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@Ramsaye
Nice little tribute in this week's comic:
The National Clarion
You may have noticed a few cycling clubs with ‘Clarion’ in their names, like the Fenland Clarion CC, or the Bolton Clarion CC. The names are a hangover from a strange combination of cycling and political activism dating from the early 1900s.
The National Clarion, the parent club of all the other Clarions, was formed in 1895, to spread the word of socialism, and named after a socialist newspaper. They combined the pleasures of a bike ride with the joys of handing out socialist literature to innocent bystanders. They provided a sort of flying speaker service — if you needed a socialist orator at short notice, a Clarion member would drop everything, jump on his bike and ride through whatever the weather might throw at him for anything up to 100 miles, day or night, to deliver a rousing speech.
The Clarion was important enough to play a significant role in the origins of the modern Labour Party, but as an actual organisation it was a delightful shambles. Having concluded that creating a clear manifesto or even a clear management structure would just result in lots of arguments, they didn’t bother with either. This meant such pleasures as a national annual meeting for over 1,000 people, for which no one remembered to book a hall or any accommodation. The meeting was held in a churchyard, and the attendees spent the night under a hedge. This was pretty typical.
The Clarion started to decline in the 1930s. While it has survived as an affiliation of clubs, the remaining Clarion organisations take almost no interest in politics.