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
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.
It is increasingly clear that people are starting to find their way to this site – so I can’t really put off confirming a launch date for any longer! We have already had visitors from a fairly broad expanse of the UK and even some international visitors from Ireland, the Netherlands and the United States.
So, I am pleased to announce that the official launch date for this site will be two weeks from tomorrow – Wednesday 21 March 2012.
In the meantime work continues frantically in the background. I am finally learning my way around – what seems to me – David’s arcane filing system and slowly I am knocking it (or him, he’s not quite sure which) into some sort of shape. We now have something of the order of 400 or so stories of Charlie’s to publish – and there could be many more! My original plan was to push out one a week, but with that much material I think that we will be able to do much better than that – I am currently aiming for 2 a week.
So, I crave your patience for a little while longer. I’m very pleased that so many of you are keen to get started on the incredible journey that we are about to embark on together. I trust that you find the wait to have been worth your while. In the meantime I can’t make any guarantees for what you will be able to see on the site prior to launch date – but I will endeavour to leave enough for everyone to look at to whet your appetites.
Also, if anyone wants to make contact then we’d love to hear from you – just enter a reply to this post. Whilst it is great to see that so many people are visiting the site you are, for the most part, anonymous to us at this stage. I’m sure that, as we come to know our audience better, we can adapt what we are planning, to improve the site and your experiences of it.