Bicycles By Numbers

June 17, 2026

Some people collect antique clocks, some people collect books, and of course some people collect bicycles. The collecting may start as an unintended pastime, rooted in some childhood moment of wonder. I have slowly acquired more than a dozen, and after careful examination, I can pin my moment of wonder down precisely to a specific event in my life, and it truly was a revelation in Technicolor . It still resonates with me. I collect bikes because I see them as a means of escape. And boy, did I need that means of escape at my seventh ever Christmas.

When I had just turned seven at midsummer, my mother and father were very concerned at how poor I was at learning to read, write, and do basic arithmetic in the state education system. My mother had retrained as a teacher herself while I was still at nursery school and was appalled at the innovations that the state was foisting on children with the eventual aim of making reading and writing easier to master.

I think she was right. I was learning to read and write using a novel phonetic alphabet called the Initial Teaching Alphabet (‘ITA’) and enjoyed reading books written in it so much that I rapidly exhausted the available stock of books at the school.

There’s a good article on the rise and fall of the Initial Teaching Alphabet from the Guardian newspaper here.

I could not read any of the dozens of childrens books that were brought home from the library for me, even though like you, I can readily guess at the meaning of each ITA word as an adult. Normal English is one of the hardest languages to read and learn, and I wasn’t given any of the mechanisms I needed to make sense of the vast quantity of written English around me. The pathways had not been formed, and in fact this turned out to be the great failing of using this approach to literacy - it was very hard to undo the false start it presented to young readers. And I was rapidly outgrowing the stock of Ladybird books at school. Something had to be done.

What they did next to remedy things had a profound impact on my life: they sent me off to have my writing and reading and arithmetic sorted out at a proper Prep School, called Belmont School, the junior school to Mill Hill School on the Ridgeway, London NW7.

My father was careful to preserve correspondance relating the whole of my education in a large box file, and it doesn’t make for easy reading. Nearly the first letter in the file is from the headmaster of Belmont School, Mr. Foster, explaining that a place can be found for me for the autumn term, but that I’ll have to come to the school as one of its 110 boarding pupils, places for day pupils having been parcelled out on the basis of academic excellence prior to my father’s petition. My parents were undaunted, since my being a border meant that they could both continue to work full time. And they were well off from my father’s government pension from his previous fifteen year career as medical laboratory manager for the East African Trypanosomiasis Research Organisation in Tororo and Nairobi. In fact my brother had been to the same school 18 years before me, and this must have been a factor in the decision - several of the staff that taught him were still teaching there, and he had done well enough academically to get into medical school from Belmont and Mill Hill school.

I was kept in the dark about all of this until a couple of weeks before the start of the autumn term, when I was taken to a London department store to get kitted out with everything a boarder would need, from a boiler suit (worn over sports gear when playing out in the woods at the school) to boot brushes (for polishing the two pairs of shoes I was sent with, with my school number 118 marked in small tacks under the instep on both pairs). The itemised list was gradually ticked off, culminating in the arrival of a stout wooden tuck box with a padlock and key, in which my personal effects that I wasn’t wearing were stored. This may sound odd, but the tuck box and its inviolate contents (staff and other boys were very conscious of this rule) were the main thing that stood between my experience of being sent away to school, and the equivalent experience of older men being drafted into National Service or Army basic training. It was difficult to transition from what I took to be the loving environment of home to sleeping in a bunk bed in a dormitory with eleven other lost boys in the first three weeks of term. No telephone calls were allowed, no visitors were allowed, and by the end of the first week I had genuinely discovered what home sickness feels like, along with the shock of going from the top of the class at reading and writing in my state school to the very bottom of the class, where I was barely literate. Maths was even worse for me, as was having to form joined up writing with a dip pen and an inkpot on my desk. For the 1970s, the school was remarkably consistent with its values and methods from the post-war years.

Although the immediate urge to run away was tempered by the border fences around the estate and warnings about guard dogs patrolling, a couple of kids did manage to slip away, notably Hank Marvin’s sons who were probably going through a far worse time at home than I ever was. But they were brought back pretty speedily.

So the special moment came on the very last day of the winter term when we were all gathered into the blacked-out gymn hall on low benches to watch Mr Kirkham screen a real film on a real film projector with proper sound - the [Great Escape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Escape_(film). I have no idea how the school came by the print or the projector to screen it on, but this film was the highlight of the year for us. After all, we lived in a small self-sufficient community with no access to radio, television, or newspapers, so watching an actual film was a really big deal to us. The strange thing is that if you ask anyone who has seen the film what its greatest scene is, they’ll talk about Steve McQueen’s desperate gamble with a stolen German BMW motorbike and a frontier fence; I could see at once that his character Virgil Hilts was going out of his way to draw attention to himself and was bound to fail. As were the escapers who tried to get as far away as possible on the German railway system. I was captivated instead by James Coburn, whose character Sedgwick quietly frees a bicycle from a bike stand and rides it all the way to the border with Spain with the odd friendly wave to people he meets along the way. The bike isn’t in the film for more than twenty seconds but it made a big impression on me.

Although the opportunity to cut through a chain and elope with a bicycle from Belmont never presented itself, the seed of the idea was implanted, and reinforced each year subsequently, because the school only had the one film, and it was shown at the end of every term just before we were released for the holidays to our parents.

The bikes, and their numbering: