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[mods - checked the archives and afaict this has not been posted. if it is a duplicate please feel free to delete or combine as you determine appropriate]

just learned of the passing on 13 August, 2021 of Andrew Ritchie

tribute posted on another forum -"ANDREW RITCHIE 1943-2021
Andrew Ritchie died in Truro, Cornwall, on Friday, 13th August 2021.

The three great passions of Andrew Ritchie’s life were cycling, music and photography. He was also a talented writer and historian with a fine aesthetic eye. He combined these abilities to produce seminal works on cycling history.
John Andrew Ritchie, a proud member of a family of Presbyterian Scots, was born in Edinburgh on August 21st, 1943, but grew up in south London. His musical life began when as a young boy he attended Westminster Abbey Choir School. He went on to Dulwich College and then studied the history of architecture at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He took up cycling in a serious way when he was sixteen, doing time-trials around London, road racing in France and touring much of Europe.
“From its very beginnings cycling… has been defined by a kind of defiant enthusiasm – the mark of the fanatic, the rebel, the individualist. Perhaps this explains why I took to cycling with a passion at an impressionable age, when music, literature and the history of art were supposed to be my main direction. But there it was – the freedom, the independence, the physicality, and the bewitching fetish of the machine itself!”
A restless and romantic spirit, Andrew was never one to settle for a nine-to-five job. He tried his hand as a journalist and photojournalist, freelancing for magazines and agencies in Europe and the USA. He got a job as an announcer and reporter for Radio Prague in the late sixties and, based on this experience, he co-authored Czechoslovakia, The Party and the People, about the Spring uprising of 1968. In the early seventies he cycled across the United States and when he arrived on the west coast he attended the San Francisco Conservatory of Music: he was a fine cellist, performing in quartets and amateur orchestras throughout his life.
He returned to London and embarked on the project of researching and writing one of the finest cycling history books ever written: King of the Road, an illustrated history of cycling, published in 1975. Highly readable and thoroughly researched, the book is lavishly illustrated with historic photographs scoured from a wide range of sources. Thereafter he spent time in the UK and in Berkeley, California, and travelled widely, working as a photographer for The Tenderloin Times in San Francisco and visiting El Salvador, Nicaragua and the Sudan in the eighties.
His most notable contribution to cycling history was his work on the life of Major Taylor, the black cycle racer who overcame prejudice and discrimination to astound the world at the beginning of the twentieth century. A major coup for Andrew was interviewing Major Taylor’s daughter, Sydney. His Major Taylor “The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World” was published in 1988, and a second edition, updated, expanded and illustrated, came out in 2010. Andrew’s work was the primary impetus behind a revival of interest in the life of Major Taylor, who today is celebrated with a fine monument in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the establishment of the Major Taylor Association in 1998. Andrew, rightly, believed that the story of Major Taylor would
make excellent movie material and it is regrettable that no such project came about in his lifetime.
In the 1990s Andrew was a key contributor to and editor of the proceedings of the International Cycling History Conferences. He continued to give talks and write articles and books on cycling history including The origins of the bicycle (2008) and Flying Yankee: The International Cycling Career of Arthur Augustus Zimmerman (2009). Later in life he earned an M.Phil. at Edinburgh University, then a Ph.D. in cycling history at the University of Strathclyde in 2008. Subsequently he adapted his thesis to write his largest book, Quest for Speed: A history of Early Bicycle Racing, 1868-1903, published in 2011. Andrew ensured that his books were well illustrated, often with rare and unusual photographs.
When it came to matters important to him, Andrew showed the passion and rigour of an artist. His fellow orchestra members remember his gruff insistence on excellence and his publisher fondly remembers him with a certain amount of exasperation. His well crafted prose is occasionally spiced with trenchant opinions: in The King of the Road he briskly dismissed Raleigh’s promotional literature for Chopper bicycles in the late sixties as ‘rubbish’. Even so, his talks were delivered with disarming charm and humanity.
Unfortunately, researching cycling history is a poorly remunerated activity so Andrew Ritchie led an unconventional life: in later years he drove rattling old vehicles, earned a living in carpentry, rescued stray cats and tinkered with bicycles in El Cerrito, California. Diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2016, he returned to England two years later. On the night of Thursday 12th August he went out into the Cornish countryside to observe the Perseid meteor shower: probably his last moments were spent gazing at the heavens. He is survived by his daughter Sophia and his sister, Elizabeth."

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first met Andrew in about 1973 at the Missing Link bike shop on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley

he had just gotten back from a trip to Britain where he picked up a blue with black panels Pat Hanlon road frame and a white with red panels Merlin (the steel marque) road frame along with some of the difficult do find Zeus seat post clamp parts to accommodate the Tron et Berthet "I" frame saddles

he worked at that time as a mechanic in the shop

visited him in his home shortly thereafter where I purchased some vintage fittings

ran into him a few years later at a showing of L'Enfer du Nord at the University's art museum theatre

subsequently met his daughter Sophia who would be around age fifty today

Andrew purchased a vintage La Caille bicycle from me. it was a large fellow of about 65-66cm with laterals. a "town" machine with a derailleur three-speed drive train and a Simplex chainstay rear mech. he had Albert Eisentraut do some work on it and give it a respray.

whenever possible, Andrew would visit the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in New Mexico; one of his many renaissance man interests

he worked as a carpenter for a time and eventually decided to begin a business specializing in hardwood floors

our last visit was about two or three years back when we chanced to run into each other at a thrift shop in El Cerrito, California

asked anent the hardwood floors and he reported he was no longer doing that work

visited his publisher - Tenspeed Press on several occasions, the owner has the ironic name Phil Wood - no connection to the famous maker of sealed bearing bicycle components

what a giant loss for us all...

thanks for reading

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Thanks for posting this juvela.

I still have my battered copy of King of the Road which I purchased shortly after its publication. I was recently prompted to read it again by [MENTION=52734]bibliobob[/MENTION] finding Andrew's long lost Eisentraut and returning it to him.

My copy sits on the shelf next to my old copies of Tom Cuthbertson's Anybodys Bike Book and Jobst Brandt's The Bicycle Wheel. I am grateful to them all for what they have left us.
Brent

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Andrew certainly fit a great deal of living, achievement, learning and travel into his seventy-eight years.

On one o' me visits to his home he showed me his hardbound set of volumes of the British periodical Cycling. They cover a good many years. He had bound them himself; yet another skill this autodidact had taught himself.

HIs collection of velo paper is most impressive. Hope that his heir/heirs are able to keep it together as a body and in a form where it might be accessed by students and researchers such as an archive or library.

His orientation to cycling history and vintage bicycles was quite different from that of most of regulars here on the forum. There was simply no commodity fetishism nor marque enthusiasm. All was fair game for his learning!


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Thanks for posting this, Juvela and Brent. I was fortunate to attend one of Andrew's readings, and have both of his books on Major Taylor. It was my pleasure to help get his bike back to him. It was truly a grail bike (in the rough).
https://photos.app.goo.gl/G56WdPKei879ZTEt8

Hello! I had the great pleasure of meeting this great man who I used to call "SIR ANDREW RITCHIE" when he visited me here in Philadelphia in the late 90s. We had numerous and lengthy phone conversations about Major Taylor and he decided to visit Philadelphia so that we could talk about a movie. I knew his book inside out as
if I wrote The Fastest Bicycle Rider in The World myself. I was working on the movie mentioned in this thread and now that I just learned about Ritchie's passing, I will continue this work. Ritchie and I ate at the famous Reading terminal Market when he visited me here in Philadelphia. P.S., the screenplay for the movie has been copyrighted since August 1998. -Tony Dphax King