66 THE BRIGHTON ROAD 



of 1906. It also, like the Hobby Horse, had iron-shod 

 wooden wheels, but had cranks and pedals, and could 

 be ridden uphill. On such a machine the first cycle 

 ride to Brighton was performed in 1869. This pioneer's 

 fame on the Brighton Road belongs to John Mayall, 

 junior, a well-known photographer of that period, who 

 died in the summer of 1891. 



This marks the beginning of so important an epoch 

 that the circumstances attending it are worthy a detailed 

 account. They were felt, so long ago as 1874, to be 

 deserving of such a record, for in the first number of an 

 athletic magazine, Ixion, published in that year, "J. M., 

 jun.," who, of course, was none other than Mayall him- 

 self, began to tell the wondrous tale. He set out to 

 narrate it at such length that, as an editorial note tells 

 us, the concluding portion was reserved for the second 

 number. But Ixion never reached a second number, 

 and so Mayall's own account of his historic ride was 

 never completed. 



He began, as all good chroniclers should, at the 

 very beginning, telling how, in the early part of 1869, 

 he was at Spencer's Gymnasium in Old Street, St. 

 Luke's. There he saw a packing-case being followed 

 by a Mr. Turner, whom he had seen at the Paris 

 Exhibition of 1868, and witnessed the unpacking of it. 

 From it came a something new and strange, " a piece 

 of apparatus consisting mainly of two wheels, similar 

 to one I had seen, not long before, in Paris." It was 

 the first velocipede to reach England. 



It is a curious point that, although Mayall rode a 

 ' velocipede," and although these machines were 

 generally so-called for a year or two after their introduc- 

 tion, the word " bicycle ' is claimed to have been 

 first used in the Times in the early part of 1868 ; and 

 certainly we find in the Daily News of September 7th 

 in that year an allusion, in grotesque spelling, to 

 ' bysicles and trisicles which we saw at the Champs 

 Elysees and the Bois de Boulogne this summer." 



But to return to the " velocipede " which had 

 found its way to England at the beginning of 1869. 



