On Tuesday Pikey went to her quilting group which has restarted after the summer holidays. It’s good as it gets her out of the house although she has to sit in her wheelchair for quite a long time which makes her fairly uncomfortable.
Yesterday we went down to have an MRI scan in Preston to find pout what the current state of play with her spine is. We won’t know the answer until we see the neurosurgeon again. No movement yet on the Elinor front. One of Pikey’s friends said that she looked as if she’d swallowed a beach ball!!!!
Robert has continued to delve even deeper into Pikey's family history and discovered that her great great uncle George Woodcock, a solicitor in Coventry, bought up the Rudge Cycle business.
Daniel Rudge ran the Tiger’s Head Inn in Wolverhampton. However he was also an engineer manufactured velocipedes - penny farthings to you and me - in a small workshop behind the pub. By the end of 1874 he had manufactured a small number of these high bicycles which ran on plain bearings. About this time a Frenchman called on him riding a French velocipede and Rudge was impressed with its smooth running. He decided to find out the mechanical advantage of the French machine; so he got the Frenchman drunk and dismantled his machine to discover that it ran on ball bearings rather than the plain bearings, like all other British cycles used at that time. Rudge took out a patent (no 526) for these adjustable ball bearings and started manufacturing for their high bicycles. Rudge started taking part in races held in the grounds of the Molineux Hotel and won his first cycle race in 1869. The Rudge machines were extremely fast and in races were often handicapped 20 or 30 yards behind the field. Daniel Rudge died young and George Woodcock bought the business from him.
After he bought the business he expanded it and floated it on the Stock Market for £200,000, an enormous sum then. But they still built penny farthing type machines for pleasure, business and racing.
This is an advertisement from 1884 – unfortunately you cannot buy one today!!! Wouldn't it be great to go shopping on!!!!Loads of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ from Robert and Pikey
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