In the summer of 1887, a dying man walked into a small bicycle workshop on Raleigh Street in Nottingham. Frank Bowden, a wealthy lawyer and investor who had made a fortune in Hong Kong and San Francisco before the climate destroyed his health, had been given six months to live by doctors who prescribed cycling as a remedy. He took the prescription seriously, rode relentlessly, and the exercise restored him in a way no medicine had. He lived another thirty-four years, and he never forgot that the bicycle had saved him.
Looking for a better machine than anything he had ridden, Bowden found a pair of craftsmen, a Frenchman named Paul Angoisse and an Englishman named Richard Morris Woodhead, building bicycles by hand in a backstreet workshop. Their machines featured refinements larger makers had ignored, including a changeable gear, and Bowden judged them superior to everything else on the market. He bought one, toured Europe on it, and then did the decisive thing. In December 1888, he bought the workshop and founded the Raleigh Cycle Company, keeping the street name and moving operations into a five-story former lace factory.
He had entered the industry at precisely the right moment. The old penny farthing, a dangerous high-wheeled toy, was giving way to the safety bicycle with its diamond frame, two equal wheels, and a chain, a machine ordinary people could actually ride. Bowden moved fast. Within a few years the company was capitalized at one hundred thousand pounds, then double that by 1896, when it had already become the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world.
The engineering philosophy that defined Raleigh came from G. P. Mills, the works manager and chief designer, who had raced the brutal long-distance road records of the era and knew in his own hands exactly how machines broke. What he drove Raleigh toward was total steel.
The industry was learning that steel tubing could be drawn thinner in the middle and left thicker at the ends, butted tubing, an innovation patented by Alfred Millward Reynolds in 1897. Raleigh built on that principle and went further. Frames were joined not by welding but by brazing, drawing molten brass into every hairline gap between tube and lug so that the frame became a single monolithic object, extraordinarily durable. Raleigh made almost everything under its own roof: the cranks, the mudguards, the rims, the handlebars, the seat posts, everything but the tires and the chain.
The durability became legendary, and rivals copied Raleigh details so closely that the company warned customers in print to look for the heron stamped on the head of the frame. The second great contribution to daily life was the hub gear. The man who actually invented the three-speed hub was William Riley, an engineer born in 1867 in Salford. In 1898 he designed the first commercially successful compact hub gear for a Salford firm, signing away rights to all his future designs.
Around 1902 he designed something far better, a three-speed that shifted with a reliable toggle chain, but he no longer owned his own ideas. To get the gear out from under the contract, the patents were taken out in the name of a colleague, James Archer, a legal stand-in. Henry Sturmey, a famous cycling journalist who had patented his own hub in 1901 and handed the rights to Bowden, lent his name to the product. A fictional collaboration between Sturmey and Archer was concocted, a fiction Sturmey was content to maintain.
The document record shows Riley’s patent, filed under Archer’s name, went in eleven days before Sturmey’s. Bowden saw Riley’s superior design and brought the tangle together, forming the three-speed gear syndicate in January 1903. A private agreement directed royalties to Riley, the true inventor, but the name on the product was Sturmey-Archer. By 1909 Riley had fallen out badly with the Bowdens and walked away from the thing he had made.
By the early 1920s, Raleigh was turning out a quarter of a million hub gears a year, putting weatherproof, reliable gearing within reach of working commuters in every hilly city on earth. Riley’s name was stamped on nothing. The company outgrew its Russell Street home and in 1897 built a purpose-made works on Faraday Road in Lenton, seven and a half acres. By 1913, seventeen hundred workers were producing over sixty thousand cycles a year, making Raleigh the biggest bicycle manufacturer on earth.
When the First World War came, the workforce swelled to five thousand and the same presses and forges that built bicycles built munitions. Frank Bowden died in 1921 and his son Sir Harold Bowden took over. When eight hundred workers came out in sympathy during the general strike of 1926, Harold answered not with lockouts but with a profit-sharing scheme. The company absorbed Humber, Rudge-Whitworth, and later the cycle interests of BSA and Triumph, and by 1938 was building close to half a million bicycles a year.
In the Second World War, the works turned almost entirely to munitions once more, and even the bicycles bent to the war effort. In 1951, Raleigh built over a million bicycles in a single year, shipping as many as seven in ten overseas. The Lenton works had become a small industrial town, with press shops, forges, brazing hearths, enameling shops, plating lines, and machine shops, loud and dangerous and alive. The novelist Alan Sillitoe, who had worked at Raleigh, set Saturday Night and Sunday Morning there, putting the factory floor into the national imagination.
Whole families passed through the gates. Women worked the lines in their thousands, and from 1956 men and women of the Windrush generation came into the works. A site that had its own fire brigade, social club, and sports teams had become a self-contained civilization. At its zenith, Raleigh was three companies at once.
