KIRKPATRICK MACMILLAN is not a firm of City accountants, but something much better: the “inventor” of the bicycle.

(Inventor has to go in inverted commas, because so many people are credited with inventing various versions of what became the bicycle. Macmillan is widely held to be the man who made the key breakthrough of adding pedals).

But this week’s column is really about how socialists came to invent the holiday camp.

Born in Dumfriesshire on this date, Macmillan was a blacksmith and the son of a blacksmith. The story goes that, as a young man, he saw someone riding a hobbyhorse — a two-wheeled vehicle which was powered by the rider pushing along with his feet — and decided to make one for himself.

At some point he realised that the ride would be a lot easier if he could keep his feet off the ground, and instead use them to drive pedals, or possibly treadles.

He had no interest in patenting his machine, but he did make several long journeys on it in the 1840s. Other inventors saw what he’d made and (if you’ll pardon the expression) ran with it. Kirkpatrick himself lived out a quiet life, without fame, and died in 1878.

How much of this tale is true, if any, is hotly debated by bicycle historians. What is undeniable is that by the 1890s the modern bicycle had become one of the most revolutionary inventions there’s ever been; comparable only, say some historians, to the printing press or the internet.

As the first widely affordable means of personal transport it transformed the lives of millions of working people.

For the first time, you could get a job, or go courting, or attend a political or religious meeting, in a different village or town when previously it would have taken you all day and half the night just to walk there and back.

On your day off, you could visit the countryside, or the city, simply for the fun of it. Learning to ride a bike could instantly broaden your horizons in a way that your grandparents could never even have imagined.

Young people in particular took to the new technology, and the effect of cycling on the growth of the movement for women’s emancipation has been much noted.

For socialists in their Edwardian boom period the arrival of the “safety bicycle” (in all essentials, much the same simple machine now as it was then) was transformative.

Socialist cycling clubs sprouted, multiplied and grew from the mid-1890s onwards. Social activities — club rides, picnics, sightseeing trips — could be combined with evangelising.

A bunch of two-wheeled reds could descend on a village green, sell their papers and give out their leaflets and make speeches and sign up new members, and then move on. They were the flying squad of the revolution.

And it didn’t have to be just a day out, did it? As trade unions began to win their members the right to holidays, cycling socialists started planning longer gatherings.

John Dodd, a member of the Independent Labour Party and of a socialist cycle club, opened Britain’s first family holiday site at Caister, Norfolk, in May 1906.

If you’ve ever enjoyed a weekend at Butlins or Center Parcs, it’s Dodd you have to thank for his brilliant idea, Dodd’s Socialist Holiday Camp.

Accommodation was in tents, and all chores were done by the paying guests. The regulations of the camp included no alcohol, no gambling, and no swearing.

The cold tap was communal (there was no hot tap, obviously) and lights out was compulsory at 11.30pm. There was entertainment laid on, though: on Sundays there’d be a lecture on socialism. Am I selling it?

Well, it might not fit the bill these days, but it was very popular at the time. We are, after all, talking about a generation of activists which expected to see socialism achieved within the next few years.

Spending your annual leave preparing your mind for the wonders of freedom and plenty which lay just around the corner — and doing so in the cheerful company of like-minded comrades, in the fresh, seaside air far from the filthy factory — would have been an adventure. Besides, how many ordinary people ever went on holiday in those days?

People loved it. Comrade Dodd was a bit of a martinet by all accounts, and he had a rule for everything, but former campers in later life remembered it as a safe, happy place, where children ran free all day and their parents slept deeply at night.

Over the years, though, the ingenious business model gradually became more important than the political aspect; tents were replaced with huts, and then by chalets made from decommissioned trams; bit by bit the socialist holiday camp became just a holiday camp.

By the time Dodd died in the 1950s, little of his original vision remained.

The place is still going, though: Caister-on-Sea Holiday Park, now run by Haven, scores a 4.0 on Tripadvisor. I glanced at the brochure but I couldn’t see what time the lecture on surplus value began.

You can sign up for Mat Coward’s Rebel Britannia Substack at rebelbrit.substack.com for more strange strikes, peculiar protests, bizarre boycotts, unusual uprisings and different demos.