Let me take this opportunity to tell you a bit more about Charlie Chadwick.  He first started keeping a diary of his travels in 1922, when he was 17 years old.  As his birthday was in July, and we are currently releasing to the website his journal entries for 1922 (currently up to mid July 1922) you will shortly (by mid November this year) be able to read much more mature and longer articles penned by a much more adventurous 18 year old.  And what a difference that age difference makes !

I have pleasure in revealing his output of stories as his maturity grew.  All his journals were written up in good quality hard backed ledgers, in the most fastidious small neat handwriting and in the main done with a fine point fountain pen.  This shows a degree of forward planning on Charlie’s part.  His very first Journal covered the two years 1922 and 1923.

The breakdown of pages are as follows:  1922 – 34 pages.  1923 – 93 pages.            1924 – 167 pages.   1925 – 260 pages and from 1924 he was starting to illustrate them.

After 1925 all his writings were stories with no date lines but because he left behind another book – his runs log – spanning the 25 years from 1921 to 1947 I can, and do, refer to his actual travels on the ground.  His stories gradually petered out during the 1930’s no doubt due to the pressures of marriage to a cycling wife, Peggy, (known as Jo in all his writings !), and because they cycle camped everywhere.

What you will not learn from his stories, but I can tell you, is that after a courtship of several years – quite common in those days – is that they married at 8am on a Lancashire Wakes Week holiday Saturday, so that they could catch a reasonably early train from Preston to Glasgow, complete with bikes and tents, reaching the Trossachs for their first night.  These two weeks in Scotland, moving on every night, read like a travel writer’s itinerary.  One day I will publish that 16 day route, and for anyone who has cycled in Scotland they really didn’t miss a thing.