The CTC, the Cyclists' Touring Club, is the United Kingdom's largest cycling membership organisation. It also has members and district associations in the Republic of Ireland. It was established in 1878, originally as the 'Bicycle Touring Club', making it the oldest national tourism organisation of any description in the World, and renamed the Cyclists' Touring Club in 1883. Since January 2007, the CTC's president has been the newsreader and journalist, Jon Snow.[1]
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History
The CTC was founded at Harrogate, Yorkshire, on 5 August 1878 by an Edinburgh medical student, Stanley Cotterell. It was originally called the Bicycle Touring Club and its headquarters were wherever Cotterell happened to be living. It had 80 members, all men. The first woman, a Mrs W. D. Welford, joined in 1880. In 1883, the Bicycle Touring Club was renamed the Cyclists' Touring Club to open membership to tricyclists. Membership rose to 10,627 and the CTC opened a headquarters at 139-140 Fleet Street, London EC4.[2]
Uniform
Members, like those of other clubs, often rode in uniform. The CTC appointed an official tailor. The uniform was a dark green Devonshire serge jacket, knickerbockers and a "Stanley helmet with a small peak". The colour changed to grey when green proved impractical because it showed the dirt.[3] Groups often rode with a bugler at their head to sound changes of direction or to bring the group to a halt. Confusion could be caused when groups met and mistook each other's signals.[4]
Cycling accommodation
In earlier times, the Cyclists' Touring Club gave seals of approval, such as the one on the right, to hotels and restaurants which offered good accommodation and service to cyclists. A few of the metal plaques showing the winged-wheel symbol of the CTC still exist, as do a handful of road signs put up by the CTC to warn cyclists of steep hills: usually steep going down, which was as much a problem for riders of large-wheel ordinaries, or "penny-farthings", as going up. Nowadays, the CTC no longer puts up general road signs—although the right to do so is retained—and approved establishments are offered a plastic window-sticker carrying the blue and yellow logo shown above. In 1898 the CTC became embroiled in a court case to defend a member denied what she thought adequate service at a hotel carrying the club's badge. Florence Wallace Pomeroy, Lady Harberton (1843-1911) of Cromwell Road, Kensington — wife of James Pomeroy, 6th Viscount Harberton and president of the Western Rational Dress Society — cycled on the morning of 27 October 1898 to have lunch at the Hautboy Hotel in Ockham, Surrey. Her campaigning for society to accept that women could wear "rational" dress on a bicycle and not ankle-length dresses led her to wear a jacket and a pair of long and baggy trousers which came together just above the ankle. She walked into the coffee room and asked to be served. The landlady, a Mrs Martha Sprague, showed her instead into the bar parlour. The CTC went into action, mounting a prosecution for "refusing food to a traveller". The landlady was acquitted and CTC lost the unusually large amount of money it had allotted to the case, which had been considered at the root of cyclists' rights and the values of the CTC.
CTC and motorists
In 1906 the CTC asked the High Court to amend its constitution so that it could admit all tourists, including car-drivers. A majority of members - 10,495 to 2,231 - had voted the previous year for the change to take place. The court ruled that the CTC could not protect the interests of cyclists and drivers at the same time and denied permission.[5]
Modern CTC
Today the CTC is concerned with the promotion of cycling for recreation, travel and transport, and has about 55,000 members. Among its recent successes have been a benchmarking project to spread best practice in cycle-friendly infrastructure design, and a grant of nearly £1 million to promote national standards for cycle training, standards the CTC helped to develop. The CTC is organised at a district level, with district associations (DAs) organising cycle rides on most Sundays and often during the week in summer. The more leisurely rides are planned around café stops, the quality of the ride often being judged on the standard of the cakes; the CTC has jokingly been referred to as "Café To Café". The CTC is one of the founder organisations of The Slower Speeds Initiative, an unincorporated association dedicated to reducing traffic speeds on all roads. The CTC works with other organisations such as Transport 2000 and Sustrans, and has at least two charitable offshoots, the CTC Charitable Trust and the Cyclists' Defence Fund. The members' magazine, Cycle, covers a variety of subjects including ride reports, product reviews and legal and technical advice. Members also benefit from public liability insurance, which is extended to cover rides organised under the auspices of CTC DAs. The CTC is a member of the European Cyclists' Federation.
References
- ^ "Jon Snow new CTC President", Cyclists' Touring Club, 2006-09-25. Retrieved on 2006-10-01.
- ^ CTC website www.ctc.org.uk
- ^ Cycling On, Ray Hallett, Dinosaur Publications 1978
- ^ John Pinkerton, int. Wheels of Fortune, BBC Radio 4, 1988
- ^ Penguin Book of the Bicycle, Roderick Watson and Martin Gray, 1984
