These road skates were owned by Charles Goodman Tebbutt, he was a well known Fen skater in the Huntingdon area, & skated on Bury Fen which is near the village of Bluntisham ( he also lived in the village so Bury Fen was only a mile away )in what is now Cambridgeshire. They were made to a patent by a man called Ritter by the 'Road Skate Company' of London.
He also entered many competitions in Holland & won the International Amateur Skating Championship run near Rotterdam in the 1886. He also took part in the Friesland excursion around 11 towns from Leewarden and back, a round trip of 120 miles. This took 14 hours 37 mins. This was in 1893.
As he couldn't skate in the summer months he used this pair of road skates to try & keep up his skating practice, (as well as riding a penny farthing cycle), whether they worked is another matter, my husband has tried several times but they are rather unwieldy. He was a very inventive man typical of the Victorians who if they saw a problem they tried to solve it.
A Pair of Victorian road skates
Contributed by Frances Tebbutt
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Bluntisham. Huntingdon.
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