Hercules vintage cycling billboard

Around 1992 I was visiting friends in Christchurch when Vivienne the keen-eyed treasure spotter mentioned a poster she'd seen in an auction house in the city - on my favourite subject of course. As it turned out, hardly a poster - this thing was 3 metres tall!

It had been folded for decades, but the colours were true as the day they were printed (using stone lithograph process). It was an eye-watering amount of money for a piece of art that would be un-hangable in most homes. As luck would have it, we had a major wall in our house that we could have squeezed it onto.

The years that followed were spent asking ourselves the constant question - what the hell would be do with that billboard? Through a friend of a friend we had the major folds reduced professionally, and put it in a protective roll. How to actually transform it into art was not so easy. As we talked ourselves up on its rarity and value (who keeps billboards?) we talked ourselves out of exposing it to light at all. Back in the roll it went.

In Manhattan later in the 1990s we visited an amazing poster gallery (squeezed up some stairs, around a corner - classic 19th century workshop industrial space converted to gallery) who had some good ideas about backing it on canvas but the scale of the job left furrowed brows. How would we get it back from the USA?

I have managed to find a lot out about Hercules - founded in 1911 they were the major force in British bike manufacture in the early 20th century. A website called Made in Birmingham celebrates their achievements, and maps their sad demise over time. In 1928 Hercules made over 250,000 bikes, exported 26% of all British cycles and by 1935 this figure had increased to nearly 40%!

There is a great photo-stream on Flickr on Hercules bikes. This image is from that stream, and you can see the similarities of the artwork and styling.

After WW2 the steel supplier to Hercules (Tube Investments - later known as TI) took them over, and by the 1960s the Hercules brand was in decline, eventually subsumed under the more popular Raleigh name along with most of Britain's bike brands, other than modern legends like Mercien, Dawes and Condor.

The name lives on in India, where they make 'old school' Hercules bikes pretty similar to the bikes in the poster.

The 1930s is around the period of the billboard from what I can deduce. Christchurch in NZ was a cycling hotbed in this period. My BSA racing bike came from Christchurch (spotted coincidentally by Vivienne's husband Ian! NZ is a small place and these 2 knew their trash from their treasure), and there is quite a lot of historical information around about the racing scene in this part of the South Island.

I imagine a poor billboard hanger getting to the end of his week, having laboured hard to put up this fortnight's advertising artwork, finding it in the back of his old van and figuring they'd done enough for the week and it could wait. Somehow it never got posted, and never got lost. A note on the back says it is 1 of 16 printed.

In a recent, slightly bizarre coincidence I discovered Studio M in Sydney, and a fellow called Michael Brewster who is Australia's expert on dealing with vintage posters. I'm planning on giving Michael the poster to see what miracles he can perform with it. The coincidence? Michael worked at the poster gallery in Manhattan that we visited in our earlier search for a solution in the 1990s.