TEE OLDEST LIVING CYCLIST
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—Thirty-six veteran cyclists have taken the trouble to help in the inquiry which I made a week or two ago in regard- to the oldest living cyclist still using a pedal bicycle.
The oldest of the thirty-six is a remarkable Yorkshire woman who, at the age of ninety-five, continues to cycle her two miles a day ; but, as her machine is a tricycle, she has to be ruled out from our immediate purpose. Of the others, nine are more than sixty years old and under seventy ; twenty are seventy or over and under eighty ; and five are eighty or more years old, amongst them Mr. Albert Arthur Cater, a Bristol evangelist, who will be eighty-nine next March. Mr. Cater is " runner-up" to the oldest of the thirty-five, the Reverend Frederick Hastings, of Eastbourne, who, at the age a ninety--
three, may safely be acclaimed as the oldest active cyclist in Great Britain.
Mr. Hastings is still able to preach twice each Sunday and it is to be noted by men now in their prime that he and the others have, so to speak, pedalled into old age.
All of them will agree with Professor J. B. S. Haldane, the biologist, who writes that "for the business man who has no time, nor, perhaps, inclination for exercise a short daily cycle ride is the ideal solution to this problem of keeping fit " ; and when he adds that "many of our ills of civilized life would be cured if the invalids' would take up cycling."—! am, Sir, &e., MEDICO.
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