SEVEN DAY CYCLIST
CYCLING, BUT NOT USUALLY RACING

From the Northern Advocate, September 21st, 1934

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Mr William Hay, of Kaimamaku, who today celebrates his 84th birthday, believes that he was one of the first people to see a bicycle in use. “One day, as a lad of six, I saw coming down the road in Dumfriesshire, Scotland,” he says, “a man riding on what appeared to be a large cartwheel. The wheels were made of light timber shod with iron at the blacksmith’s."

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Quite mystified, he returned to his home to tell his parents of the strange adventure. “It’s that daft fellow from the Keir mill,” they told him. Keir was a small village about four miles distant, and the smithy there was owned by the McMillan (sic) family. It was one of the younger sons to whom posterity owes the present working-man’s and tourist’s friend – the push bike. “Everyone regarded young McMillan as slightly afflicted,” Mr Hay says, “but then most geniuses are daft in their own generation."

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Ten years after his roadside experience, Mr Hay remembers, "All the local wheelwrights were making the old type machine, and to see the big clumsy bicycles being ridden at local fairs was a sight which today would evoke the heartiest laughter.”

 

A note from Joan Leversedge: William’s ‘parents’ were actually his grandparents, who brought him up. His mother had married someone other than William’s father and was living in Ayr in 1856. William was born in 1850 and emigrated to New Zealand in 1879, dying there in 1941.