CHET’s aims are:
- To promote understanding of the contribution made by cycles and cycling to human cultures amongst all age, social and ethnic groups and to raise awareness of the contribution of cycles and cycling to the quality of life.
- To provide facilities to encourage the education of the public in appreciating places of historic, architectural or scenic interest where they have direct or indirect associations with cycling.
- To further 1. and 2., to establish and maintain or assist the maintenance of museum and library facilities relating to cycling and to encourage research and develop facilities to make this information available to the public.
Trustees are appointed for five years, after which term they may be reappointed.
The current trustees are:
Nicholas Oddy (Chair)
Andrew Millward (Secretary)
Paul Arnold (National Cycle Museum appointee)
Bob Damper
Michael Gruetzner
Sheila Hanlon
Ray Pascoe
Carlton Reid
BACKGROUND
Originally, the Trust was an integral part of the Cyclists’ Touring Club — it was formed in 1976 as the Cycle Touring and Countryside Trust (CT&CT). At that time, the Cyclists’ Touring Club (CTC) was a member association without charitable status and the Trust was its charitable arm, enabling the CTC to gain some of the benefits of charitable status for a subset of its activities.
Subsequently, following certain relaxations of the laws governing charitable status and having realised the benefits of such status, another charitable trust was formed within the CTC, prosaically named the CTC Charitable Trust, with remit closer to the central aims of the organisation (i.e., more concerned with cycle campaigning than with cycling heritage). When the CTC converted to a charity in 2012, this was effected by merging the Cyclists’ Touring Club with the CTC Charitable Trust, forming a single charitable organisation. This left CT&CT as somewhat “surplus to requirements” and it was relaunched as the independent Cycling History and Educational Trust, which remains
its name today.
Although now independent of the CTC (which changed its trading name to Cycling UK in 2016), CTC/CUK retained the right to nominate a trustee. In recent years, they have declined to do so.