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I am hoping to find out more about my great-grandfather's escapades through the Brighton local history centre and the National Archive at Warwick University. According to family folklore, Isaac is also supposed to have raced in Belgium at some point and I'm pretty sure that the 10th anniversary races attracted riders from the continent. Someone by the name of F M di Villa won the big race in 1897, partly thanks to a bike Isaac lent him for the occasion. I’m hoping to track down and ride a bike from the period and have become a member of the Veteran Cycle Club for the purpose.
When I first took up cycling at 16, my mother told me about my great-grandfather, Isaac Christmas, the racing cyclist. How he started by riding a 'boneshaker'; came to own a bike shop in Brighton and raced on the continent. More recently, she told me how her mother, sitting with her in a railway carriage rattling its way into Brighton, pointed out the cycle track where Isaac had raced. Having just taken up cycling again, I was determined to find out more about my great-grandfather. Imagine my excitement when he peered out at me from the pages of a Victorian newspaper. An intrepid reporter from the “Hove Echo” had tracked him down in the summer of 1879, just as he was getting ready for business, surrounded by bikes in his workshop along Church Road, Hove.
Previously discovered reports of races at Preston Park had told me, for example, that Isaac had come a close second in the 3-mile Scratch Race (8 laps) for the Championship of Sussex in 1894 (reported in “Brighton Guardian & Hove Recorder”). But this particular article was a gold-mine of information. I heard from Isaac's own lips how he had started cycling around 1874 and by his own reckoning was one of the first cyclists in Sussex. He began racing bikes five years later on the County Cricket Ground. Presumably, this was grass track racing around the perimeter of either the existing cricket ground or a pre-existent one elsewhere.
Due to his experience with cycling, Isaac was appointed by the National Cycling Union as one of three representatives to inspect the new cycle track at Preston Park, before it was opened in May 1887. From his original trade as a boot-maker, he started to sell bikes in 1893, a year before cycling became the latest craze for women. His wife, Sarah Christmas, was of course one of the first ladies to cycle in the Brighton area. Isaac sold over 200 bikes in 1896 alone. He provided the 'Campion' machine with which F M di Villa won the big race in the amalgamated meeting arranged to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Preston Park track. One of Isaac's sons (my grandfather), was named John Nelson Christmas, not primarily in honour of the great Lord Admiral, but after a type of bike that Isaac apparently helped to design.
I hope to find out more about Isaac's role with the NCU and any details of his races in Belgium. Not only that, I am hoping to further research the opening of Preston Park cycle track, and subsequent anniversary meetings. If anyone living in the Brighton area, with an interest in cycling history, is willing to help, they could contact me via the scrl website. Perhaps I could also suggest to the readers of Preston Park News, organising some event to mark the 125th anniversary of the opening of Preston Park in May 2012?
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