Across Africa and India it sold heavy, unkillable black roadsters by the shipload, so dominant that in Nigeria a bicycle, any bicycle, was simply a Raleigh. It sponsored Reg Harris, Britain’s greatest track sprinter, world professional champion four times. And it made the bicycles of childhood, launching the Chopper in 1970, which sold over a million and a half in Britain and became the best-selling bicycle in the country, then the Burner in 1982, which sold over half a million in its first two years. In 1980, the TI-Raleigh superteam under Dutch directeur sportif Peter Post won the Tour de France with Joop Zoetemelk, a team that dominated the era.
By 1979, close to 8,800 people worked at the site, the works sprawled across nearly sixty-four acres, and Nottingham alone could build two million cycles a year and sell into 140 countries. And yet, back in 1974, when Ian Phillips was appointed chairman, his own finance director told him the vast integrated works was the biggest white elephant in Britain. The trouble had a date: the 19th of April, 1960, when Tube Investments, an engineering conglomerate, took over Raleigh for 10. 8 million pounds.
TI did not find bicycles interesting. To Raleigh, the bicycle had been a creed. To TI, it was a line on a balance sheet. Meanwhile the ground was shifting.
Between 1950 and 1962, cycle sales in Britain halved. The ordinary family wanted a car now. In 1961, the engineer Alex Moulton came to Raleigh with a radical design for a compact bicycle on small wheels with suspension. Raleigh’s managing director refused to believe it could be profitable and turned him away.
Moulton built it himself and it sold. Raleigh imitated it, and then bought Moulton out. The pattern was set: refuse the future, imitate the future, buy the future once someone else has proved it. When the mountain bike revolution came out of America in the 1980s, Raleigh did not launch a serious model until 1985, by which time the race was lost.
By 1981, foreign makers had taken 36 percent of the British market, and in 1987, for the first time, British buyers bought more imported bikes than homemade ones. On the first of April, 1987, TI sold the business it had never loved to Derby International for 18 million pounds plus 14 million in assumed debt. For a while it worked. The mountain bike boom lifted Raleigh as a seller, UK sales rose by around a third by 1990, and Derby grew into the largest cycle group in the world.
But the ownership was offshore and financially driven, and the managing directors began to churn. In late 1999, Derby sold the Triumph Road site to the University of Nottingham, and in December of that year, the frame-making equipment went under the auctioneer’s hammer, including multi-robot welding machines bought new only three years before. After 111 years, Raleigh stopped making its own frames. Then came the sale that should never be forgotten.
On the first of July, 2000, Derby sold Sturmey-Archer and the Brooks Saddle Company for 30 pounds, the price of a single hub gear. The buyers were a firm called Lenark, whose directors included a professional gambler listed in Las Vegas and a recently discharged bankrupt. A rival, SunRace of Taiwan, had already made a generous offer in the tens of millions, but selling to Lenark took the whole business off Derby’s balance sheet cleanly and made the short-term figures look better. That October, employees were told with about ten minutes’ notice that the company was closed.
Over three hundred workers lost their jobs. Both pension schemes were wound up, with no statutory safety net beneath them. One of the firm’s top engineers ended up selling sandwiches in the middle of Nottingham. Derby did not survive its own arithmetic.
In August 2001 it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and a management buyout formed a new Raleigh Cycle Limited. On the 11th of March, 2002, the Raleigh executive agreed to cease all cycle assembly in the United Kingdom by the end of that year. A planned new assembly plant at Bulwell ran aground in a planning dispute over allotments and potentially homeless newts. Around 280 jobs went with the end of assembly.
From 2003, Raleigh bicycles would arrive fully assembled from suppliers in the Far East. The last day did not look like the end of anything grand. There was a buffet, speeches, redundancy checks handed across a table. The managers kept the television cameras out because they did not want the world to hear the words that Raleigh was no more.
The place had that feel of a ship found drifting, the table still laid, the crew simply gone. In 2003 the factory was demolished. On the ground where up to 8,800 people had forged steel into bicycles now stands the Jubilee campus of the University of Nottingham, sleek and quiet. Raleigh did not really die.
It was hollowed out, absorbed by a conglomerate that never cared for bicycles, slowed by the very integration that had once made it invincible, sold offshore and pared down until its most famous name went for the price of a single gear. The brand survived, bought by the Dutch Accell Group in 2012. The bicycles are designed and specified in Britain and built in the Far East. The heron still flies, but the nest that hatched it is long gone.
And yet, somewhere on a British road, an old black roadster is still being ridden to work, its frame drop-forged and dip-brazed in Nottingham maybe seventy years ago, its three-speed hub still clicking cleanly between gears designed by a Salford engineer named William Riley who never got the credit. Machines made so well they would outlive not only the men and women who rode them, but the great works that built them and the very company whose name they carried. The bicycles that could survive a war outlived the company that made them.
That, in the end, was the whole point.