same distance race at Stamford Bridge at a London Athletic Club event (London Daily News, 13 April 1896). Shortly after, in another London Athletic Club Spring Meeting at Stamford Bridge, he came second in the 1.5 Miles handicap. He was listed as running for 'Lewisham H.H', showing that the latter was not just a cross country club but was now taking part in track athletics events (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 18 May 1896). In 1897, he ran in the first Inter-County Cross Country race at Wembley Park: 

Scard was also for a time Vice-Captain of the Goldsmiths Institute Athletic Club. He is listed as such as in 'A Handbook to the Goldsmiths Company's Technical and Recreative Institute 1896-87',  with the team Captain being Alec Nelson - later a notable athletics coach as discussed here previously.

In 1898, Scard won the Lewisham Hare and Hounds Four and a Quarter Miles handicap at Ladywell, followed by W.W.Lamb and H. Larkins (Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, 27 February 1898). Later that same year, Lewisham Hare and Hounds merged with West Kent Harriers to form Kent Athletic Club, which remains based in the Lewisham area at Ladywell track to this day. Scard must have been actively involved in the merger, as according to club historian Len Reilly, he was Kent A.C.'s first treasurer. 

In 1900, Scard ran for Kent A.C. in the Printing and Allied Trade Sports meeting 'held at Herne Hill grounds in the presence of about 3,000 spectators'.This was at what is now known as the Herne Hill Velodrome - as was often in the case at that period, cycling and running races were held as part of the same event. Scard came 2nd in the One Mile Handicap behind A.H. Lye (Herne Hill Harriers) and ahead of Kent A.C.'s A.E. Godsall:

Scard continued to be involved in the club after he had passed his peak as a runner. A 1908 notice for Kent Athletic Club advises that:

'The next evening meeting will be held at the Ladywell recreation grounds on Tuesday next, 26th inst., commencing 7.30 p m. The following events are down for decision - 109-yards and 1 mile handicaps and entries with fees, close on Saturday next... Members may train any evening at above grounds... and intending members may obtain full particulars from Mr. H. C. Scard, 30, Blackheath road, and Mr. A.J. Jennings, 19, Blythe vale, Catford who attend at Ladywell on Tuesday and Thursday evenings' (Kentish Mail Greenwich And Deptford Observer, 22 May 1908).

Over a hundred years later, Kent A.C. are still to be found at Ladywell on Tuesday nights, and not doing too badly in cross country either.

[updated 19 June 2015, with information about Goldsmiths link]