1966 Raleigh Model 24 Cold Warrior

Richard Alexander’s 1966 Raleigh

Every bike in our museum has a story, some of the stories have more interesting players and settings than others…

This is a Raleigh model 24 gents bike built by Raleigh in 1966.

At first glance it is a pretty unassuming old city bike. The paint is in great condition, the British racing green is still shiny and the gold box striping looks great. This was a pretty deluxe version, and it has a lot of great bells and whistles (except that there isn’t a bell or a whistle on it, go figure). The bike features a Sturmey-Archer four-speed rear hub shifter and a fully enclosed chain guard. It came with color matched fenders, saddle bag, saddle and pump.

There are two generator hubs on this bike, both front and rear.

Dual head lamps

Sturmey-Archer Dynamo hub

Dyno-Luxe battery holder

Raleigh front end

The generators power the dual head lamps and the two tail lights. The green can that is attached to the seat tube houses four D-cell batteries which would have kept the lights running when the bike came to a stop. Everything still works, but it’s pretty amazing to see how much brighter modern lights are today.

There’s a steering lock on the fork, which is a fine secondary theft deterrent. By locking the steering straight ahead, you make the bike impossible to ride. In order to steal this Raleigh you would have to pick up the bike and run with it or throw it in a car (and it weighs 53 pounds).

Matching saddle bag

4 speed hub with generator

Fork lock theft deterent

So this bike was owned by a gentleman named Richard Alexander. Richard was a pretty avid rider, and he owned a couple of cool bikes (The Exxon Graftek in our collection was also his). Richard wasn’t a famous racer, and he didn’t build this bike, but his ownership of the Raleigh adds quite a bit to the narrative.

Richard did interesting things with his bikes. We have a mid-’80’s newspaper article chronicling a 700 mile bike trip that Richard undertook on his racing bike to get to his 35th high school reunion.

The interesting thing Richard did with this Raleigh? Richard bought the bike to ride around the neighborhood near his office!

Isn’t that great?

All right, that doesn’t sound like much. How about now: Richard’s office was at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and the year was 1966.

1966 Export Invoice

1966. Lyndon Johnson is in the White House, Leonid Brezhnev is running the Soviet Union, and the superpowers are fighting a Cold War. Richard works in the office of the naval Attaché and rides his bike around Moscow during his down time. Most likely with a KGB tail.

Having all of your bike rides monitored by the secret police might have actually been a plus. We can imagine that theft wasn’t a big concern.

Left unattended, Richard’s Raleigh may have been inspected once or twice to see if secret messages were being transported inside the tubes. The bike was in pretty good shape when we got it, so if the KGB took it apart at any time, they did a stealthy job and got all of the pieces back in the right place.

By the way, if you click on our photo of the original invoice it’ll expand and you’ll be able to make out some neat details. Notable things include Raleigh’s Telex number (Telex!), the fact that the air freight from London to the Moscow airport was only about $10 less than the cost of the entire bike, and that the “E” on the typewriter was wearing out. Old time problems! Cool.