SATURDAY 11th AUGUST 1888

Morning - Office, drawing the new sewing machine pedal.

Afternoon - To Huntley toll bar on Lowndes Tricycle. Wants 10 pounds.

Evening - Walked to Kingsley to see Mrs Blurton regarding organette she had 2 weeks ago. She has sold it to Johnsons. Woodhouse and effects, to get the cash next week.

Notes:
1) At a time when an engineer would be earning about 100 pounds a year, 10 pounds for a second-hand bike seems a lot of money.
2) An organette was a wind-up machine that played tunes from a paper roll with holes in it. The machine was popular before the invention of the record player around the turn of the century.

1 comment:

  1. colintheconroy25 May 2018 at 09:31

    Hi Rob. Re the price of the bicycle - bear in mind that the first car had only been invented two years before, remembering what you have noted earlier about John having to walk everywhere and how so many people turned up to see the start of the new railway line. Bicycles were pretty revolutionary (no pun intended) and, were still fairly new technology, so would have been pretty expensive.
    I found this from three years later - http://a-day-in-the-life.powys.org.uk/eng/cult/eu_bicy.php

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