ABSTRACT
Writing in a 1926 issue of the New Statesman, R.E. Davidson reflected on the importance of the motor cycle as a means of providing cheap personal transport for the working classes. To Davidson, its implications for British society went far beyond a matter of simply conveying people from one point to another:
There will be no need to prate of a new spirit in industry when wages permit the workers to escape from an industrial environment for a few hours every weekend [and] a week or more every summer.
