In the UK in the early 20s most club machines, racers and lightweights would be fitted with a single steel calliper brake (either front or rear!) which clamped around the fork blades or seatstays. Bowden from France was one of the first and was imported together with Bastide bicycles pre WWI. Chater Lea made one variety, there were many different brands by the mid 20s. Constrictor launched a brake of their own around 1925 which was a rather complicated affair not easy to describe; not surprisingly it was not very popular. But the big change that made calliper brakes more popular was the invention and fairly quick adoption of the square sided Endrick wired-on rim from 1922 onwards. This meant that calliper brakes could be made to stop reasonably well. Someone had the brilliant idea in the late 20s of simply attaching the brakes to the frame with a bolt through the fork crown or seatstay; certainly by about 1928 or so these were quite widely offered generally by the same makers as who made the earlier clamp-on ones. Some riders clung to the the older design of rod operated pull up brakes - these were available for quite a time and version was devised to operate on square sided rims. The Resilion cantilever brake was launched in 1927 but its heyday was really the 30s. In the 1930s the most common brake by far was the Resilion; Constrictor also offered a range of brakes but these were far less common. There was brief flurry of interest in hub brakes on lightweight machines from around 1933-35 but this mainly concerned club riders and tourists, certainly not racers. From 1935 onwards Ambra Superga aluminium side pull calliper brakes, and from 1937 or so Gloria, Lam, Bulla and Bowden were increasingly used but were very expensive. There were a number of 'lightweight' steel calliper brakes made in the UK - Webb for example and these were widely used on the medium priced models. GB as a company did not start up until 1946 and the Hiduminium was launched in 1948.
Hilary Stone, Bristol, England
Walter Skrzypek wrote:
> Most pictures I have seen of racing bicycles of the 20s/30s era picture fixed
> gear bicycles and most are equipped with some type of brakesets. What type of
> brakesets were used on bicycles of the 20s/30s?