In his excellent book On Your Bicycle, Jim McGurn offers a brief but persuasive discussion about the bureaucratic/legal impediments to early German cycling and hence the German cycle industry.
McGurn also links the success of British exporting with the efforts of evangelical middle-class expat clubmen to establish cycling on the continent:
"British manufacturers' exporting efforts were helped greatly by expatriates who founded clubs abroad. In the Netherlands, for example, C.H. Bingham was captain of the Ooivaar (Stork) Cycling Club of the Hague, and D. Webster was captain of the Haarlem Cycling Club. Both being CTC members, they initiated a similar national club for Dutch Wheelmen: the Netherlands Cycling Federation (1883). The Berlin Bicycle Club was founded by T. H. Walker, despite a ban of riding within the city. He popularised the bicycles of the Howe Machine Company of Glasgow, for whom he was the Berlin agent. Walker was also the editor of Das Velociped, Germany's first cycling periodical. Very few German nationals rode. In 1881 the Leipxig Bicycle Club consisted of four Americans, two Britons, two Iatalians and one German."
Jim McGurn, On Your Bicycle: The Illustrated Story of Cycling, New Edition, Open Road Publishing, York, 1990, p. 65.
Though I don't agree with all of McGurn's conclusions, IMHO On Your Bicycle is a succinct and readable decoding of the bicycle's position in social history and vice versa. Well worth a read if you are at all interested in such questions as to why there is no German BB thread (even if there IS a German Thompson-Thun Bottom Bracket!).
Michael Toohey Rangiora, New Zealand.
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