Planned obsolescence in cycling

A Different Take

This is an article I wrote some time ago for the Veteran Club newsletter. I hope its relevance can be seen as the opposite approach to the desire to have the latest bike. I can only hope that it won't be TL;DR.

I'm well aware that this Dragonfly Roadster wasn't ever a very good bike. However, if you're not racing the important question is whether you perceive the bike to be satisfactory.

A Dragonfly

My Mother was the proud owner of this Dragonfly. (see pics. below)

A completely standard rod braked roadster, it was never really a great machine but my Mum was very attached to it, and rejected more modern and apparently superior machines that were offered to her. There are two aspects which I believe are worth recording, but I’ll describe the bike first.

It arrived as a twenty first birthday present in 1934, although I understand it was a 1933 model which my Grandfather acquired for her at the discounted price of 3 guineas (reduced from 4 ) as it was old stock. It has a 22” frame with 26 x 1 3/8th Westwood rims, bolted up seat stays and ‘North Road’ upturned bars with an expander bolt stem. The Williams chainset shown in the photo is a late addition (I reduced her gearing slightly as she approached eighty). The original gearing was 66.4” The head badge was a transfer of a dragonfly, but there is only a tiny fragment remaining.

One small adjustment my grandfather (a former track rider) made for her was to put the handlebars down as far as they would go, which gave her a slightly more efficient riding position than most users of this type of machine. It is not especially heavy – about 30lbs if you removed the remains of the child seat, and this is probably its best feature.

This brings me to the first point of interest. Nowadays we generally think of these roadsters as just utility machines, only suitable for shopping or commuting, but originally they were also used for recreational riding. My Mother certainly used hers as a touring mount – I don’t know how much she did, although cycling was not her main sporting interest. However, there is a story I think will bear repeating.

One summer in the late 1930s she went on a youth hostel trip with a friend which took them from London into Wales, and what was intended to be their penultimate night was spent at the newly opened Wilderhope hostel. They got a good start in the morning which was necessary since their next intended stop was Oxford, about 100 miles, quite an ambitious target for anyone carrying luggage and using a single gear. Luck was on their side and they had a good tail wind which got them to their destination by mid evening, only to find the hostel full. This was a blow since money was clearly not plentiful – there was some discussion and in the end they decided that with the wind still favourable and some moonlight, they would push on home to Teddington (Middx.), about another 55miles including the ascent of the steep side of the Chiltern ridge to Stokenchurch. They arrived, still in good spirits, at 2 am.

Perhaps it was the memory of this ride that made her so keen to stick to her Dragonfly, or possibly sheer bloody mindedness, but I believe the second point of interest is that many people of my Mother’s generation expected things to last, literally, a lifetime. They did not feel the pull of retail therapy: they had acquired the tools for life which they felt were necessary and they were jolly well going to keep to what they had. For example, at some point about 1980 my Mum complained to me that her bike didn’t feel quite right, and that the chain had become much too tight.
It didn’t take long to diagnose two broken chainstays – the chain was all that was holding the bike up! I told her the machine was knackered, but she insisted she wanted it mended. Some third world style patches were brazed onto those chainstays without even doing much dismantling, and as you can see in the photograph they are still holding the bike up. Faced as we are with the problems of debt and global warming perhaps there is a lesson here.

The Dragonfly now hangs in my garage and is unlikely to get much more use. Everything about it is worn out, excepting that C34 chainset I fitted near the end. All the same I do have a small hope at the back of my mind that some day, probably after I’ve gone, some one will see fit to restore it.

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