Page 21 - PBCMarch2018

Pickwick Bicycle Club Magazine Volume 15 No.1 March 2018 !21

Who Were Your Early Namesakes?
Researching Your Ancestors

The Pickwick Bicycle Club has been in continuous existence since its formation
in 1870, and the soubriquets of its members have been faithfully passed down
from generation to generation. If you would like to receive the available history
of your soubriquet, please contact Joseph Smiggers at:
steve@stephenbullen.com and you will receive the information by return.

Bilson–did not exist.Bilson & Slum was the firm where Tom Smart was a Bagman
“'One winter's evening, about five o'clock, just as it began to grow dusk, a man in a gig might
have been seen urging his tired horse along the road which leads across Marlborough Downs,
in the direction of Bristol. I say he might have been seen, and I have no doubt he would have
been, if anybody but a blind man had happened to pass that way; but the weather was so bad,
and the night so cold and wet, that nothing was out but the water, and so the traveller
jogged along in the middle of the road, lonesome and dreary enough. If any bagman of that
day could have caught sight of the little neck-or-nothing sort of gig, with a clay-coloured
body and red wheels, and the vixenish, ill tempered, fast-going bay mare, that looked like a
cross between a butcher's horse and a twopenny post-office pony, he would have known at
once, that this traveller could have been no other than Tom Smart, of the great house of
Bilson and Slum, Cateaton Street, City. However, as there was no bagman to look on, nobody
knew anything at all about the matter; and so Tom Smart and his clay-coloured gig with the
red wheels, and the vixenish mare with the fast pace, went on together, keeping the secret
among them, and nobody was a bit the wiser.”

C Adams pre 1881 to 1914
Col. H F Kemball TD DL 1920 to 1969
Richard C Bladon 1970 to 1995
David J Henstone 2000 to 2004
Arthur Wilkinson 2007 to present
______________________________

Mr Cluppins – Mrs Cluppins husband
‘'Mr. Pickwick's servant!' said Mrs. Bardell, turning pale. 'Bless my soul!' said Mrs. Cluppins.
'Well, I raly would not ha' believed it, unless I had ha' happened to ha' been here!' said Mrs.
Sanders. Mrs. Cluppins was a little, brisk, busy-looking woman; Mrs. Sanders was a big, fat,
heavy-faced personage; and the two were the company. Mrs. Bardell felt it proper to be
agitated; and as none of the three exactly knew whether under existing circumstances, any
communication, otherwise than through Dodson & Fogg, ought to be held with Mr. Pickwick's
servant, they were all rather taken by surprise.