The Hidden Hazards of Cycling to School

I think there was a by-law preventing parents from dropping their kids off by car outside the school on Whingate in our day. We all walked, cycled or took the school bus. A few 6th formers were allowed to arrive in style on their motor cycles or scooters. One even drove a red E-Type Jag.
When I observe parents doing the school run today, dropping off their offspring outside school in huge 4WD vehicles, more powerful and well equipped than the jeeps my father used to fight against the Afrika Korps in the Western Desert , I often think they would be doing both the environment and their kids a favour, health-wise , if they just let them walk or cycle to school the way we used to.
Generally, I used to walk to school from Bramley, a journey which I now know was about 1.5 miles. If the weather was bad or I was late I could catch the bus outside the Bus Depot at Bramley Town End. Most days I preferred to walk and I could then spend the bus fare, about 3d, on half a tea cake with jam and cream at Fred and Ethel's "tuck shop" on Whingate.The roads were not as busy or dangerous in those days but this anecdote from Mike Fall about cycling to school in the 50's shows that traffic accidents were not the only hazard to cyclists. -JS

West Leeds School was at Whingate Junction and so was a few miles from where I lived. After a short downhill ride on my bike from my home to Kirkstall Road, the rest of my ride was uphill. My journey was punctuated by several potential World Heritage sites that never quite made it:- the Kirkstall gas works, Kirkstall Road swimming bath and wash house, the river Aire, the Leeds and Liverpool canal, Canal Road Armley, Sammy Ledgard's bus depot, Armley swimming baths and ballroom (the larger of the two swimming baths became a ballroom on Saturday nights by simply covering the pool up with boards) and, finally, Charley Cake Park. The Kirkstall wash house was frequented at that time by a procession of women with prams. However, there wasn't a baby to be seen. Wartime films were still fresh in our minds in 1950, and the sight of this stream of women shoving their battered prams along, reminded me of newsreel refugees, particularly as every pram seemed to have buckled wheels and was piled high with drab, grey clothes. The whine of a malevolent Stuka dive-bomber might have completed the sad picture only a few years earlier almost anywhere in Europe, but, as all these particular prams lurched drunkenly from side to side, they wouldn't have presented very easy targets. I found it a little disquieting, though, to imagine that these ladies, with their resigned features, might have once been the sort of young girls that were beginning to set my pubescent hormones racing. As it was, when I beheld the future in their faded pinnies, their turbans, their florid faces, and their arms which were as thick as Sumo wrestlers' legs, my emergent testosterone took the hint and dived for cover.		Bridges over the River Aire at Canal Rd Armley. A potential world heritage site that never quite made it.
Although none of us knew it at the time, the last will and testament of J. W. Roberts and Co. had already been drawn up as I passed their Canal Road factory on my way to school each day, but many people would have to wait patiently for their dark inheritance. A certain Mr. Justice Holland would rule in a legal action, which would take place many years in the future, that the dangers of breathing asbestos fibres were well known in the trade as early as 1933. Strangely though, that information did not seem to have been passed down to the workers, or to the people who lived in the area. It certainly wasn't passed down to me. By the time I had pedalled myself up Canal Road, each morning, into the flurry of asbestos fibres that the Roberts' factory bestowed on their community, I would be gasping from the effort of the climb. I no doubt had the opportunity to inhale enough airborne asbestos fibres to stuff a fireproof cushion during my time at West Leeds School. Epidemiological studies have since concluded that I did the right thing though when I decided to stop smoking (I did so at the age of eleven). Asbestos fibres and tobacco smoke which are inhaled together are considered to be infinitely more dangerous in combination. Even so, it is said that one single microscopic asbestos fibre lodged in your lung is all it takes to cause lung cancer in the least fortunate. Asbestos-induced mesothelioma can, it is said, take forty years to develop, so I continue to count my blessings.	J.W. Roberts' Canal Rd. Asbestos free-for-all.

Our school cycle racks provided a clandestine meeting place. "Behind the cycle sheds" was a cliché, even then, so they were, of course, frequented at breaks and lunch times by the traditional band of smokers and ne'er-do-wells, in addition to ourselves, the bona fide cyclists. We would compare our bikes, our cycling stories and, not least, our hopes. We would also critically appraise the real bikes which stood there and were usually owned by the sixth-formers - an occasional one of whom might even deign to speak down to us if he thought that no one else was looking. By the time I was twelve I had extended my cycling experience to the riding of a ladies bike with balloon tyres and a back-pedal brake, and I had acquired a rear carrier with a spring clamp, a pump which required no flexible adaptor, and a lock which clamped onto the bike's rear stay. These items were special..... you could not buy them in Britain. They were bought in Germany.

As soon as my parents and I had arrived back at our house from Hull, I was down in our cellar fitting the new accessories to my bike in readiness for my return to school. The bittersweet emotions of the first day back, with its displays of stiff new clothes, new spots, and new sproutings of body hair, soon settled into the steady grind of the new school year. The high-point of the return for the cycling fraternity was the appearance in the cycle racks of the brand new Armstrong Moth racing bike. Its new paint glistened in the autumn sunlight, it had a five-speed derailleur gear and it was owned by a fifth-former! Was this a sign of things to come? Might we of the second year have only another three years to wait for ours? In the meantime, I was flattered by the interest shown by my friends in my recent adventures and now, as a second year, I was no longer a "sprog". Life seemed as though it might be more settled now. In my boyish naiveté I couldn't begin to imagine that my days of cycling to school might be numbered, and that soon my shiny new German carrier would rust and sag under the strain of heavy-duty service. Fate had already decreed that I was soon to become "the over-river laddie."

Mike Fall (WLHS 1950 - 54) Experience more of Mikes Wit & Wisdom by clicking here