During December we will be publishing Charlie’s diary entries for December 1924.

You can see the headlines here but the actual items will appear on the dates – so you can follow Charlie’s progress throughout the month.

A significant aspect of the Charlie Chadwick archive are the 4,000-5,000 colour transparencies that are currently stored in David’s loft. We have been pondering how best to deal with these and finally we concluded that probably it would be worth our while to invest in a Slide Scanner.

Fortunately a friend had passed on some back copies of PhotoPlus, one of which contained a review of scanners and in the end I was happy to go with their recommendation of the Canon CS5600F Film Scanner. Even better when I was able to pick this up for just £102 from dabs.com. Although there was a small delay getting the order fulfilled – even though you can virtually see the main Dabs warehouse from David’s house – it was recently delivered and although I haven’t yet seen it in operation David seems to be getting the hang of it. The first slide to be scanned is one of Atherton House.

Many of the slides are in poor condition and many of the mounts are rather dirty so it remains to be seen how many of them will be useful to us. The other thing, of course, is that the transparencies come from a different part of Charlie’s life (i.e. post-war) as opposed to his writing and drawing (predominantly from the twenties) so in many ways it seems unlikely that they will be suitable to illustrate Charlie’s stories.

The process of working out what to publish next is starting to crystalise now and there is not doubt that having a plan does make things a great deal easier.

Having spent a couple of days visiting with David we did take the time out to do some planning and what we agreed on is that the next major pieces to publish would focus on Charlie’s “Bolton Wakes Week” holidays for 1923 and 1924. Bolton Wakes Week was at the end of June / early July and so we thought it would be good to publish these so that they cover broadly the same period, i.e. late June / early July. Arbitrarily I have decided to interleave these years with the entries for 1923 appearing on Sundays and the 1924 entries appearing on Thursdays.

This will leave a slight gap from the end of existing April Publishing schedule but we have found that Charlie’s Easter tour of 1923 seems to fit quite neatly into this gap.

So, the final schedule looks like this

• May 2 – Easter 1923, Bolton to Bala
• May 4 – Easter 1923, Bala to Bettws-y-coed
• May 6 – Easter 1923, Bettws-y-coed to Whitchurch
• May 8 – Easter 1923, Whitchurch to Bolton
• May 12 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Chester
• May 16 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, Scarborough
• May 19 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Conway and the Sychnant Pass
• May 23 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, Hayburn Wyke, Hackness and the Forge Valley
• May 26 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Nant Ffrancon and Glyder Fawr
• May 30 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, Scarborough Head and the Yorkshire Wolds
• June 2 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Pont Aberglaslyn to Barmouth
• June 6 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, Goathland Moors, Whitby and Robin Hood’s Bay
• June 9 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Arthog and Penmaenpool
• June 13 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, Castle Howard and Rievaulx Abbey
• June 16 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Aberdovey to Aberystwyth
• June 20 – Bolton Wakes Week 1924, York, Tadcaster, Leeds and Blackstone Edge
• June 23 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Tal-y-Llyn Pass
• June 30 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Vale of Edeyrnion and Llangollen
• July 7 – Bolton Wakes Week 1923, Langollen – Chester – Bolton

I can’t promise that it will all run smoothly – but at least we do have something for me to work to.

In addition to the items I previously mentioned for the April publishing schedule I am also working on a long story that Charlie wrote about his Whitsun excursion in 1926 – “Whitsuntide and Walter“. It is looking like this will need to be serialised into 3 or 4 episodes and so I will try and complete these so that they come out mid-week in each of the first 3 (or 4 weeks) in April.

I recently noticed that the dates and days of the week for 1923 coincide with 2012! So, armed with this information I thought that it might be quite nice to follow Charlie’s journal entries for the month of April in “real-time” – by which I mean that I will publish each of his diary entries for April on the corresponding days of April 2012.

Charlie made diary entries for the following days

• April 7 – Copster Green
• April 8 – Alderley Cross
• April 15 – Rudheath
• April 21 – Alum Scar
• April 22 – Hill Climb Handicap
• April 29 – Wildboarclough

Welcome to the Charlie Chadwick website.

My Son, Alistair (Joe) and I are pleased to launch this website in conjunction with the publication by the Veteran Cycle Club of a book containing excerpts from the pre-war diaries of Charlie Chadwick, a Bolton cyclist.

Born in 1904 Charlie started to record all his cycling trips in 1922 at the age of 17 and over the next decade his literary and artistic skills developed to a very high standard.  His illustrated Journals are an absolute pleasure to read, interlaced with personal and humorous interludes awheel on his bicycle.

Hidden away in his loft these journals only came to light in comparatively recent times and it is our pleasure to share this small selection of them with you.  I first met Charlie in the 1950’s, but never a word did he say about his Journals from before the war.  Charlie died in 1968, his secret still safe.

The Book, No 2, published under the Cycling History label of the Veteran Cycle Club contains many of Charlie’s wonderfully executed drawings and the accompanying narrative is a joy to read.

We have now produced a detailed plan to publish much more of Charlie’s archive through regular weekly updates on this site so stop by regularly or better still follow @CharlieChadwick on Twitter to keep up to date with all of the developments happening on the site.