Dressed For A Spin

Press, Volume C, Issue 29500, 29 April 1961, Page 3

Dressed For A Spin

(A Fourth Leader In “The Times”] An eminent reviewer recently noted with surprise and incredulity that in some of the entries in "Who’s Who 1961” "motoring" is still claimed as a "recreation." It is a reasonable assumption that, thanks to traffic jams, roundabouts, and those dear little black boxes on wheels that creep along the middle of narrow country lanes at 22 m.p.h., there is no longer any element of pleasure in getting into a car and going for a drive. But it might plausibly be argued that the essential romance went out of motoring long before the arrival of these inconveniences—«n fact when motorists abandoned the practice of putting on special clothes for the enterprise. Dressing up plays an important part in all recreational activities—what would cricket be without white flannels, fly fishing without fly-decked tweed hats, and golf without nailed shoes?

Motoring without hairy greatcoats, goggles, and long dust-proof veils fitted with talc windows has become a mere part of the ordinary day’s round; just as riding must have seemed a com-mon-place chore—hunting was different, people dressed up for that—for the breeched or tight-trousered Victorian land owner who used a horse as walking stick to get him round his property. A pre-sent-day young lady, struggling into her jodhpurs, has a very different view-point. Bicycling is another case in point. George Gissing was taught to ride a bicycle by H. G. Wells in 1898. He did not prove an apt pupil—“far too nervous and excitable” was Wells’s verdict: but Gissing himself, in a correspondence with a German friend who had written a comprehensive work entitled "Philosophic des Fahrrads.” ascribed has failure, really to enjoy bicycling to quite another cause. “I never had a cycling costume.’’ he wrote, “which was a great mistake.”

It is true that he went on to explain that, bicycling in his ordinary clothes, he “used to get drenched with perspiration, and of course caught colds, and rheumatism and liver complaint, and I don’t know what.” That is as it may be. Plenty of people nowadays hop on to their bicycles in “what they’ve got on,” and pedal off with no great pleasure but with no particular danger to their health. It is the Bicycle Club member out for a spin at the weekend, dressed in a black windcheater, very short shorts, and white Tirolean stockings, who really enjoys bicycling. Gissing might have regarded the whole business in quite another light if only he could have run to a “costume."