Cycling

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 28 November 1958.

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Photo of Sir Richard Nugent Sir Richard Nugent , Guildford 12:00, 28 November 1958

My hon. and gallant Friend puts in a qualification—unless such persons are doing hard manual work. Three miles is a good walk. I am among the few remaining people who like to walk to work, but I have only about a mile and a half to go. It is a good thing to walk a certain distance to work, but it takes time. On the other hand, if one proposes to cycle there is the problem of the weather if it is wet, and it is not awfully convenient—there is no getting away from it—to cycle three or four miles to work. On the whole, though, it is a good thing. I agree entirely with my hon. and gallant Friend that it is a bad thing if people do not have any physical exercise and do not have the pleasure and good health that comes from it. I think we are tending as a nation to fall into the practice of watching other people perform in the realms of sport rather than performing ourselves, and that is a great loss to us individually. It may be that the popular craze of the hula hoop is symptomatic of our condition. When I was a youngster we used to bowl hoops along and run after them. Today one stands still and twiddles the hoop round oneself. Maybe that is symptomatic of this situation and a bad thing.

On the other hand, one must accept—I am sure my hon. and gallant Friend will—that, although people are less inclined to work and play games for recreation, the growing habit of using the motor car to take the family out into the countryside will probably have great benefit in itself eventually. It is true that the family sets out not with the intention of walking and taking exercise, but having driven into the country, they stop the car somewhere and get out and in the course of time they begin to walk about because they enjoy being there, and they walk around and look at the fields, the cows and the views, and gradually learn the delights of the countryside.

I am not among the Members of Parliament to whom my hon. and gallant Friend referred who think it a mistake to take physical exercise and who say that they are better for not doing so. I think that it is one of the pleasures of life to move one's body and to feel the wind on one's face and the sun on one's back. I am sure that that is the common experience. I am delighted to see people going into the countryside at weekends and, although to start with they do not walk and lose the great benefit which they used to get from cycling, they gradually come to enjoy the benefits which all countrymen enjoy from walking in the countryside, both in the pleasure of the exercise and the pleasure of seeing what is going on.

My hon. and gallant Friend can take some comfort from the fact that we are all the same in the end. We all have the same instincts and the same blood running in our veins and when we go into the countryside, we probably react in the same way, so that the benefits of physical recreation are not completely lost.

Although people may tend to play games less, nowadays, this is certainly the age of "do-it-yourself". As soon as a man gets married, any idea that he will be able to sit down and put his feet up must surely disappear. Not only will he be called upon to "do-it-himself" in assisting his wife with the washing up at the sink, but he will have to paint the walls, dig the garden, and undertake plumbing and electrician's work and a whole range of other things. He will find a great deal of hard physical exercise in that, and the contortions he will have to go through to do a bit of amateur plumbing will be "quite something "for him—much more exercise than he ever took on a bicycle.

We do not need to despair that our physical fitness and physical strength are deteriorating in all aspects of our national life, although I am with my hon. and gallant Friend in regretting the diminution of any aspect of it. I call his attention to certain other aspects which are reassuring that there is vigour and enterprise still, and that when called upon the Englishman can still show himself a vigorous and capable human being.

I hope that my hon. and gallant Friend will take some comfort from that and certainly from the fact that as a Ministry we are doing a great deal in encouraging the training of youngsters to see that they have a safe ride on the road.