I FIRST met the late Denis Pye at a Raymond Williams Foundation event at Wortley Hall. 

He was busy encouraging those who were not members to buy shares in the hall.  

When he found out we had a mutual interest in co-operative ownership, we fell into conversation about the issues and challenges of owning assets for the movement. 

Denis had been active in the revival of the Bolton Socialist Club and, as a cyclist, was a regular at Clarion House in Pendle. 

It was when he began talking about the Clarion Cycling Club that his eyes lit up. I had not realised its importance nor that, despite everything, it was still going. 

Like many socialists, my first encounter with the Clarion Cyclists was in the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: “One Sunday morning towards the end of July, a band of about twenty-five men and women on bicycles invaded the town. […] As they rode along they gave leaflets to the people in the streets, and wherever they came to a place where there were many people they dismounted and walked about, giving their leaflets to whoever would accept them.”

The leaflet caused a great degree of agitation. Its title was “WHAT IS SOCIALISM!” and it encouraged people to look out for the socialist van.

This incident from Tressell’s masterpiece came to mind when, with great sadness, I heard the news that the Clarion Cycling Club was to take the term socialism out of its constitution. 

It also reminded me of Denis Pye because he had given me a copy of his book, Fellowship is Life: The Story of the National Clarion Cycling Club. 

The Clarion Club is one of the few survivors of a particularly English ethical socialist tradition, based more on practice than theory. 

Its origins help explain how important this type of socialism was not only to its formation, but to its long life. 

In February 1894, a small unorganised band of cycling friends, who called themselves the Dejected Perishers, met in a Labour Church in Birmingham. 

The Labour Church movement believed that capitalism was an exploitative, unethical and unchristian economic system. 

Cycling enabled these working-class Brummies to escape the claustrophobic confines of their inner-city lives and embrace the countryside. 

In the style of Ewan MacColl’s Manchester Rambler: “I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I am a free man on Sunday.”

What better than to name this club after the paper they all loved, Robert Blatchford’s Clarion. 

One of the paper’s contributors under the pen name “The O’Groomio” was Tom Groom. He wrote that in March 1894 the Dejected Perishers were to be “a social club with much need of good fellowship” and to call themselves “after that paper which we all loved, and which has done more to spread the spirit of comradeship and broadness of sympathies in our movement than any other influence I know.” 

It is hard to imagine today just how liberating the bicycle was for working-class people. 

It enlarged the range of their activity for both work and leisure and the by-product was that it enabled the spread of ideas. 

The Clarion and the cycling clubs were a key vehicle for the transmission of socialist ideas. 

As Tom Groom articulated: “Rules should be as few as possible and I should not like to see one to the effect that none but socialists be admitted as members. 

“Let us admit any who cares to join, reserving, as we have done, the management of the club to those connected with some distinctly socialist body. 

“By giving the non-socialist, who may join us, ‘Clarion’ reasoning and ‘Clarion’ comradeship, we may soon turn him into a bona fide socialist.” 

In 1912 the renowned socialist illustrator Walter Crane gifted the National Clarion Cycling Club a new logo, which included the slogans “Fellowship is Life,” “Lack of Fellowship is Death” and “Socialism is the Hope of the World.” 

At its peak in 1936 it had over 200 sections and over 8,000 members. 

Denis Pye’s wonderful book details the long and eventful history of the Clarion Cycling Club and tells us that it has been for many years a site of struggle. 

This was partly shaped by different attitudes to cycling itself. 

In the 1980s there was a move away from cycling for collective pleasure to racing and enlarging the membership. 

Within the Clarion this led to a new leadership sweeping away the Crane logos and embracing “On bike social networking”!  

This tendency was anticipated by former national secretary Charles Jepson, who set up the umbrella body National Clarion Cycling Club 1895.

Jepson explains this was “to protect the founders’ commitment to combine the pleasure of cycling with the propaganda of socialism.”

Throughout its history every Easter they have had a weekend meet during which the annual meeting has taken place. 

The last and 125th was in Warwick in 2020. This year, due to Covid, the meeting was held online and achieved something that the former national secretary, Ian Clarke, of the Tuxford Section in Nottinghamshire, had campaigned for over many years, the removal of socialism from the constitution.

Like Alex Southern of London Clarion, probably the club with the longest continuous history, I find this somewhat perplexing — why join a “socialist cycling club” with the objective of making it into just another cycling club? 

“This rips the heart out of the club,” says Alex. Apparently, socialism is “divisive and non-inclusive” and is to be replaced with “fairness, equality, inclusion and diversity.”

Part of the critique of socialism implied in the change is that it must be about party politics. 

National secretary Edward Gilder, in a post-decision statement, said that the club “has neither made donations to or received money from any political parties or similar such organisations.” 

Ian Clarke has called for a new history of the Clarion, removing what he sees as “romantic political bias.”

To me, this clearly misunderstands the socialism the Clarion embraces, which is indeed romantic in its commitment to fellowship and to socialist practice way beyond party politics. 

It is worth taking a closer look at William Morris’s Dream of John Ball and the source of the phrase “Fellowship is Life” — the strap-line which is still used by the National Clarion. 

Morris has John Ball say: “Ah, my brothers, what an evil doom is this, to be outcast from the church, to have none to love you and speak with you, to be without fellowship! 

“Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds ye do on this earth it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them.”

The change is not clearly supported by the results of a member survey published in the Summer 2020 issue of the Clarion magazine, Boots and Spurs. 

When asked to respond to a question about “our origins with the Clarion socialist newspaper of the 1890s” members were evenly split between being “proud” and “look to the future.” 

Though it’s notable that more people wanted to “celebrate them to the front of our activities” than “confine them to the history books.” 

Even more perplexing is that immediately following the survey results is an article entitled “Look to the Future, Honour the Past” by Ian Bullock.  

In it Ian says: “What the Clarion stood for, and our club still tries to stay faithful to, is well worth preserving.”

Furthermore, Chris Goode of Yorkshire Clarion pointed out that the voting system of branches/sections having block votes distorted the voting and does not accurately represent the opinion of members. 

He fears that the chance for unity has been squandered by this move: “The National Clarion will continue to find it difficult to retain its officers and does not have a president or standing orders secretary.”

The change may also prove to be counterproductive by drawing attention to the founding principles of the Clarion Club: many socialist cyclists will have discovered it for the first time. 

This also recalls another quote from Morris’s great work: “But while I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name…”

Somehow, I do not think we have heard the last of the relationship between the Clarion Cycling Club and socialism. 

Clarion House in Newchurch-in-Pendle is one of the places that commemorates this relationship. 

It is the place you will find the Denis Pye memorial bench. The day it was inaugurated we joined his lovely wife and cycling companion Wendy to assemble at the Socialist Club in Bolton. 

The coach dropped us at the foot of Jinny Lane. In glorious sunshine, music playing, unfurled banners rising above the hedgerows, we marched up the hill to Clarion House. 

We inaugurated the bench with poetry, speeches and song, large mugs of tea and lots of cake. 

As children played, we took it in turn to sit on Denis’s bench and admire the view.

Be in no doubt, Fellowship is Life.