I belong to many vintage clubs, but I refuse to have anything to do with their politics. We study 100-year-old magazines to see when certain new innovations were first reviewed (it helps us date bicycles with similar features), read correspondence of the time to try to understand contemporary views and opinions, research old catalogues, meet fellow enthusiasts, help each other with restorations, ride our old bikes as much as possible, and work with our elders to pick up tips and wisdom.
My contemporaries and I are in a younger age group – forties to sixties – and we’re busy learning and recording what we can before it’s lost forever. By the time we learn from them, it’s second-generation information. They don’t usually use computers, so much of their knowledge is stored in their heads. Now we must depend on those who gleaned that first-hand knowledge from them these chaps were the ‘youngsters’ then, but now they’re getting older themselves, most in their seventies and eighties. The key point here is that the elders who were around while our favourite vintage machines were still on the road are no longer with us, the last of them having passed on in the past thirty years or so. Similarly, to learn about vintage bicycles, we ask questions of our elders in the hobby.
