Raleigh Chopper

 

Well, I took a break today from Sir John Tenniel and Lewis Carroll. I popped into Sketching Everyday in Facebook and saw that today’s prompt is National Bicycle Day. On a whim I sketched this.

If you’re a child of the 90s or later you may not be familiar with this. On the other hand, if, like me, you were born in the mid 1960s, you won’t need me to tell you that It’s a Raleigh Chopper. And the reason you won’t need me to tell you is that you probably wanted one yourself. If you didn’t want one, then you probably actually had one.

The Raleigh Chopper was inspired by the Schwinn Stingray of the 1960s. The Stingray incorporated features that would be used in the later Raleigh Chopper – smaller front wheel, slightly larger back wheel, ‘chopper’ motorbike style handlebars, elongated seat. The Stingray was a success in the mid 60s, and the British Raleigh company decided it wanted a piece of the action. Their first response was the Raleigh Rodeo. The Rodeo looked a lot like the Stingray, a major difference being the two wheels were of the same size. The Rodeo was not a conspicuous success, which led Raleigh to reconsider, and the design that they came up with was the Chopper.

There’s controversy over who actually produced the design. Alan Oakley of Raleigh and Tom Karen of the Ogle Design Company have both claimed to have been the original designer. The patent for the bike was applied for in the US in 1967.

The Mark I Chopper first went on sale in the UK and the USA in 1969. Within a couple of years it had certainly taken the UK kids’ bike market by storm and pretty much singlehandedly restored the fortunes of the Raleigh Company. Apparently assistant working in bike shops regularly had to remind adult customers that it was a child’s bike, and to try to steer them to something more appropriate. I turned 10 in 1974, and would very much liked to have owned a Chopper in the early 70s. I remember the days when kids in my school were put through the National Cycling Proficiency Test, and when that happened the kids could all bring their bikes into school. The playground became like a sea of Choppers, and many of them had accessories like wind shields and wing mirrors.

I never had a Chopper. I’ve read things today that suggest that the cost of a Chopper in the early 1970s was the equivalent of about £500 today. I don’t know how true that is, but they were certainly out of the reach of my family’s finances, what with me having two brothers, one a year old and the other year younger, who would have had to be bought one too, and a feckless father who thoughtfully drank away any spare cash the family came into. Quite a lot of the essential cash as well, for that matter, still I digress.

Now, looking back, I’m glad that I never had a Chopper. Yes, it would have been cool, but enough of my mates had Choppers that I got to cadge rides on from time to time, and to be honest, as bikes they were pretty terrible. They had these fat, small wheels and tyres, they wobbled even at relatively modest speeds and the frames were really heavy. If you came off the seat and landed on the crossbar, then that gear lever could do you a very nasty injury, in a place guaranteed to reduce your mates to helpless laughter. I mean, I think you’d be just about okay riding one to the corner shop to get a packet of Spangles, the latest edition of Look In and 10 Players Number 10 tipped for the old man, but I don’t think you’d have wanted to go much further.

The first bike I ever had was an ancient kids BSA bike. As I recall it had very strange brakes, which had no cables, but metal rods instead, which needed no encouragement to break and come loose. It was a Christmas present – my mum and my grandmother had somehow managed to buy three second hand bikes for us that year. All of them had stabilisers on, and I got frustrated with this. At Easter I finally persuaded my father to remove them, and I spent about a week, going up and down the back yard, teaching myself to balance on it and ride it properly.

I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I got my second bike. I think it was in the mid 70s. I certainly had it by 1977, because I remember buying silver jubilee union jacks from B&L Accessories in South Ealing to stick on it. This was a full sized racing bike, with 28 inch quick release wheels. It was old even then, but it was such a step up from my first. Over the next 2 or 3 years I replaced the handlebars, the cranks and the old man even splashed out for a new campagnolo five gear changer and a whole ten gear from changer set as well. I got far more out of that bike than I can believe I would ever have got out of a Chopper.

When I started working during holidays for a local temp agency, I rode the bike to work all over West London. When I went to University In Goldsmiths’ College, I used to ride the bike to and from the Student Hall, and then all the way across London for trips home and back. In 1984 I even used it for a one-day pilgrimage to Canterbury, my longest ever single trip. In fact, I only stopped using it when I moved to South Wales in 1986. When I’d first had the bike I wasn’t yet a teenager. When I last used it I was a married man with a kid.