Sharrow Cycling Club Race 1897. Source: Picture Sheffield.
Sheffield has a long history of sporting activities with cricket, the first organised sport, gradually being superseded by football. All of Sheffield’s notable football clubs originally formed from existing cricket clubs with Sheffield Football Club set up in the town in 1857.
Sheffield’s proximity to countryside enabled many Sheffielders to enjoy the outdoors. Sheffield Clarion Ramblers’ first ramble was around Edale in 1900 and by the early 1920s was claiming to be the ‘largest and most influential Rambling Club in the British Isles’. Sharrow Cycling Club, the oldest in Sheffield, was formed in 1887 and still heads out twice a week. For the more adventurous, the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club, founded in 1892, offered climbing, caving, mountaineering, scrambling and hill-walking. Sheffield Water Rats, formed in the 1890s, were an all-male club and to qualify for membership one had to swim winter and summer in Endcliffe Bathing Pool for a period of six years.
