Bolton born Charlie Chadwick first put pen to paper in 1922 at the age of 17 when he started to record his cycling trips in an ordinary foolscap book, but it was, in effect, a cycling diary because if it didn’t involve a bike it didn’t get recorded!

The ledger he purchased to record his travels in 1923 was a much thicker affair he intended to fill and it was in that year that his first tentative sketches appeared on green feint lined paper!

Charlie was a very descriptive writer and hit the jackpot with increasingly compelling accounts of his companions and travels and we must be grateful his books have survived.

He produced an annual book all the way up to 1929 (see example below), after which they dwindled to individual stories with no date continuity.

He also produced a daily cycling log, illustrated with monthly and annual mileage graphs continuously through from 1921 to 1947 all in one book, and it is an invaluable record of his movements for 26 years.

It is fair to say that Charlie obviously liked to record things. Right up to his death in 1968 he used to keep an annual record of the weight of tomatoes he garnered from individual plants in his greenhouse – yes, really!