The Rees Jeffreys Road Fund is celebrating 150 years since the birth of its benefactor William Rees Jeffreys by running a £150,000 competition seeking ideas on how to improve Britain’s roads.
The fund was founded by Rees Jeffreys in 1950 after a lifetime of campaigning for better roads. While he’s now known as an arch motorist—he argued for motorways almost 50 years before the first British one was built—he started his life’s work as an official for a cycling organization.
“For [Rees Jeffreys], safe and appealing roads and streets were a key to the quality of life for all,” said Ginny Clarke, vice chair of the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund.
“As we recover from the pandemic, face the challenges of climate change and embrace new technologies we have a unique opportunity to reimagine our roads and streets in new ways,” she added.
The competition is seeking 150 ideas—including from schools—on how to improve British roads. Entries close in December.
Motorway champion
Rees Jeffreys was appointed secretary of the Road Board in 1910. This newly created body was the first central authority for roads in Great Britain since the Roman era.
By many accounts (including his own), Rees Jeffreys was the person most responsible for the 20th-century expansion and improvement of Britain’s road network.
“The conception of the construction of wide, new roads in this country is due to Mr. W. Rees Jeffreys,” said the City Engineer of Liverpool in 1925.
Rees Jeffreys started his 50-year career as a champion for improved roads as an official with the Cyclists’ Touring Club (CTC), now known as Cycling UK.
He took over the running of the cycling-based Roads Improvement Association in 1900, while a CTC council member. His first experience of the new science of road crust manufacturing came while he was employed by the CTC.
He would run the Roads Improvement Association until the 1950s, and it became known as a motoring organisation but it had been founded in 1886 by the CTC and the National Cyclists’ Union, forerunner to today’s British Cycling.
Rees Jeffreys was at one time the Secretary of the Royal Automobile Club, and until 1933 was honorary treasurer of the Institution of Automobile Engineers.
When Parliament researched roads—such as during a public inquiry into highways in 1903—invariably the first witness called would be Rees Jeffreys.
In 1905, Commercial Motor said of him, “there is no doubt that many of the privileges enjoyed by automobilists are directly or indirectly due to his efforts.”
The trade magazine added that “Mr. Rees Jeffreys is associated with cycling as well as with automobilism. He has been for many years, and still is, a member of the Council of the Cyclists’ Touring Club.”
Cycle tourist
The roads-promoting arch-motorist started his 50-year highway administration career as a touring cyclist. In 1890, at the age of 18, he cycle-toured in Scotland, returning frequently.
“With other members of the Council of the Cyclists’ Touring Club, I took a cycling holiday in Scotland each summer inspecting the roads, sampling the hotels and hydros, and accumulating information required for the guidance of touring cyclists,” he wrote.
In a motoring yearbook for 1903 Jeffreys said he had toured “awheel in eleven countries; and cycled over twenty-eight of the Alpine passes.”
At this time it was not unusual to list cycling credentials in such a yearbook. In fact, it was perfectly normal, and many of the rich, high-society individuals in the yearbook—to be a motorist in 1903 was an explicit admission of wealth—also highlighted the fact they were cyclists.
Rees Jeffreys was given the Road Board role thanks to his leadership of the Roads Improvement Association. He had been made Secretary of the RIA in March 1901, while a council member of the CTC. He was to remain a CTC council member until 1909, and was chairman of the CTC’s rights and privileges committee from 1901 to 1906. In the early 1900s, being an official in a cycling organisation was no bar to being an official in a motoring organization. Cyclists and motorists wanted the same thing: better roads.
Via the RIA, Rees Jeffreys became an advocate for spreading tar on Britain’s roads, travelling the world on behalf of cyclists and motorists. He had started cycling while a student at the London School of Economics. The LSE was founded in 1895 by four Fabian socialists: Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw. All four were cyclists. The institution’s motto, rerum cognoscere causas—“to know the causes of things,” from Virgil’s Georgics—was suggested by Professor Edwin Cannan, another cyclist.
Rees Jeffreys attended Cannan’s economics lectures.
“Outside the school we were associated as members of the Council of the CTC,” said Rees Jeffreys.
“Cannan was a great cyclist. He made full use of the bicycle as a means of transport,” he added.
