Our Local Area

1. Wood and C. Dean, September 2021

The Yorkshire Clarion Club at Chevin End, Menston was the most notable of sites in the story of socialist Chevin. Writers and researchers have rightly reviewed the circumstances that led to the formation of the National Clarion Cycling Club in 1895, in both local and national context.

The development of the ‘Safety Bicycle’ by the 1890s which superceded the ‘ordinary’ or penny farthing, soon sported Dunlop’s inflatable tyres. Down in the Wharfe valley in 1892, it was at Otley’s 12½ mile ‘Triangle’ circuit that Harry Fieldhouse used one of the first pneumatic tyred machines in Yorkshire.

The bikes availability to the industrial working class, their need for recreational and social fresh air, coupled with the politics of Utopian Socialism, were all convergent movements which created the Clarion ‘Fellowship of the Wheels’. The debate was further stimulated by Socialist columnist Robert Blatchford (1851-1943) founder of the weekly ‘Clarion’ in 1891. Round the corner on Chevin hill at the 600ft contour were the sympathetic souls at Chevin Hall, site of the North West Co-operative Convalescent home from 1906. Otley itself had been a retail centre for the reformers of the Leeds Industrial Co-operative Society since 1873, ultimately offering a modern arcade store 10 years later at Beech Hill with drapery, boot, grocery and butchery departments and education reading room above.

5 second hand bell tents in a field between Burley and Otley had marked the early Annual Camp of the Bradford CC members in the late 1890s as a venue for Summer Sunday runs out of the smoke filled city. The Bradford club claimed 112 members by 1897 out of the National Clarion total of about 2, 000. By 1906 the camp sites had changed several times, but the newly formed Yorkshire Clarion CC looked for a ‘country house’ permanent site. Early in 1907 the Clarion Clubhouse Ltd., was registered as an Industrial Provident Society, offering supporters half-crown shares. A previous camp site at Chevin End, probably from the first tented pioneers, about 1902, took on a three year lease by 1907. £500 was needed to purchase the 4 acre field outright.

Dormitory and bell tents at the site of Yorkshire Clarion Club, Chevin End. Also membership stamp discovered on site with imprint. By P. Wood 2021.

Dormitory, bike sheds and club house followed when enough money was raised from the half-crown shares, with the foreground levelled for tennis courts. Whilst timber buildings were lost to time and fire, stone club houses survived to the southern boundary. The Clarionettes unwittingly pitched their camp on the 4^th century trampled ground only a Brigantian sling-shot throw from the march of the Tadcaster to Ilkley roman road. Ancient imperialists had long retreated before the Clarion bugle.

‘Fellowship is life’, National Clarion Cycling Club logo re-drawn by P. Wood 2021.

The CCC’s peak membership in 1913 was 8, 000 comrades and the following year their 20^th Annual Meet in Shrewsbury included a witty pitch for Chevin End Holiday Camp and Club House, in the ‘Switzerland of England’.

Are you fed up with the bustle of Mudpool

The insipid gaieties of Sloshton

and the tinsel delights of Borecambe?

Why spend a weeks wages on railway fare

and sleep in a room the size of a bacon box

for a fleeting pleasure of watching the tide

come in and go out once a day?

Taken from ‘Switzerland of England’ in the 1913 annual meet programme for the CCC.

Indelibly lettered with Morecambe seaside rock, the writers conservative Bradford ancestors would not fancy Chevin End, but Socialist comrades could apply to Hubert Kaye of 18 Priestman Street. The next generation were also catered for as at Great Horton Socialist Sunday School, where the children would go to Chevin End Clarion for weekend camps.

Children’s Cinderella Clubs, Scouting, Vocal Union, Dramatic, tennis, football, billiards, rambling and field clubs joined camera groups and handicraft guilds as Clarion offerings. The 20^th century history of the Clarion movement was of course a cast of thousands interrupted by two world wars and the transfer of power from two wheeled Kings of the Road to four. The Socialism of liberated youth was moving to the individualism of non-political Sunday social runs, racing and time trials. Who could beat whom, prevailed over who could beat the system. Even so, the National Clarion Committee at Menston in September 1936 affirmed their solidarity with Spanish workers in their fight against the menace of facism.

The rise of the Independent Labour Party and fall of The Depression and General Strike with social unrest caused by poverty and living condititions, created a fierce independent spirit among some. An heroic inter-war cycling culture emerged from the back streets of Bradford. No more so than from Walter Greaves, unemployed communist and vegetarian who had lost an arm in a motor accident aged 14. From childhood challenges, Walter of West Bradford Cycle Club was greeted as a 29 year old on the steps of Bradford Town Hall on the 23^rd December 1936, having cycled 45, 383 miles for the endurance record. Averaging 120 miles a day through all weathers, this included a stay in Bradford Royal Infirmary. J. B. Priestley, commenting on the large number of cyclists in Wharfedale in the 1930s, was observing the huge growth in national cycle club membership alongside the mass weekend exodus to the countryside.

Meanwhile, at Yorkshire Clarion Clubhouse, the regional Clarionettes, supporters and volunteers made their frequent pilgrimages to Chevin End. There were 30 National Clarion Yorkshire Clubs in 1936, listed from Bolton on Dearne to York.