The early beginnings of Rochdale Special Needs Cycling
Club date back to 1998. The Chairman, Louis, was then a member of the Trans
Pennine cycling Club in Rochdale and used to
ride with them every Sunday. He noticed a youth of 16 or 17 who came to wave
the riders off, and watch enviously as they rode away. Louis asked him if he
would like to join the rides but the youth replied that he didn’t have a bike.
Louis took pity on him and bought him a bicycle. A couple of weeks later the
young lad returned with a friend, and pointing him out to Louis said, “Err, he
hasn’t got a bike either.” Realising that in this very deprived neighbourhood
there must be many such children Louis formed a cycling club for
underprivileged children who didn’t own or have access to a bicycle. He got
some bikes from the police that had been lost or stolen and couldn’t be traced,
put them in good condition, and within a few months the club had over twenty
bikes and members queuing up to join. The club then received enquiries to see
if they could take out blind children and Louis bought two tandems to cater for
them. As the years passed more and more children joined and enquiries started
coming in to see if the club could cater for children with other disabilities.
The present day.
The
club now has over four hundred members. In addition to tandems it has
bicycle-wheelchairs for amputees and quadriplegic or paraplegic children,
bicycle trailers for infants, tandems with a recumbent seat for children with
spinal problems and a variety of other dedicated machines. A large purpose
built clubroom with disabled toilet facilities and a fitted kitchen has been
built where the club provides a nourishing hot meal at the end of each ride. To
house the growing number of bicycles required it has recently acquired three
more bike storage sheds. Apart from the growing membership we are getting more
and more calls to help other organisations who send children with disabilities
to come with us on our rides.
We have
hired the Town Hall at Rochdale at a special
rate from our council for our Christmas party. This is one of the few places
round here with a room big enough to hold all the children and helpers. We had our Christmas Dinner there
on 20th December. It’s a wonderful building and we are going to have
it there every year. We had a magician this year and after his act he came and
sat down with some of the children. The little girl in the wheelchair next to
him has Muscular Dystrophy. She told him how much she liked his act and how she
thought he must be one of the best magicians in the world. Then she asked him
if he could fix her legs. He told her very sadly that his magic was just tricks
and he couldn’t do real magic to fix her legs. She said “No, don’t be silly, I
know that. I just want you to put them in my callipers for me.”
Our future intentions.
Although the acquisition of three more bike storage sheds
is helping to meet the increasing demand we will soon have to consider opening
offshoots in nearby towns such as Bury, Oldham and Bolton.
This will not only provide facilities for new members from these towns but will
relieve the pressure on our present Rochdale based clubroom as the members who
presently come from these other towns will use their own local clubroom. Louis’ long term dream is that eventually our project
may stretch nationwide in all underprivileged areas of the UK.
Now back
to the present day.
We have
continued to expand at an ever increasing and somewhat alarming rate. This is
now all by word of mouth because we have temporarily ceased advertising and
publicising our activities as we have all the members we can handle for the
time being. We now have wheelchair bikes for children with severe disabilities
and electrically assisted hand cranked ones for children without the use of
their legs. We are now well known to the local traffic and cars usually stop to
allow us to cross junctions etc.
In
order to minimise disruption to traffic we don’t like to have more than twenty-five
or thirty riders in a group but now have three Rickshaws with signs on the back
warning following traffic that there are young novice riders ahead, so the
rides can split up into three groups that meet at a café stop. We can therefore
take out 80 or more children each weekend (plus three on each rickshaw).
Louis
recently got an advance on one of the books he writes, and with the money has bought
a plot of land on which he intends to build a new clubhouse. This is only 50
metres from our present clubhouse and on the same road. There were seven houses
on this land that were knocked down in 1999 and he managed to buy it for only
£15,000. It is prime building land and he has already been offered £230,000 for
it so it is one of the best buys ever done. We can’t sell it because it is such
an ideal site for our new building, but Louis has signed the deeds over to the
club so we have a fantastic asset. The new building is a long term project
because it will cost £458,000. We probably won’t be able to start work on it
for a year or two at the earliest, but in the meantime we are going to build a
large concrete garage on the site where we can store some of the bikes to free
up room in our present clubhouse. We have had plans approved both for the
temporary concrete garage and the new clubhouse. The latter, when we get it
built, will include a much larger clubhouse on the ground floor, and upstairs
(reached by a lift that will take wheelchairs) there will be a sports hall
where children in wheelchairs can play squash and table tennis etc.