From 1901 to 1910 Cannan worked with Jeffreys at the RIA. Jeffreys transformed the organization from a cycling-only one that pamphleted, aiming to influence road surveyors and local authorities, to one that was highly politicized, aiming to change national government policies. A professional lobbying organisation was needed and Jeffreys said that he had “full authority from the cycling and motoring bodies to organize political propaganda in favour of a Central Highway Authority and a State grant for highway purposes.”
What Rees Jeffreys wanted—and eventually got—was the first central administration for British roads since the Roman era. In effect, this was the nationalisation of Britain’s main roads.
Rees Jeffreys said in 1906 that, “[The] roads so selected should be specially subsidised by the State and termed ‘national roads’. It should be left to an ‘authoritative and impartial body’ to decide which roads should be subsidised.”
Prior to the creation of the Road Fund, roads were the responsibility of hundreds of local authorities, with an appalling disparity in quality of road upkeep from parish to parish, region to region. Even strategically important English roads—roads now administered by England’s newly-renamed National Highways body—could be poorly maintained in places.
The creation of a central highway authority was key to Rees Jeffreys’ reform platform. The call for the nationalization of Britain’s roads was first mooted by Jeffreys in an article in the CTC Gazette in 1900.
The CTC man got the first chance to put his view before Parliament during a Highways Committee research meeting in 1903. Rees Jeffreys told the committee that a “certain sum should be allocated and placed in the hands of the central department for the purpose of building new roads and improving existing ones, and that, as these improvements will be required mainly for national purposes in the national interests, we think it but fair that the State should contribute fairly liberally towards them.”
This wish was granted, something an editorial in an automobile journal in 1903 could hardly believe: “A national system of road control! How many of us have dreamed of it – dreamed of it as something nigh impossible of realisation? And yet the report of the Departmental Committee of the Local Government Board … opens up an alluring possibility of something being done to nationalise our roads …”
The journal said this was a “Triumph for the Roads Improvement Association.”
The RIA was later taken over by motoring interests but in the early 1900s it was very much a bicycle organisation. Its work was funded by the National Cyclists’ Union and the CTC, with the Automobile Club as the minor partner. In 1901, the Annual General Meeting of the RIA was held at the offices of the CTC, which also owned the RIA’s furniture.
Before 1905, there were more cyclists on the RIA board than motorists, although some RIA officials sat on motoring and cycling organisation boards at the same time.
When Jeffreys represented the RIA in parliament he did so as both a cyclist and a motorist. In 1903, the CTC Gazette praised Jeffreys’s securing of a highways improvement inquiry: “After two years unremitting labour the Roads Improvement Association have induced His Majesty’s Government to institute an inquiry into Highway Administration and Highway Authorities in England and Wales. [The terms of reference] are everything that could be desired from the cyclist’s point of view.”
Jeffreys clearly had motorists in mind when he told the CTC Gazette that “old roads should be widened, straightened and severe gradients reduced,” and that “loop roads for the fast traffic should be built round towns and villages,”, but he also admitted that “to no class in the community are good roads so important as to cyclists.”
In his evidence to the 1903 parliamentary inquiry he stressed his cycling credentials:
Chairman: You are, I understand, the Honorary Secretary of the Roads Improvement Association?
Rees Jeffreys: That is so.
Chairman: I suppose you have travelled a good many miles on the roads yourself?
Rees Jeffreys: Yes, in all parts of the United Kingdom, and also a good deal abroad.
Chairman: On both motor cars and bicycles?
Rees Jeffreys: More upon bicycles than upon motor cars. The bicycle is perhaps the best road inspector there is.
Rees Jeffreys was in favor of separating cars from bicycles. He didn’t wish cyclists to be banished from the new roads he proposed but rather to be provided with their own parallel roads, the sort of separation later perfected in the Netherlands.
In a paper he read at the Automobile Club in London in 1903 he proposed the “building [of] eleven new main roads out of London and encircling it with a boulevard.” The eleven new roads would be “four track roads” which were to “consist of a number of separate tracks” including one for slow-moving traffic and others for “automobiles and cycles.”
He insisted upon “… the slow going traffic keeping close to the kerb … The banishment of all crawling cabs from main roads … The removal of all unnecessary obstructions from the centre of all streets, including lamp posts, electric standards, public conveniences and cab ranks …”
No doubt many of the submissions to the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund Competition will seek to remove such clutter, and also seek to improve road conditions for cycling, Rees Jeffrey’s first love.
