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Courting couple parted after 76 years

from Cathy (cathyvpreece@aol.com)

Times

January 19, 2005

Courting couple parted after 76 years

By Alan Hamilton

A bicycle ride that began in 1929 has come to an end in London’s Transport Museum

WILLIAM WAGSTAFF and his trusty companion Evans were inseparable for 76 years. They went courting together, endured the Blitz and took memorable holidays in Cornwall and the Isle of Man.

Now they are parted, Mr Wagstaff at the age of 95 to a retirement home in East Sussex and a still-healthy Evans to London’s Transport Museum, to represent an earlier, gentler and more environmentally friendly age of travel.

On May 14, 1929, the 20-year-old apprentice telephone engineer walked into F. W. Evans’s cycle works in Kennington, South London, and exchanged his £13 life savings for a shiny black racer.

The faithful Evans ensured that Mr Wagstaff was never late for a date with his wife-to-be Gladys when the couple were courting in the 1930s.

More than seven decades, 50,000 miles, three saddles and numerous sets of tyres later, Evans was still going strong and in regular use.

Only when Mr Wagstaff, on a trip to the shops, had a brush with a motorist who knocked him and injured his confidence did he decide to donate his one-owner-from-new bike to the museum, where it will form part of a permanent display.

Jan Hibbard, 65, Mr Wagstaff’s daughter, said yesterday that her father had ridden Evans almost every day of his life until he was 93. “It has all the original parts, right down to the stainless steel wheel rims, which cost extra when it was new, and the oil-powered lamp, which is still covered with blackout paper from the war, when Dad used to ride 12 miles home to Croydon from his job at Bermondsey telephone exchange.”

The only non-original parts are the handlebars; as he grew older Mr Wagstaff exchanged the dropped racers for a more comfortable upright set.

Robert Excell, a curator at the museum in Covent Garden, said that the cycle still worked remarkably smoothly, despite some 76 years’ continuous use.

“Mr Wagstaff had soaked everything in oil to preserve it and even gave us the original saddlebag and toolkit, which he got with the Evans when it was new. It is made of a heavier metal than modern bicycles and that is partly why it has lasted so long,” he said.

The Evans company still exists, but no longer manu- factures frames and con- centrates, instead, on its chain of 17 specialist cycle shops.

Mark Smith, a director whose grandfather bought the company from the original Mr Evans, said: “It’s no longer efficient to manufacture frames here; I’m afraid the industry is now dominated by Taiwan. Evans used to have a good reputation for touring bikes, but that’s a dying side of the market. What people want now is mountain bikes.”

We shall have to wait until 2080 to discover whether today’s Taiwanese mountain steed has the life expectancy of an original Evans.

(posted 7008 days ago)

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