Marian Rijk

This is yet another non-fiction book oversold by its subtitle (loosely translated: "Geared-up century: how the bicycle achieved a social revolution in the Netherlands") - the cover of the paperback edition seems to have a rather less bloated and more relevant subtitle, so maybe reviewers already gave the publishers a hard time about this...

What it actually turns out to be is something on a rather smaller scale than a complete social history of Dutch cycling, but still moderately interesting: it's an unusual mix of family history and industrial history, charting the development of the well-known Dutch cycle manufacturer Gazelle, the main employer in the small Gelderland community of Dieren, through the lives of the family that owned and ran the company.

Rijk takes us through the background of the firm's founder, assistant postmaster Willem Kölling, who was so impressed by the potential of the new machine he was using to deliver the mail that he got together with a local blacksmith in 1892 to go into the business himself, and looks into the complicated interaction between changes in Dutch society and the development of the Kölling and Breukink family over the next eighty years, until rising costs and an investment backlog made it impossible for them to carry on as a family firm and they sold out to Raleigh in 1971.

There's a lot of interesting detail about the development of the way the company was run, the strong paternalistic relationship the family nurtured with their employees and dealers, the social improvements (health insurance, worker housing, sports clubs, half-day working on Saturdays, etc.) that they always managed to introduce a little while before they became obligatory, developments in marketing and publicity, and the odd ways that private life and the company crossed over (even after the takeover, they negotiated a deal that would allow Gazelle employees to carry on doing the gardening for the former directors...). And of course the usual family quarrels and misunderstandings. Obviously Rijk must have had a lot of help preparing the book from the surviving family-members, and her account sometimes seems a little bit lacking in critical edge, but that's a minor flaw, almost inevitable in this kind of book.

The aspect of the book that doesn't work so well is the attempt to tie the history of the company into the general history of the bicycle and the social and economic development of the Netherlands in the 19th and 20th century, which comes over as both long-winded and superficial. The first hundred pages of the book, dealing with the period before the foundation of the company, are unlikely to tell you anything you don't already know about bicycles. What they tell you about the career of Willem Kölling's father, a German immigrant who became a miller in the Achterhoek, is quite interesting, but it scarcely seems relevant to the theme of the book, since he never showed any interest in bicycles, as far as Rijk could discover. In the later parts of the book she's a little more economical in what she tells us about society in general: the role of the bicycle in Dutch society is a huge topic, and she obviously realised that she had no chance of covering it comprehensively, so we get little snippets here and there, most of them fairly familiar - the bizarre story of how the cabinet intervened to prevent the young Queen Wilhelmina endangering the succession by riding a bicycle, for instance (she overruled them and bought herself one as soon as she reached the age of majority - sadly for Rijk it wasn't a Gazelle, though...).

A bit disappointing, but quite interesting in parts.… (mais)