News and Adventures of the Rye & District Wheelers Past and Present
Well Attended A.G.M.
The Annual General Meeting held at the Riverhaven Hotel on Thursday 13 February was attended by more than half of the membership.
Officials were elected and subscriptions collected before the meeting moved on to the main part of the agenda. The Club have decided to run a 24 Hour Indoor Cycle Marathon to raise money which will be donated by the club towards the teacher training education for fellow member Richard Mwangi of Kenya. Richard, who rode with the club during the autumn and winter has recently gone home to Kenya and is hoping to return for a two year course at the Hastings College of Further Education. £1,500 of the £3,850 required has been promised by Eaton College. The Rye Wheelers are hoping to raise up to £2,000 and are looking for sponsorship of their efforts.
Richard was in Rye for only six months but in that time he made many friends. There was a collection from the congregation at St. Marys Church where he attended during his stay and others have promised to contribute.
The Indoor Cycle Marathon will be held in the recreation room at the Community Centre on Saturday and Sunday 15th & 16th. March by kind permission of the Antique Fair Organisers. Offers of sponsorship can be made to individual members of the club or sent to The secretary, Rye Wheelers, 56 Cinque Ports Street. TN31 7AN.
Gary Booth the Racing Secretary has presented two trophies for series events. The Tenterden Evening “10” points series, a seventeen event weekly competition starting on 2 May at 7.pm. and a similar points competition based on the Hastings club’s five event Broad Oak 8 mile Hilly Trials. The first of these being on 7 May at 6.45pm. It was also decided that the Club Championship “10” would be incorporated in the Dave Ashdown Memorial event to be held on the Charring course on Saturday 17 May. Dave was one of the Rye Club’s leading riders in the sixties and the Bexley Road Club whom Dave rode for in his later years have run the event every year since his death in 1994.
Rye Cyclists of E. Company Volunteers about 1905. E. C.Fillery, G. T. Burchall, P. F. Henley, G. T. Jarrett, F. G. Stocks, H. J. Rands and R. Cook
The type of racing cycle and racing outfit that W. Adams would have used when he became the first Rye Cycling Club member to win a prize in a cycle race in 1885.
There are very few photographs available of early Rye Cyclists. The Rye Cycling Club was formed in 1883 and the first recorded winner of a race was W. Adams in 1885. Some of the lads in the picture above almost certainly raced in the Rye Sports meetings that were held from 1899 up to the outbreak of W.W.I in 1914. As Volunteers in E Company “Rye” they would have used their own machines, the one on the right of the picture at the top of the page was typical of the ‘safty’ cycle that would have been used for racing. We know that the Rye Football Club members went off to War as a group, perhaps the cyclists of Rye volunteered ‘en bloc’ in the same way. It was seven years after the Great War before the Rye Cycling Club became active again.
Rye’s Own March 2003
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