Qu'est-ce qu'un vélo? It is a philosophical question. But also a practical one. The Post Office asked the existential question, ‘what is a bike?’ in 1929. They were laying out specifications in order to standardise their bicycle fleet.
At the time, picking up a bike to feel how light it was required a couple of people. Gears were in their infancy. Bikepacking was not a thing. The metrics were different. Bike shoppers asked different questions. It wasn't, how does this bike make me feel.
The gentleman bicycle purchaser of 1929 was more likely to ask questions like how many sausages can you carry on this bike? How many decades will it last? Where’s the ashtray?
The result, the ‘Standard Pattern’, looks exactly how you imagine a bicycle to look: it’s a big, sold thing. Black for the inspector, red for the worker postman. The lugging is solid and fantastic to look at, once you’ve learnt to love lugging.
Early trials had to be suspended, apparently because there was a shortage of cyclists who were fit enough to ride them. A range of manufacturers provided their own specifications, effectively beta testing: learning about what worked and what didn’t.
The spec laid out by the Post Office stated that each machine had to carry 50 lbs and last a minimum of four years. It would need to be self maintained with the minimum of fuss. It's a singlespeed bicycle, featuring rod brakes instead of those fancy cable jobs, and it's estimated that they covered 120 million miles on them every year.
The ‘Standard Pattern’ post office bicycle was in use until 1992 with only minor updates. I love the idea that nothing much changed over several decades: it’s a radical thought, that looking across all the innovations the world of engineering has to offer, that somebody decided that, no, the old bike will work just fine.
For lots of people who need a utility bike, the Post Office specification is close their own ‘spec sheet’: the ability to carry a person and a load on fairly short journeys, not very fast, without anything going wrong. Bit on the heavy side maybe, and probably you’d want to add a few gears – and use electric lights rather than the hefty oil lamps which featured on early models.
From 1977, Pashley became the main supplier of Post Office bikes. Pashley is England’s longest established bicycle manufacturer, according to its website, and has been knocking them out in the Midlands since 1926. Raleigh is older, of course, being founded in 1888, but it no longer makes bicycles in Britain, and is owned by a Dutch holding company. Raleigh is an idea and a distribution network, but not a bicycle manufacturer.
As years went by, instead of issuing its own specification The Post Office - by now called the Royal Mail - effectively outsourced the design to Pashley. In 1992 a bicycle called the Millennium was introduced to the line up, ‘codename’ RM92.
Calling anything Millennium felt pretty forward thinking in the 1990s, but is also pretty much a guarantee of impending doom or at least imminent outdatedness. Like the Millennium kebab houses you still get in parts of London. Sure enough, the RM92 was replaced by the MailStar in 2001, also made by Pashley, but by 2014 the Royal Mail had scrapped its bicycle fleet entirely, ending more than a hundred years of service.
Posties now push a trolley instead, which presumably is more efficient given the relative boom in parcel delivery and decline in letters. It may be the most logical way to go about this work, and itself a decision as utilitarian as the choice of a virtually unchanged utility bicycle for so long.
All the same, one can’t help feeling sentimental in the knowledge that there isn’t a postperson on a bicycle anywhere in Britain.
If you want to see this bicycle still in use, try Africa. The gents roadsters are made in China these days, but put them next to a 1927 Post Office bike, and squint, the average person would be hard-pressed to spot the difference.
