I am pleased to advise that the publishing committee of the John Pinkerton Memorial Publishing Fund (JPMPF – its easier) which is a division of the Veteran Cycle Club, are close to signing off the second volume of Charlie Chadwick’s work.  With a  fair wind and a bit of luck, we hope to get this Volume Two out by the end of February, plus a reprint of Volume One at the same time.  There is to be a change in the appearance of the reprinted Volume One, it will have a new cover but will contain word for word the contents of the book some of you already have.

The reason for the change of cover is so that we can go on to produce more Charlie material – there is plenty to go at – as Volume Three and so on, creating a mini Charlie Chadwick Series within the umbrella of the History of Cycling Series.  Details of the new book and both covers will appear on this website shortly !  (I hope).

The A5 format retention will maintain consistency but the mini series will have colour coded covers.

David Warner

This is a very unusual day for Charlie, as he finishes up admiring a herd of Llama’s and Emu’s wandering around the grounds of Lord Leverhulme in Horwich.  There are several interesting features in these grounds, including a 14th Century Tithe Barn which serves as a café and a function room.  Further along, hidden in the woods, something even more surprising.

To this day there are the remains here of a replica castle built as a copy of the ruined Liverpool Castle.  In other words, the replica was built not as the original Liverpool Castle would have been, but as an exact copy of the actual ruins in Liverpool.

Philanthrophy takes many forms, but building replica ruins seems to me to be someone getting carried away !

Charlie had struck up a friendship with Tom Idle – which lasted for years – after meeting him at a Bed and Breakfast establishment at Bettws-y-Coed in Wales the previous summer.  They had had many outings together since but Charlie had never been to Tom’s parents house before, and as we read our hero’s sense of direction let him very badly down.  Another item of note, Charlie was able to listen to a concert on the radio, at his friend’s house, suggesting that was a novelty, it may well have been, radio was very much in its infancy in those days.  My own father in those far off times actually had a business with a motor bike and sidecar ‘box’ in which to collect radio batteries (glass sided containers with two large screw terminals perched on top) for recharging, swopping them for a newly charged one, doing a weekly round rather like a milkman as very few houses had electricity wired to them, everyone used gas for lighting and batteries for that new fangled ‘wireless’.  That ‘wireless’ would be the only electrical appliance in the house in those days.

We learn now of the pleasures to be found in the arms of the Cathole Inn at Keld in Swaledale.  Alas the Cathole Inn is no more.  In the 1960’s a clergyman with more than a stipend to his name thought it would be a good idea to save the sinners of Keld by buying the Inn, with the only intention of closing it for good, which he promptly did.  Needless to say from that day on, attendances for his Sunday services plummeted, but it was all to no purpose – the Cathole Inn remains closed to this day.  A very distant memory for me.

Charlie and Fred are now getting the lot – snow, ice and biting cold winds, all for free.  Then the snow begins to deepen as they gain height, their route picked out by very faint tracks in the snow on their way over the Buttertubs Pass.  What drives them on are the thoughts of the haven they will reach and relax in having achieved their goal – but there is plenty of excitement, nay, danger before they can breathe easily.